Of Khans and Caravanserais: Travel Literature in the Age of the Russian Conquest of Central Asia Jeremy Cohen Honors Thesis Submitted to the Department of History, Georgetown University Advisor: Professor Gregory Afinogenov Honors Program Chair: Professor Alison Games May 4, 2020 Cohen 1 Table of Contents Table of Contents ........................................................................................................... 1 Figures ............................................................................................................................ 1 Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................... 2 Cast of Characters ........................................................................................................... 3 Maps. .............................................................................................................................. 4 Introduction ................................................................................................................... 6 Chapter 1: Inadvertent Ambassadors: The Role of Travelers in Promoting Russia’s Civilizing Mission ......................................................................................................................... 14 Chapter 2: Khan in the Castle: Tales of Faith and Tyranny ............................................ 34 Chapter 3: “Dust Thrown in the Eyes”: Perceptions and Misperceptions of Slavery ...... 55 Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 81 Bibliography ................................................................................................................. 86 Figures “Glimpse of a Residence in the Native City of Tashkent” .............................................. 28 “Street in the Russian City of Askabad” ........................................................................ 28 “A Persian Slave” ......................................................................................................... 65 “Slaves Abandoned” ..................................................................................................... 66 “Turkestan Cotton Awaiting Shipment at Krosnovodsk” ............................................... 76 “The Way the Native Farmers do Their Plowing”.......................................................... 77 Cohen 2 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. Gregory Afinogenov, for his guidance throughout the thesis-writing process. His comments, advice, and encouragement were invaluable in making sense of the material I covered, and in shaping my thesis into a product of which I can be proud. I also want to thank Dr. Alison Games for her incredible work leading the Honors Seminar. Her leadership in the Seminar helped cultivate a collaborative scholarly community for me and my peers. Her belief in my work and her enthusiasm for a topic as esoteric as mine meant a great deal to me throughout the year. I am immensely appreciative to my parents for their constant support of my education, both academic and experiential. In particular, I thank them for not balking three years ago at their then teenage son’s plans to jet off to Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. I am eternally grateful for their twenty-two-yearlong effort to expose me to the wider world which has made me who I am today. I must also thank the many other groups and individuals who have made my own travels in Central Asia possible. Thank you to all those who helped me at the U.S. Embassy Astana, the Bilimkana Foundation, the Georgetown International Relations Association, and the School of Foreign Service Dean’s Office. Finally, I would like to thank Mr. John Baxter, and Mr. Mark Shelley, my Princeton High School history teachers without whom I certainly would not have made it to Georgetown, let alone have written a history honors thesis. I give permission to Lauinger Library to make this thesis available to the public. Cohen 3 Cast of Characters James Abbott (1807-1896)- British East India Company officer. Abbott traveled to Khiva on assignment in 1839. Abbott published the accounts of his journeys in 1843 as Narrative of a Journey from Heraut to Khiva, Moscow and St Petersburgh. Frederick Burnaby (1842-1885)- British cavalry officer. Journeyed to Khiva in 1876 and published A Ride to Khiva in the same year. Burnaby traveled extensively, both personally and as part of his military duty. He died in 1885 fighting in the Mahdist War in Sudan. William Eleroy Curtis (1850-1911)- American journalist and diplomat. Curtis wrote travel handbooks primarily for Latin America, but visited Central Asia in 1910 and published Turkestan: The Heart of Asia the following year. Stephen Graham (1884-1975)- British journalist and travel writer. Graham wrote prolifically and traveled extensively in Russia and visited Central Asia in 1916. He published stories of his travels in Through Russian Central Asia. Annette M.B. Meakin (1867-1959)- British travel writer. Meakin travelled to Russian Turkestan in 1903 and published her account, Russian Turkestan: A Garden of Asia, in the same year. Eugene Schuyler (1840-1890)- American scholar and diplomat. Schuyler entered the American diplomatic corps and served as consul-general in Constantinople, where he played a key role in investigating the Bulgarian Uprising of 1876. He journeyed to Central Asia in 1873-74 and wrote Turkistan: Notes of a Journey in Russian Turkistan, Khokand, Bukhara, and Kuldja in 1877. Ármin Vámbéry (1832-1913)- Hungarian academic who specialized in Turkic studies. Vámbéry was born into a Hungarian-Jewish family in modern Slovakia but became atheist. He traveled incognito throughout Persia, Central Asia, and Afghanistan in 1863-64. He published his account, Travels in Central Asia, in English and was an active member of the British academic community. Joseph Wolff (1795-1862)- British missionary. Born in modern Germany to a Jewish family, Wolff later converted to Christianity. Wolff traveled extensively in order in his missionary work and visited Central Asia twice. In his 1843-1845 journey, the second time he visited, Wolff sought to acquire information on the deaths of Charles Stoddart and Arthur Conolly, two British soldiers who had been killed in Bukhara. He published his account of that journey as Narrative of a Mission to Bokhara, in the years 1843-1845, to ascertain the fate of Colonel Stoddart and Captain Conolly. Cohen 4 Maps Russian Conquest of Central Asia1 1 Encyclopedia Britannica, s.v. “History of Central Asia,” Encyclopædia Britannica, inc, November 16, 2017, accessed May 3, 2020, https://www.britannica.com/topic/history-of- Central-Asia/Soviet-rule Cohen 5 Russian Central Asia around 19002 2 Wassily, “Russian Turkestan in 1900,” map, Wikipedia, March 8, 2009, accessed May 3, 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_conquest_of_Central_Asia#/media/File:Turkestan_1900- en.svg Cohen 6 Introduction A Hungarian man masquerading as a dervish. An Anglican priest searching for the Lost Tribes of Israel. An American diplomat who was friends with Lev Tolstoy. These are a few of the colorful individuals who traveled to Central Asia between 1815 and 1917. These travelers and more became the experts on Central Asia in the Anglophone world. With their wealth of first-hand knowledge, they bore the responsibility of sharing their experiences with an audience eager to gobble up information on all corners of the earth. In a period where little information, especially first-hand information, on Central Asia was available in the West, these individuals played the privileged role in shaping the popular understanding of the places they wrote about, making their travel accounts valuable conduits for spreading knowledge. They told the stories of their journeys through the books and articles they published and played a key role in establishing an understanding of Central Asia to their readers. These travelers’ accounts trace the development of how a small group of individuals with first-hand knowledge crafted a narrative of empire and civilization. Most importantly they demonstrate the intellectual interplay between international politics and travel. The Russian conquest of Central Asia, marked by the capture of Bukhara in 1868 and Khiva in 1873, was a critical point for travel in the region. The experiences of travelers in this period show how solidarity under the mission of promoting “civilization” was sufficient to displace geopolitical concerns for those who ventured to the epicenter of potential conflict. Tensions that existed between Russia and the British Empire over control of the contested region took a backseat to the advancement of the higher objective of bringing civilization to the world. While Central Asia is often viewed through the notion of the Great Game, that storied imperial rivalry in the mountain passes of Asia, the reports of travelers offered a different outlook. Their perspectives sought to portray Britain and Russia as fighting on Cohen 7 the same side against the amorphous enemy of uncivilized savagery. In this way, the accounts of travelers simultaneously demonstrate what those who visited Central Asia themselves thought of the purported rivalry playing out there, and how those with first-hand experience in the region transmitted information on that rivalry to British audiences. The accounts on which this thesis is based represent a broad diversity of individuals. The travelers who