Authors

Discussion

While in the USSR as a whole it took collectivization to ‘capture’ the peasantry, in Central Asia the vast majority of cotton was procured via advance contracts already at the end of the Tsarist period. This paper sketches out how cotton was procured in the region, looking at both regional variations (e.g. between Turkestan and Bukhara) and change over time. The paper traces the history of advance contracts on cotton before the revolution, on the basis of published and unpublished documents drawn from archives in Russia and Uzbekistan, including the papers of the Kokand Cotton Stock Exchange and those of various cotton firms. It questions the relation between advance contracts on cotton and local precedents in other sectors, in particular Persian lambskins (karakul). It reconstructs their standardization during the pre-revolutionary cotton boom, examining the respective roles of banks, cotton companies, local merchant houses, and indigenous rural intermediaries (chistachi, arbakesh), to understand the leverage of cotton-growing peasant households themselves and explain instances of contract failure. Special attention will be paid to issues of default and repossession in a context of legal dualism. Following in the steps of Jairus Banaji's far-reaching study on the topic (2020), this paper argues that, by dint of advance contracts, cotton companies and local capitalists influenced the very production of cotton: before the revolution, thus, the boundaries of the conventional definition of 'merchant capitalism'. This conclusion leads to the revision of Soviet-era debates on the nature of the pre-revolutionary economy of Central Asia, and opens up opportunities for fruitful comparisons with other colonial and non-colonial contexts.