This paper examines the production of knowledge in the service of the Russian imperial power by focusing on the role of ethnography, and particularly census data, in Tashkent under Russian rule. It argues that ethnography was one of the key means that allowed the Russian Empire to penetrate Central Asian communities. When the Russians had first taken over Tashkent in 1865 they did not know how many people lived in the city, and were faced with the need to count the people in the newly conquered region to hold elections and set up its colonial administration. Yet, reliable information on the size of the population only began to emerge in the 1890s, when Nil Sergeevich Lykoshin became the first Russian head of the Asian quarter of Tashkent in the sweeping police reform after the ‘cholera riot’. Lykoshin’s appointment was an indicator that the Russian imperial power was expanding its footprint by taking over an area of local administration that since the conquest had been left largely in the hands of Central Asians.
