Authors

Discussion

The economic history of Central Asian during the Soviet period continues to vex historians and social scientists, who debate the relative levels of development in the region, its supposed ‘subsidization’ and the costs of regional monocultures and hydrocarbon extraction. Throughout this debate, however, what has remained consistent – even with the recent ‘colonial turn’ that has increasingly viewed the region as a colonial holding of Soviet power – is a Moscow-centric perspective that privileges the relationship between Moscow and its peripheries.   As a result, Central Asia’s economic development remains bound to the terms of debate set during the Soviet period and comparisons made to other Soviet republics.  Yet what if the region were to be compared not internally to Soviet republics but instead to other peripheries in other contemporaneous and earlier imperial holdings?  This paper suggests a re-evaluation of Soviet economic practices in Central Asia, using Tajikistan and Turkmenistan as central case studies, that compares levels of financial transfer, infrastructural development, and social practice, not to other Soviet republics, but instead to British, Dutch, and even Roman peripheral imperial economies.  Applying primary statistics and novel modes of financial recalculation as well as local social history and building on the early findings of the Dutch OCW-funded ‘Reevaluating Conceptions of Imperial Monetary Flow’ at Leiden University (https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/research/research-projects/humanities/reevaluating-conceptions-of-imperial-monetary-flow), the paper argues that such cross-imperial economic comparisons provide a novel perspective on the imperial and colonial character of Soviet rule in Central Asia, including the long-term outcomes in the region.