Settlers as a last resort: John Britton Seitz, Science and the steppe: Agronomists, nomads, and the settler colony on the Kazakh steppe, 1881-1917, PhD dissertation, Iowa State University, 2019 | settler colonial studies blog

Settlers as a last resort: John Britton Seitz, Science and the steppe: Agronomists, nomads, and the settler colony on the Kazakh steppe, 1881-1917, PhD dissertation, Iowa State University, 2019

28Feb20

Abstract: In the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, Russian officials and scientists undertook a project of exploiting the Kazakh Steppe to turn it into an agricultural breadbasket. However, this project ran into difficulties both among the indigenous nomadic Kazakh population and with the challenges of farming in a new environment. Therefore, officials and scientists turned to another group to attempt to transform the steppe: peasant settlers from European Russia. While they did not fully overcome the challenges and achieve their most extreme visions for the steppe, this process that included demographic, scientific, and economic changes would have far reaching affects on the story of Kazakhstan down to the present day.

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