Collaboration, Resistance, and Imperial Power

Abstract

Graduate school recruitment is an odd time to make a friend. Yet in 2005, drinking overpriced beer at an off-campus bar in Ann Arbor with Maya Peterson, I knew immediately that I had found one. In the years that followed, she proved to be a brilliant, generous, and supportive colleague, with whom it was always a joy to think through the nature of Russian imperialism in Central Asia. It is still hard to believe and unbearably sad that we must talk about these questions—about the issues that her work helped us understand— not with her on an adventurous hike or after a full day of conference panels, but without her. Indeed, Peterson’s wonderful first book, Pipe Dreams, sheds light on several perennial issues not only in the historiography of the Russian Empire but in the history of imperialism more generally.1 In particular, it highlights the importance of cooperation and collaboration in sustaining imperial ventures, and the potential for resistance to such ventures in both the inhabitants and environment in Russian Turkestan. In Pipe Dreams, neither water nor people can be easily coerced to achieve a desired outcome. Since the publication of Ronald Robinson’s seminal piece in 1972, it has become a commonplace that “imperialism was as much a function of its victims’ collaboration or non-collaboration ... as it was of European expansion.”2 This is an insight applicable not only to the forms that imperial rule took (i.e., settlement, occupation, or the “imperialism of free trade”) but to the fate of specific ventures within a colony. This is not to say that such cooperation, when it occurred, took place on equal terms; Peterson rightly follows Arjun Appadurai’s argument that “cooperation is a state of affairs that