The History of Fishing in Turkistan in the late 19th – early 20th Centuries: Economic and Social Aspects

Abstract

The fishing economy of Turkistan has received far less scholarly attention than cotton growing, irrigation or livestock breeding, although in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it became one of the most rapidly developing branches of the regional economy. The article examines the formation and development of the fishing industry in the Turkistan region from the 1870s to 1917, its place in the regional and imperial economy, and its social consequences for the indigenous population. The study draws on documents of the National Archive of Uzbekistan (fonds I-1 and I-17), legislative acts of the Russian Empire, official statistical reviews of the Syr Darya Region, contemporary scientific descriptions of the Aral Sea and materials of the periodical press. The principles of historicism and objectivity, source criticism, and the comparative-historical, problem-chronological and elementary quantitative methods were applied. The traditional, subsistence- and exchange-oriented fishing of Karakalpak, Kazakh, Uzbek and Tajik communities was gradually replaced by a commercial, market-oriented industry. The Statute on the Administration of the Turkistan Region (1886) declared major water bodies state property and opened the way to a leasing system under which large Russian entrepreneurs obtained long-term rights to fishing grounds. Salting, freezing and canning technologies and, above all, the Orenburg–Tashkent railway (1906) integrated Aral fish into the all-Russian market, with annual exports reaching 1–1.5 million poods. The modernization of fishing was contradictory: it raised output and revenues, but deprived local fishermen of customary rights, deepened their dependence on lessees and merchants, and initiated an extractive model of resource use whose ecological consequences became evident in later periods.