Eurasian exchanges: Central Asian nomadic pastoralists, mountain ecosystems, and market economies in the early twentieth century

What role did nomadic and non-settled societies play in the early twentieth-century world economy? Exploring a remote mountain valley close to the border between the Russian and Qing empires, this article investigates the multiscalar history of the Karkara trade fair and its Kazakh and Kyrgyz pastoralist communities. Although at first sight incongruous given its remote location, this market was in fact one of the most significant fairs in the entire Russian empire. Tracing dynamic circuits of exchange on local, regional, and trans-imperial scales across northern Eurasia and beyond from the 1890s to 1916, the article argues that ecological perspectives are essential if we are to understand the anatomy of global capitalism in the valley, and that the shifting relationship between environment, economy, and political power as the Russian imperial state sought to use the fair as a site of control and regulation created frictions that proved deeply corrosive. Throughout, the article underscores the need to re-evaluate the often overlooked importance of pastoralist societies and seemingly remote rural places in the early twentieth-century global economy and in modern Eurasian history.