School of History, UCC
Dr Jennifer Keating, Department of History, University College Dublin (UCD)
Thursday 20 October 2022, 16:00 (4 PM)
The paper will be delivered through MS Teams. Please, contact Dr Jérôme aan de Wiel, j.aandewiel@ucc.ie, School of History, UCC, to obtain a Teams link, or use Teams link below
Paper The environmental history of the Russian imperial rule in Central Asia has long focused on the region as a commodity frontier, noting the empire’s quest to manage water and to secure a domestic source of cotton, the ‘white gold’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Yet our explorations of cotton have arguably obscured numerous varied and more complex interchanges. This paper revisits the commodity frontier by exploring some unlikely global monopolies that revolved around bioprospecting – the exploitation of ‘natural’ resources for their biochemical uses in the agricultural and pharmaceutical industries. Developing a fragmented history of an interconnected world, this research draws on material from the 2022 book On arid ground: Political ecologies of empire in Russian Central Asia (OUP). It reveals how plants and animals that were valued for their medicinal role in sustaining everyday livelihoods and communities were one battleground where local practices, traditions and alternative understandings of value faced off against the modernising impositions of empire. Tracing cultivation, production and circulation chains from the steppes and riverbanks of Central Asia to the laboratories of Merck and the pig farms of the United States in turn uncovers intertwined ecologies as previously unfamiliar forges of empire in the heart of Eurasia. Dr Jennifer Keating is a Lecturer in Modern East European History at UCD. Prior to joining UCD in 2018, she was a Past and Present Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research in London, and a Lecturer in Russian and Soviet History at the University of Cambridge. She is a historian of the Russian Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, working in the main on the history of Central and Inner Asia in the late imperial and early Soviet state. Her work uses environmental history to explore the building and breaking of Russian imperialism in Eurasia, most recently in her monograph published with OUP in 2022, On arid ground: Political ecologies of empire in Russian Central Asia, and in a chapter on environmental violence in the Russian civil war in the Russia's Great War and Revolution series, forthcoming with Slavica next month. In 2019, she also co-edited the volume Empty Spaces: Perspectives on emptiness in modern history. She is currently developing a new project on the political and environmental impacts of population pressure in Inner Asia.