Astronomers and Surveyors in the Struggle for Central Asia. Notes on the Epistemology of Colonization

Central Asia was mainly desert land that contained just a few small, densely populated oases when it was forcibly occupied by Imperial Russia between 1865 and 1885. What reason was there to gain control of it? It did not serve any military purpose because the Russian Empire was already well protected on its southern frontier by Central Asia’s notorious deserts and dry steppes. Nor was there much economic advantage to be gained. To present it merely as an opportunity for the thievish embezzlement of public money — and theft there was — is somewhat beside the point. The advance of Great Britain into the same region from the opposite side reflected the same trend. What kind of reasoning was behind these incursions? The counterintuitive answer is that the only rational reason to move into the region was a scientific one. At that time the Central Asia was still a blank spot on European maps and it was the only region on Earth in which the great empires had not yet confronted each other. The frontier lines of both empires were bound to move in on each other, although neither empire gained much advantage from the expansion. The article analyzes the way in which the struggle for the territory eventually turned into a symposium about the territory. The main agents in that war — and also its beneficiaries — were the British and Russian military geodesists and surveyors who used the latest astronomical methods. Systematic mapping of the desert region was important not only for the geographical knowledge it produced, but also for advancing the surveyors’ careers and improving their social status and personal prosperity. The so-called Afghan Demarcation between the Russian Empire and Great Britain in 1885 seemed to them more like an enjoyable conference for sharing topographical and geographical information than a hostile confrontation. After the outer and inner demarcations had been fixed, the result was that this region — “Created by the Lord in Anger” — was surveyed and studied not only in terms of geography, but also geologically, ethnically and historically.