Studies in History http://sih.sagepub.com/ The Centrality of Central Asia Andre Gunder Frank Studies in History 1992 8: 43 DOI: 10.1177/025764309200800103 The online version of this article can be found at: http://sih.sagepub.com/content/8/1/43 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com Additional services and information for Studies in History can be found at: Email Alerts: http://sih.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://sih.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations: http://sih.sagepub.com/content/8/1/43.refs.html >> Version of Record - Feb 1, 1992 What is This? Downloaded from sih.sagepub.com at University of Warwick on September 27, 2011 From time to time Studies in History will carry a contribution challenging received wisdoms or turning long-standing issues on their head. Our first dialogue is initiated by Andre Gunder Frank who argues that the history of Central Asia is crucial to the understanding of develop- ments in a very large part of the world. Four scholars of Central Asia then comment on this provocative thesis from an unabashed non-specialist, anchored in world-system theory. Daniel Balland comments as a geographer of the region, Thomas Barfield as an expert on China- Central Asia connexions. Mansura Haider specializes on medieval Central Asia and has a command over the Uzbeg and Persian language sources, and Lawrence Krader, known in India primarily as a Marxist theoretician, is an authority on political processes amongst Central Asian peoples. Frank’s rejoinder sums up the debate&mdash;for the moment! editors The Centrality of Central Asia Andre Gunder Frank University of Amsterdam Central Asia is of fundamental importance for understanding Eurasian History .... It is the missing link in World History. Christopher Beckwith Introductory Scope and Method This paper poses some questions about how Central Asia fits into world history. The questions arise from my attempt to study world history as a world system (Frank 1990 a,b,c, 1991, Gills and Frank 1990a,b). From this perspective, as one non-specialist addressing other non-specialists of Central Asia, the region appears as a sort of black hole in the middle of the world. Little is known or said about it by those who focus on the geographically outlying civilizations of China, India, Persia, Islam, and Europe including Russia. Even world historians only see some migrants or invaders who periodically emerge from Central Asia to impinge on these civilizations and the world history they make (cf. McNeill 1963 and my critique in Frank 1990a). Historians of art and religion view Central Asia as a sort of dark Acknowledgements: I would like especially to thank Nicola Di Cosmo and Barry Gills for their very careful reading of and most useful comments on an earlier draft. Thomas Hall and Willia’m McNeill also helped. The usual disclaimers apply, especially since I am still ’stabbing in the dark’. Downloaded from sih.sagepub.com at University of Warwick on September 27, 2011 44 space through which these world cultural achievements moved from one civilization to another. At best, they see Central Asia itself as a dark tabula rasa on which itinerant monks, mullahs, and artists from these civilized areas left their marks. Their remains can be admired in a Thousand Buddha Caves and mosques spread through Central Asia. Or they have been deposited in museums spread through the cultural capitals of the West and Japan after their ’discoverers’ unearthed them, crated them up, and carted them away. Yet Central Asia is also a black hole in the astronomical sense: it is hugely dark or darkly huge. Central Asia is also central to the civilizations of the outlying peoples, whose life space is sucked into the black hole in the centre. It is not clear where civilized peoples and spaces end, and where they interpenetrate with those of Central Asia. None of the civilizations are pristine. All of them were formed and even defined through interaction with Central Asia. Moreover, Central Asia is where all the outlying peoples and their civilizations connected and interacted with each other. Indeed, for millennia the Pulse of Asia (Huntington 1907) probably came from its Central Asian heart-beat. Central Asia is truly the ’missing link’ in Eurasian and world history. Central Asia is also central to any attempt at systematic or systemic analysis of the history of the world system. Central Asia is a black hole that must attract the attention and even the enthusiasm of any analyst of world system history. Yet Central Asia is perhaps both the most important and the most neglected part of the world and its history. Some rea--ns for this neglect are as follows. History is mostly written by the victors fc r their own purposes, especially to legitimize their victory. While Central Asia was home to many victors for a long time, they either wrote or left few histories of their accomplishments. Then, since the fifteenth century, Central Asian peoples have been mostly losers in two ways. They have lost out to others on their home ground, and their Central Asian homelands ceased to be so central to world history. Moreover, these losses were intimately related to each other: the world historical centre of gravity shifted outward, seaward, and westward. History has also mostly been written from national perspectives about ’nation’ states or at most about ’civilizations’. That is also because history is written by the victors. Moreover, national(ist) or not, historical writing or written history has been overly Eurocentric. This Euro (or Western) centrism has marked and (de)formed not only historical writing about ’the West’, but also about ’the East’ and the ’South’. Even many non-Western historians writing about their own countries and cultures have been infected by the virus of Eurocentrism. It blinds people to Central Asia and especially to anything important or good coming out of it. Sino-centric, Indian-centric, Persian-centric, Islamo-centric and other histories also omit adequate reference to Central Asia and even to its large influence on their own Downloaded from sih.sagepub.com at University of Warwick on September 27, 2011 45 histories. ’Civilized’ peoples write their own histories about themselves and not about their ’barbarian’ neighbours, whom they consider beyond the pale. However, Beckwith (1987, 1990) argues powerfully and I have also suggested (Frank 1990a) that it is high time to stop the injurious appel- lation of Central Asian peoples as ’barbarians’. I hope this essay will help demonstrate the same. Finally, virtually nobody writes world history, or even international history. Therefore, the millennial centrality of Central Asia in inter- ’national’ relations and in world history, not to mention world system history, goes virtually unnoticed. Only specialists in this or that part of Central Asia take notice, but they in turn go largely unnoticed by others. Moreover, political circumstances in Soviet and Chinese Central Asia and Mongolia virtually closed much of the area off from foreign researchers for nearly two generations. For this reason also, a generational gap developed among students of Central Asia outside the area. Fortunately, a new generation of scholars, journalists, and publicists is growing, with renewed interest in Central Asia. Dramatic ethnic movements and political devel- opments in the area now will undoubtedly attract increasing attention. Hopefully, the same events will not again close off access to the same. Today Central Asia is waiting to be discovered by the outside world. So,is yesteryear’s centrality of Central Asia in the history of this world outside. Even if my purpose were, which it is not, to focus on Central Asia per se, I believe we would have to follow but also go beyond Barfield (1989: 2, 12). He writes that ’the main obstacle to creating a coherent Inner Asian history has always been the lack of an appropriate analytical framework which made sense of events there .... The Mongolian steppe, north China, and Manchuria must be analyzed as part of a single historical system.’ I suggest we would have to go beyond that. Whatever the appropriate framework may be, it would have to encompass far more than these three areas or even all of Central Asia itself. It would have to be derived also from the study of the interrelations within the whole Afro-Eurasian world system of which Central Asia was a central part. However, my purpose is not to write a coherent or any other Inner Asian history. Instead, my intent is to help clarify the role of Central Asians in the history of their neigh- bours beyond Central Asia and thus their place in world system history as a whole. Whatever the purpose, we need a broader systemic scope and analysis to pose more suitable questions. I will pose a dozen questions and some alternative or tentative answers, propose four systemic approaches, and offer two conclusions. The dozen questions about Central Asia in world history relate to (a) the definition or location of Central Asia, (b) ecological and climatic factors, (c) migratory movements, (d) challenges to and responses by Central Asia’s neighbours, (e) technological change, (~ state formation, (g) gender Downloaded from sih.sagepub.com at University of Warwick on September 27, 2011 46 relations, (h) ethnogenesis and ethnicity, ( i) religion, (j) special nexuses, (k) inter’national’ trade, and (1) inter’national’ political economic relations in the world system. All of these questions have special contemporary relevance today, and they are also selected by me for that reason. Of course, this dozen is not intended to. and does not exhaust the long list of other problems, which could and often are studied by others (such as art, kinship, language, or war). I then proceed to consider four systemic structures and processes derived from the study of the contemporary world system, which may be useful also to study the place and role of Central Asia in world history: the process of accumulation, core-periphery structure, hegemony-rivalry alternation, and political economic cycles in all of the above. We may briefly anticipate two derivative conclusions. One conclusion is that it is high time to abandon the historical and still popular image of Central Asia as the home of nomad barbarians or barbarian nomads. Central Asia was also home to many highly civilized and urbanized peoples. Yet even when many people were nomadic pastoralists, they were no more ’barbarian’ or ’savage’ than many of their sedentary ’civilized’ neighbours. Indeed, the very use of the term ’barbarian’ and its supposed difference from ’civilized’ is without justification. The second conclusion concerns pastoral nomadism. It was not a ’stage’ from hunting and gathering to agriculture and urbanization. On the contrary, much nomadic and highly specialized pastoralism was probably the adaptive reaction to ecological, climatic, and economic exigencies by previously settled agricultural peoples. Even the Bible assigns temporal precedence to the latter. Moreover, nomadic pastoralism and settled agriculture have long been both comple- mentary and alternative, as well as transitory and sequentially interchange- able, forms of existence. It obscures more than it clarifies to regard nomads and nomadism as a permanent type of people rather than as a transitory form of socio-economic organization. It is mistaken to regard ’Central’ (or ’Inner’) Asia and its many different peoples as somehow all different from the rest of the world then and now. There was and is unity in diversity, and Central Asia was not apart from but rather central to this reality of human history and existence. Definitions, Ecology, Migrations and (Im)pulses of Central Asia Definitions of Central Asia Where and what is Central Asia? Or Inner Asia? Are they the same or different? Sinor (1969: 5) regards them as ’virtually synonymous’. Reference to ’Inner’ Asia seems to be more an American usage. ’Central’ Asia is mor,e used in Europe-and in the region itself. Thus, Harvard has an ’Inner’ Asian Center and Newsletter, and London has ’Central’ Asian one. Downloaded from sih.sagepub.com at University of Warwick on September 27, 2011 47 However, they seem to cover the same area. But while Sinor (1969, 1977), the American authority on the area, uses ’Inner Asia’ in his titles, he prefers ’Central Eurasia’ as a more accurate and self-explanatory, albeit more awkward, denomination. Whatever the name of the area, varying definitions and boundaries have been offered for it by different scholars and publicists. Toynbee (1934) delimited precise latitudes and longitudes for his definition of Central Asia. Yet Hambly (1969: xi) begins his study of Central Asia with the warning that ’as a geographical expression the term &dquo;Central Asia&dquo; tends to elude precise definition’. Geographically, Hambly features its isolation from oceanic influences, which reduce precipitation and increase aridity. Bounding Central/Inner Asia on the south, he finds some four thousand miles of mountain ranges between China and the Black Sea. However, he recognizes that historically the Tibetan and Iranian plateaus south of the mountains have been inextricably linked to Central Asia to the north. The eastern and western limits of Central Asia are even less easily defined along the Great Walls built by the Chinese, ,.,~~ the Ukrainian-Romanian- Hungarian plains. To the north, there is no identifiable boundary, unless it is where the tundra becomes virtually uninhabitable in the Siberian cold. Thus one set of mountain ranges running from south-west to north-east helps delimit Inner Asia from the centres of civilization to the south and east. Another lower and more or less parallel range divides the arid desert belt-punctuated by a long chain of oases-between these ranges from the steppe and tundra grasslands to the north. Sinor (1969) prefers more socio-culturally defined boundaries. He suggests that: the definition that can be given of Central Eurasia in space is negative. It is that part of the continent of Eurasia that lies beyond the borders of the great sedentary civilizations. This definition implies that the frontier is unstable .... Essentially it is a cultural barrier that exists in the heart of man (Sinor 1969: 2; also Sinor 1977: 95). Sinor (1977) also evokes the analogy of a volcano. Occasionally, the volcano erupts and its molten core of magma overflows into the outlying sedentary civilizations, which try to contain it. Later, however, the molten lava hardens, is assimilated into the surrounding crust and then helps to contain new eruptions and the forces that propel them. Therefore in the view of Sinor also, the remaining ’center’ or ’inner’ Asia is tendentially shrinking. Khazanov (1979) is more precise and further distinguishes Middle Asia from Inner (Central) Asia. He limits the latter to Kashgaria, Jungaria, Mongolia, and Tibet. Khazanov denominates the region between the Caspian and Aral Seas in the west and north and bounded by the Hindu Kush and Downloaded from sih.sagepub.com at University of Warwick on September 27, 2011 48 the Pamir mountains in the south and east as Middle Asia. Khazanov, also distinguishes between the now Arabic Near East and the Middle East, where he places Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan. Yet he recognizes that much of the latter have historically been very much part of Middle, Central or Inner Asia. Some authors argue that socio-politically speaking, Man- churia was historically also part of Central/Inner Asia. But so were much of Siberia and Southern Russia, the Ukraine, and other parts of Eastern Europe. The people of Central Asia do not call themselves ’Central Asians’. Rather, they tend to identify with (and themselves as) this ethnicity or that. However, the same ethnic denomination has served and been applied to many different peoples at different times. Over the centuries, the ’same’ people also have gone through various different ethnic names, adopting their present name and identity only very recently, as Gladney (1990) shows about the Uighurs in China for instance. I . In the meantime however, the ’Inner Asian Frontiers’ of China, as Lattimore called them, move back and forth. So do, or soon again may, the boundaries of Soviet ’Central’ Asia. The Chinese call their Central Asian region a part of Western China. They expressly do not like it to be called ’Eastern Turkestan’. The boundary now threatens to shift again in the near future. For people in Tibet and the Sinkiang Autonomous Uighur Region, and their supporters abroad, seek to reverse Chinese administration and sovereignty, as even the Beijing Review recognizes (Vol. 33, No. 34, 2(~26 August 1990). ’ . To conclude, perhaps we should return to Herodotus. He already asked why we should distinguish between Europe and Asia (and indeed, Africa), when geographically and socially, that is historically speaking, there is only one continent of Eurasia (or Afro/Eurasia). So where does its centre begin and end? How much of present day China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran, or even European Hungary, were effectively working parts of Central Asia during what times of their history? Speaking of Europe, what about the Magyars, Bulgars, Turks, and others who migrated as recently as in medieval times; or Dorians, Hittites, and many other peoples who populated Greece and the Levant in classical and ancient times? Indeed Aryans went to India and Indo ’Europeans’ and their languages came to Europe. Yet all originated in ’Central’ Asia. So where and when does Central Asia begin and end’’ Climatic and ecological features and differences also have some bearing. Ecology and Climate What effects did ecology and climatic change have on human settlement and migration in Central Asia, on its boundaries if any, and thereby alw in neighbouring areas’? And vice versa, how did human habitation and usc ot~ the environment maintain or degrade it? More than other regions in thc ( Downloaded from sih.sagepub.com at University of Warwick on September 27, 2011 49 world, Central Asia is marked by shifting tundra steppes and deserts as well as high mountain ranges whose snow water run off permits habitation even in desert oases. Therefore also more than elsewhere, habitation was and still is often at a margin of subsistence, which is sensitive to minor changes in delicate ecological balances. Even small climatic and ecological changes can have large human consequences, and vice versa. Estimates and interpretations of determinant factors cover the whole range and many variations from ecological to social determinism. Huntington wrote The Pulse of Asia (1907) and Civilization and Climate (1915/1971) to argue the case for ecological determination. ’History can never be written correctly until its physical basis is thoroughly understood’, he said. Lattimore (1940/1962) denied even less determinist interpretations and argued for more social ones. Yet even he recognized that different eco- logical bases supported different settlement and land use patterns in steppes, oases, hill country and alluvial plains. Particularly important is the question of just when and how (much) climatic changes may have influenced patterns of settlement, land use, and migration in various parts of Central Asia, anci thereby also in other parts of the world. Huntington (1915) found a dry period trom 1400 to 1200 B<~, moist conditions from 400 to 500 Bc, greater dryness around 200 Be, and better conditions when Christ was living. These were followed by renewed desiccation reaching its climax about AD 650, improvement until about AD 1000, renewed dryness culminating in the thirteenth century, followed by a recovery and then minor fluctuations in climate. Huntington saw climatic degradation leading to economic distress, political instability, and increased migration. Conversely, he saw ’the repeated coincidence between periods of improving climate and periods of cultural progress [which] appears to be due not only to the direct stimulus of climate ... but to that stimulus combined with a high racial inheritance due to natural selection’ (Huntington 1915: 28). Huntington’s geographic and climatic determinism is now mostly discarded (but we will encounter its resurrection by De Meo in the discussion of gender relations below). There seems to be no generally accepted theory of climatic change; and the thesis that tendential warming, desiccation, and desertification engendered the conversion of sedentary agriculturlists into nomadic pastoralists is the subject of much dispute. Prince Kropotkin (the anarchist!) and Toynbee and others gave it credence. The Russian and American authorities, Barthold (1956: 13) and Lattimore (1962), rejected it. Contemporary writers such as Khazanov (1979: 87-95) regard climatic change as an important, albeit not necessary and certainly not sufficient, explanation for the emergence of nomadism and other social changes. Still, climate and ecology seem to deserve more attention than .social, scientists and historians are usually willing to give them. In Central Asia especially, small changes in global and regional temperature move the Downloaded from sih.sagepub.com at University of Warwick on September 27, 2011 50 snow line up and down the mountains and alter the resulting water flow. Habitation in the lowland steppes, oases, and even plains is dependent on the same. Moreover, the amount and geographical pattern of precipitation and summer and winter temperatures change in the lowlands. Therefore, the amount and location of agricultural and grazing land and desert change, as do ever shifting ’frontiers’ between them. Areas of settlement and pasturage, and of migration or invasion, were affected accordingly. There- fore ’the Inner Asian frontiers’, not only of China but also with other neighbouring peoples and among Central Asians themselves, were subject to periodic adaptations to climatic change. For instance, did climatic change contribute to the decline of the Hsiung Nu and the early (and later?) Han Dynasty in China? Did the same also help change Han Chinese relations with peoples in Central Asia and contribute to their westward migration and invasion into Europe? Did a regional increase in temperature in East Central Asia during the early fourteenth century contribute to the increase in the population of rats there? These, in turn, helped spread the Black Plague across most of Eurasia in the third and fourth decades of the century. Did they follow the Mongol advance, and was this also a response at least in part to a climatological impulse? Migrations and land use or disuse, also by deforestation and through irrigation destroyed by warfare, could also affect the environment in general; and they could alter precipita- tion and erosion in particular. We will take note of some major historical migratory movements through and out of Central Asia below. Whether and how climatically induced they were or not remains open. Migrations When and what were the major migratory movements out of Central Asia? What were their causes and consequences there and elsewhere? It is a commonplace that peoples from Central Asia crossed the Bering Straits to settle the Americas. Increasing evidence also points to eastward maritime migrations to the New World from Southeast Asia and the Islands across both the South and the Central Pacific. However, even these people of Indian and Malay origin-who also peopled Madagascar----could also have had some origins in or impulses emerging from Central Asia. Central Asian peoples repeatedly emerged and migrated into outlying areas. From a European perspective, Gimbutas records radiocarbon evidence of three major westward thrusts of migratory waves by steppe pastoralists in 4300-4200 Be; 3400-3200 BC; and 3000-2800 BC (cited in Eisler 1987: 44). For more recent periods, McNeill (1963), Phillips (1965), and Hambly (1969), have also observed recurrent waves of migration emerg- ing from Central Asia towards all directions. However, the predominant direction was westward; perhaps, as Khazanov (1979: 173) suggests, because that was where the more fertile and richer regions lay. Each of these waves Downloaded from sih.sagepub.com at University of Warwick on September 27, 2011 51 was about 200 years long, and they occurred at intervals of about 500 years. Huntington attributed these recurrent migrations to a 640 year cycle of climatic change in Central Asia, but others dispute this. Gills and Frank (1990b) suggest the existence of long cycles of approximately 200-year upswings and 200-year downswings in economic growth and hegemonial expansion, which we have tried to identify since 1700 Bc. Whatever the reasons for the migrations, perhaps by 1900 Bc but certainly between 1700 and 1500 BC, Hittites and Kassites moved to Asia Minor; Aryans moved into India and Iran; etc. These and other migrations out of Central Asia affected not only each of the receiving regions and peoples. The consequences also altered the relations among these outlying peoples and regions themselves, as for instance those between Mesopotamia and Egypt. Another major migratory movement occurred around 1000 Bc, from perhaps 1200 to 900 BC. Indo-Europeans moved eastward and perhaps became ancestors of the later Tocharians of the Tar m Basin in Xinjiang. Around half a millennium before the birth of Christ, the movement of the Massagetae drove the Scythians westward, and they in turn pushed the Cimmerians west and southward. The latter crossed the Caucasus and arrived in Asia Minor in 680-670 Bc. Later, Herodotus recorded their incursions-and their supposedly exceptional savagery-for history. They were followed by the Sarmatians. Around the beginning of the Christian era, migratory movements emerg- ing from Central Asia contributed to far-reaching changes. On China’s ’Inner Asian Frontier’ the Ch’in and Han rulers fought off the Hsiung Nu in Zungaria across the Tien Shan Mountains. To do so, the Chinese tried to enlist the aid of the Yue Chi along the Kansu (Haxi) Corridor and Dun- huang. However, the Hsiung Nu defeated the Yue Chi, who migrated westward. It is still disputed whether the former became the Huns who later invaded Europe. However, the latter did conquer the Saka people and/or the Bactrian successors of Alexander the Great. Their descendants founded the Kushan Empire, which ruled the north of India. Parthians invaded Persia from the north to conquer the Seleucids who had taken over there from Alexander. Around AD 500, new movements of peoples from Central Asia spread in all directions and had domino effects. Ephtalites moved into India, Goths and Huns into Europe (Attila attacked Rome in 452). Tang China, Western and Eastern Byzantine Rome, Persia, and the later spread of Islam, among others, would not have become what they did without the impact of these migrants and invaders from Central Asia. Before AD 1000, the Turks, who originated in the Altai near Mongolia, moved into Anatolia, which became Turkish. Perhaps the most memorable migration and invasion movement was that of the Mongols under Genghis Khan and his successors to Tamer- lane in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The world’s largest empire Downloaded from sih.sagepub.com at University of Warwick on September 27, 2011