Environmental History of Central Eurasia

This course introduces students to recent research on the environmental history of Central Eurasia, with a focus on the 19th and 20th centuries. As a region, Central Eurasia has seen radical environmental interventions under quite different regimes: tsarist, socialist, and capitalist, each carrying its own priorities and visions of extraction, transformation, management, and protection.

Environmental history is a relatively recent arrival among the sub-disciplines engaged by historians of the region, and yet scholarship produced over the last decade has already shown us how a focus on the environment makes it possible to approach long standing concerns about empire, colonialism, revolution, and socialist development in new and productive ways. The course will thus offer a new perspective on a region (somewhat) familiar to students in the program, while also helping identify ways in which research on the region could inform ongoing debates in environmental history beyond Eurasia.

The course will begin with an introduction to environmental history and how it has evolved in recent decades, including the different kinds of perspectives and methodologies grouped under that term. From there we will zoom in slightly to examine environmental history in studies of Russia and the USSR, and then moved on to the imperial and Soviet periods in Central Asia. Finally, we will look at the work being done by anthropologists, sociologists, and other social scientists on contemporary environmental issues in the region.