THE INCORPORATION OF THE EMIRATE OF BUKHARA INTO THE ORBIT OF THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE

This article reconstructs the stages through which the Emirate of Bukhara, the most populous and politically weighty of the Central Asian khanates, passed from formal sovereignty into the position of a dependent protectorate of the Russian Empire. Drawing on the established historiography of the Russian advance into Turkestan, the study distinguishes three analytically separate processes that are often merged in general accounts: the military defeat of the emirate between 1866 and 1868, the legal codification of dependence in the treaties of 1868 and 1873, and the slower economic absorption of the emirate's territory into the imperial market after the arrival of the Trans-Caspian railway. It is argued that Bukhara's survival as a nominally independent state until 1920 was not an accident of imperial inattention but a deliberate arrangement of indirect rule: St Petersburg preserved the throne of the Manghit dynasty because a compliant emir administered a densely settled Muslim population more cheaply, and with less risk of religious mobilisation, than a Russian provincial bureaucracy could have done. The consequence was a hybrid polity in which pre-modern forms of governance persisted alongside railways, cotton exports, joint-stock banks and a Russian customs frontier, and in which the emir's domestic authority was in certain respects strengthened even as his external sovereignty disappeared.