ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the accommodation and tension that must have accompanied the coexistence and necessary cooperation of Orthodox and Muslim colleagues on the Siberian frontier. It talks about Urasko Kaibulin, a Muslim merchant who served as a customs agent for the tsar, would have been tasked with gathering the information for such books. In the last third of the seventeenth century this steppe oasis grew busier than it had ever been, as traders from diverse and distant places converged on this remote salt lake to trade with one another. Ever so gradually, they came in greater numbers with larger caravans as more merchants realized that, by trading here on the desolate Eurasian steppe, they could avoid more sustained border-crossing hassles and other forms of state oversight. Thus state customs regulations, in their absence, had actually contributed to the emergence of a bustling borderlands market in this stateless zone.
