ABSTRACT
Rural Central Asia cannot be imagined without fields of cotton and flocks of sheep. The plant and the animal are both established parts of complex biotic entanglements. Yet, what looks familiar is in fact profoundly different today from what an observer would have gazed at in the pre-colonial nineteenth century. In order to satisfy the ever-growing demands of increasingly global markets that ultimately connected Central Asia to Russia’s urban centres and across Europe to North America, breeding programmes, seed experiments and new species were introduced in hitherto unknown dimensions. Colonial interventions not only reversed trade routes, changed work routines and introduced capitalist modes of production; they also geared into human and non-human entanglements more profoundly. Without idealising pre-colonial rural economies, many of the ecological difficulties that Central Asian countries face today (such as cotton monoculture with its extensive need for water, overgrazing, or rural poverty) can be traced back to the legacies of colonial ruptures in agro-pastoral ecologies.
