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CHAPTER ONE Amlākdārs, Khwājas and Mulk land in the Zarafshan Valley after the Russian Conquest

Introduction A crucial question when considering the transition to colonial rule in any non-settler colony (as most of Russian Turkestan was until the early 1900s) is the relationship with pre-existing elites, whether landed, commercial, religious, rural or urban. No colonial regime can survive by means of force alone, and the form it takes will often be determined by the nature of the groups it chooses to co-opt and co-operate with.1 This question is usually intimately linked with revenue collection, the most basic and fundamental activity of the state. In their early years, at least, colonial regimes rarely seek to do a great deal more than collect taxes, whether at the same level as or at a higher level than their predecessors.2 In agrarian societies these are usually taxes on the land or on the harvest, necessitating either very good local connections or detailed knowledge of patterns of landownership, irrigation and crops in order to be effective.3 In British India, for instance, until at least the mid-19th century the military-fiscal garrison-state was much more concerned with maintaining the flow of agrarian tribute than with opening up the country

3 with large-scale quantitative research on documents recording land transactions, mortgaging agreements and tax payments from the exceptionally rich archives of the region will it become possible to say anything definitive about the administration of the emirate. 9 Nevertheless, however inadequate it may be, some brief description of the situation before the conquest is necessary to make sense of the policies the Russians pursued subsequently.
Most historians of the late Bukharan state seem to agree that it had become increasingly strong and centralised since at least the reign of Amir Naṣrullāh (1826 -1860), and that, although the bīks and hākims (regional governors) in more remote areas such as Hissar and Shahrisabz preserved considerable autonomy, in regions within easy reach of the capital (such as the Zarafshan Valley) official appointments and the right to collect taxes were firmly under the control of the Amir, not least because of the creation of a Persian Shiite administrative and military class which made the Manghit dynasty less dependent on the Uzbek tribal nobility. 10 By the 19 th century one of the most important Bukharan tax-collecting officials was the amlākdār, whose precise status and role has attracted little scholarly attention and presents the historian with numerous problems. An early reference to this title, (if such it then was) can be found in a document establishing the boundaries of a waqf in the Samarqand tumān of Shavdor in 1686, in which the signatories described themselves as 'Niyazbek amlākdār' and 'Ashurbek amlākdār,' but it is unclear what meaning the term had at this date. 11 The title is mentioned in the appendix to the Majmaʿ al-arqām, a late-eighteenth century Bukharan "manual of administration" but without any explanation of the precise role or status which attached to it. 12  117-140, however Sela is referring to the early eighteenth century, and does not appear to appreciate that the political situation had stabilized somewhat from the late 1700s. 11 Dokumenty k istorii agrarnykh otnoshenii v Bukharskom Khanstve, ed. A.K. Arends and O.D. Chekhovich, Vyp. I (Tashkent: Izd. AN UzSSR, 1951): 66, 68. 12 B.A. Vil'danova, "Podlinnik Bukharskogo traktata o chinakh i zvaniyakh." Pis'mennye Pamyatniki Vostoka 1968(Moscow: Nauka, 1970: 43; Bregel has pointed out that the date of composition of this text, and the identity of its author are still obscure, and it cannot be considered reliable. Yuri Bregel, The Administration of Bukhara under the Manghits and Some Tashkent Manuscripts, Papers on Inner Asia No. 34 (Bloomington, IN: RIFIAS, 2000): 16-18. 4 basing his assertion on the late 18 th -century Risāla-yi Habībīya of ʿIbadullāh b. Khwāja ʿĀrifī Bukhārī, writes that the amlākdār was a senior tax-collector responsible for collecting kharāj and other taxes on the land through local officials (āqsaqāls and amīns) which the amlākdār was then responsible for remitting to the local bīk, something echoed by Saidqulov on the basis of colonial sources. 13 Semenov wrote that in the last years of the Bukharan protectorate an amlākdār was a salaried tax-collecting official, earning the equivalent of 2,500 rubles a year, but frustratingly he did not devote any more attention to this office, preferring instead to concentrate on the judicial branch of the Bukharan administration. 14 More recent work suggests that in the late 19 th -century Bukharan protectorate amlākdārs were usually members of the Uzbek tribal nobility, and were amongst the most powerful officials of the fiscal administration, although their appointment and dismissal remained within the power of the Amir. 15 Another element of confusion concerns the apparent overlap between the roles of the amlākdār and another tax-collecting official, the sarkār, a shadowy figure in the literature on Bukhara but more commonly mentioned in that on the Khanate of Khoqand, where this official was apparently responsible for collecting kharāj. 16 The Soviet scholar R. N. Nabiev, who worked extensively with documents relating to the patrimonial estates of the Khans of Khoqand, asserted that the sarkārs were the most important officials in Khoqand, renters of Government revenue on a large scale and with an additional 'roving' judicial remit, although this last observation seems to be based on just a single example. 17 As well as collecting kharāj, they could settle disputes over land and water, acted as confidential advisors to bīks when they were posted in towns and directed construction projects for the Khan. Thus Nabiev argues that it was the sarkār who in Khoqand provided the mobile link between the rural officials on the land, and the hākims and bīks in the towns-in other words, who performed the role of a Bukharan amlākdār. 18 However, Nabiev's work was based solely on documents relating to the Khan's own estates, and it seems unlikely that the division of titles neatly followed the political division between the khanates (which was itself blurred and contested), even if the title of amlākdār does 13 M.A. Abduraimov, Ocherki agrarnykh otnoshenii v Bukharskom Khanstve v XVI -pervoi polovine XIX veka, vol. II (Tashkent: FAN, 1970): 11-12, 25; T. S. Saidkulov Samarkand vo vtoroi polovine XIX -nachalo XX vekov (Samarkand, 1970): 37-42. 14 A.A. Semenov, Ocherk ustroistva tsentral'nogo administrativnogo upravleniya Bukharskogo Khanstva pozdneishego vremeni (Stalinabad: Izd. AN TadzhSSR, 1955): 11. 15 S.A. Dudoignon, "Les "tribulations" du juge Ziya. Histoire et mémoire du clientelisme politique a Boukhara ." Annales: Historie et Sciences Sociale 59/5-6 (Sept.-Dec. 2004): 1112; Franz Wennberg, An Inquiry into Bukharan Qadimism. Mirza Salim-bik (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz, 2002): 24-5. 16 A.L. Troitskaya, Materialy po istorii kokandskogo khantsva XIX v. po dokumentam arkhiva kokandskikh khanov (Moscow: Nauka, 1969): 33; V.M. Ploskikh, Kirgizy i Kokandskoe Khanstvo (Frunze: Izd. Ilim, 1977): 152, 192, 259;Kh. Bababekov Istoriya Kokanda (Tashkent: FAN, 2006): 119-39. B.M. Babadzhanov Kokandskoe Khanstvo: vlast', politika, religiya (Tokyo-Tashkent: TIAS, 2010): 609. 17 R.N. Nabiev, Iz istorii Kokandskogo Khanstva. Feodal'noe khozyaistvo Khudoyar Khana (Tashkent: FAN, 1973): 228. 18 Ibid.: 229-34. 5 seem to have been less commonly used in Khoqand than in Bukhara. According to Beisembiev's work on the Tā'rikh-i Shahrukhi, the hierarchy of titles and duties in Khoqand was extremely confused, but most positions in the state administration were based on Bukharan precedent,19 whilst Nabiev himself refers to the collection of kharāj by amlākdārs in Khoqand. 20 Beisembiev's index to the Khoqand chronicles lists only four occurrences, two of which are in the Tā'rīkh-i ʿĀlimqulī Amīr-i Lashkar, where they refer to the collectors of kharāj, although this is a late source composed thirty years after Khoqand's dissolution. 21 Another mention, overlooked by Beisembiev, occurs in the Khoqandi Tāʾrīkh-i Jadida-yi Tāshkand (composed ca.1867-1886, where the term is being used in connection with tax-collection around Ura-Tepe, a region which had long been contested between Bukhara and Khoqand. 22 Ultimately these terms are generic (in principle an amlākdār can mean anyone with control over property, a sarkār anyone in authority), and by the 19 th century, at least, they seem to have become interchangeable, at least in Russian usage. In the absence of detailed work on taxation registers, yārlīqs of appointment and other documents, it is difficult to say anything more definitive about the role of the amlākdār or sarkār: as we shall see, however, in the 1870s the Russians came to associate it with what they saw as a particularly corrupt and inefficient method of collecting kharāj.
The question of what was or was not mulk land is if anything even more difficult to establish than the precise role of the amlākdār. This is partly because it has proved particularly hard to disentangle questions of taxation from those of land tenure in Central Asia. Much the most vexed question for Tsarist scholars and their Soviet successors was the existence (or not) of separate categories of private property (mulk) and state land (usually referred to as mamlaka-yi padshāhī or amlāk), their respective levels of fiscal liability and the relative proportions of each (together with religious endowments or waqf) within the overall quantity of arable land. One reason for this is that from their arrival in the region the Russians usually referred to state land as amlyak, creating a number of semantic traps for the unwary. One of these is the apparent link between amlak and amlākdār, which is probably coincidental. It is quite possible that an amlākdār could collect taxes on all forms of land, making no distinction between different forms of tenure.
Another misleading point is that grammatically, amlāk is simply the Arabic plural of mulk, and when applied to land it can indeed function as a simple plural. O. D. Chekhovich 6 publication of fifteenth and sixteenth century waqfnāmas relating to the vast estates of the 15 thcentury saint and landowner ʿUbaydullāh b. Maḥmūd Khwāja Aḥrār, 23 writes that the standard formula which many of the documents use refers to the conversion of Khwāja Aḥrār's 'estates'-amlāk-into waqf for charitable purposes. 24 Throughout the volume she translates amlāk simply as the plural of mulk (milki, in Russian), and the context in which the term is used makes it quite clear that these are personal, private possessions of the Khwāja. For instance, in one waqfnāma of 1490 transforming some of his property around Samarqand and Tashkent and the Kashka-Darya region into a waqf for the use of himself and his descendants and for the support of the Suzangaran madrasa in Samarqand, the term used for Khwāja Ahrar's estates is amlāk-i khwudash ('his own property'). 25 It was probably this kind of usage of the term which led V. V. Barthold to claim that even in the nineteenth century amlāk and mulk were simply greater and smaller quantities of the same thing: he gave the following definition which he said applied to both.
A common form of land tenure, that is land, which in theory is considered to be the property of the state, but is held in permanent and hereditary use by those landholders who have converted it, who have the right to sell their plots […] that is in practice they can dispose of it as their own property. 26 Other than this brief passage, Barthold paid little attention to mulk land in Central Asia and as early as 1928 his conclusions were being questioned by Soviet historians, who argued that, at least by the nineteenth century, there was in fact a clear difference in the terms of tenure between amlāk and mulk land, the latter owing far fewer obligations to the state. 27 Whilst this conclusion, informed as it is by the ideologically-driven search for forms of 'feudal' landholding in Central Asia, must be viewed with some caution, it is supported by other evidence.
Abduraimov writes that although grammatically amlāk is simply the plural of mulk, in Bukhara by the early nineteenth century it had a particular juridical meaning, and was state land subject to heavier taxation than that which was privately owned. 28 28 Abduraimov,Ocherki agrarnykh otnoshenii,25. 7 pre-revolutionary system of taxation. All his interviewees were in agreement that amlāk and mulk were two different things, the former state, the latter private land. The rate of kharāj on amlāk could be as much as ½ the value of the crop, and it constituted the principal source of income for the Amir. Mulk estates were apparently much smaller than amlāk, carried a lower tax burden (no more than 20% of the value of the crop), and were usually farmed by the beneficiary himself. 29 Barthold was thus in error on this point: full private property clearly did exist in Central Asia. 30 As Schwarz explains it, both Islamic legal theory and local practice in Central Asia presupposed a clear distinction between state land (mamlaka or amlāk) and full private property (milk or mulk). 31 Chekhovich wrote that Barthold had also failed to appreciate that not only were all forms of mulk private property, some also carried significant exemptions from tax.
She further argued that those payments which were made on mulk land in Central Asia were simply a tax paid by private property owners, but E. A. Davidovich disagreed, instead interpreting them as rent paid to the state as the ultimate owner. 32 They did both agree, however, on a fairly rigid schema which classified mulk land into three different types: the most common, mulk-i kharāj, was land subject to the normal tax of 20%; mulk-i ʿushrī was subject to a lower rate of kharāj because it notionally belonged to the descendants of the Arab invaders or other religious elites and was subject to half the usual rate of kharāj, i.e. 10%; finally mulk-i ḥurri khāliṣ was not subject to taxation at all. 33 Schwarz notes that these distinctions were probably less rigid in practice, but a more significant problem is that Chekhovich and Davidovich's work is based on documents from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and it is far from clear whether these categories were still in use in the nineteenth century, or if they were, whether they still meant the same thing. Some forms of tax-exemption or reduction on mulk land clearly did still exist: Schwarz's research suggests that mulk-i ʿushrī was still widespread in the early 29 K. Shaniyazov, "Ob osnovnykh vidakh zemel'noi sobstvennosti i razmerakh kharadzha v Bukharskom Khanstve v kontse XIX -nachali XX veka (po etnograficheskim dannym)." Obshchestvennye Nauki v Uzbekistane 3 (1962): 51-6. 30 J. Paul, "Review Essay: Recent monographs on the social history of Central Asia." Central Asian Survey 29/1 (March 2010): 126. 31 "Legal tradition and legal practice are unequivocal about one thing: milk of any kind is full ownership, independent from fiscal and other financial obligations of the title holder or the fiscal or legal status of the peasants. Private land (milk) could however become state land (mamlaka) as the result of a historical process, and in this process the peasants who had been tax-paying owners would have become rentpaying tenants. It was also common practice that state land was (re)converted to milk, usually in combination with the granting of tax privileges. But the legal distinction between milk and mamlaka 8 nineteenth century, although in legal documents its title was Persianised to mulk-i dah-yak (i.e. one in ten). 34 The Samarqandi topographer and historian Abū Ṭāhir Khwāja wrote in the 1840s that the lands in the hills around the Chupan-Ata mausoleum to the north of Samarqand were subject only to ʿushr because the inhabitants had converted to Islam voluntarily at the time of the Arab conquests and had later heroically resisted the infidel Mongols. 35 As this suggests, there was a connection between the enjoyment of tax privileges and high religious status, although the extent of this correlation is still unclear. Barthold and Nabiev both argued that much tax-exempt mulk land was in the hands of khwājas, 36 members of a religious elite on which there is a growing literature. 37 The term is often taken as more or less synonymous with sayyid, i.e. claiming descent from the Prophet's kin, and the originating figure in most khwāja genealogies was Muḥammad b. al-Ḥanafiyya, a son of ʿAlī whose heirs had briefly had claims on the Shi'i imamate, although khwāja groups are firmly Sunni. 38 However, Central Asian khwājas derived their authority and influence in large part from belonging to local Sufi lineages within the three principal Sufi brotherhoods: the Naqshbandīya, Yasawīya and Kubrawīya. Of these the Naqshbandīya had become dominant by the 16 th century, and within the Naqshbandiyya one of the most important lineages was that of khwājas claiming descent from Aḥmad Kāsānī Makhdūm-i Aʿẓam, the pupil and spiritual heir of Khwāja Aḥrār. 39 Although he was born in Ferghana, Kāsānī spent most of his life in Samarqand and was buried in the nearby village of Dahbid, where in the 1890s there were still at least fifty households of khwājas claiming descent from him, some of whom still owned substantial amounts of land. 40 The true extent of landholdings in the hands of khwājas by the 19 th century was probably less than it had been in 34  predominantly used to support these and other religious elites.
The historiographical confusion surrounding these questions has its roots in the first attempts by the Russians to understand the nature of land tenure in the Zarafshan Valley immediately after the conquest. Erroneous as many of their conclusions will probably prove to have been, they nevertheless informed colonial policy on administration, taxation and attitudes towards Bukharan elites. Hence I am principally concerned with the Russian understanding of these subjects in the years immediately following the fall of Samarqand in 1868, and the perceptions, reasoning and motivations which led them to annul the privileges of groups who could potentially have been very useful collaborators in the construction of a colonial administration. As we shall see, for the Russians the key difference between amlāk and mulk lay in the tax privileges which they believed the latter enjoyed, not the fact that it was private, hereditary tenure. Whether this view was justified or not, it would form the core of the debate amongst Russian officials in the immediate aftermath of the conquest of Samarqand and the Zarafshan Valley. Central to this is the correspondence between the two officials who took the decision to reform the taxation system, namely Governor-General Konstantin Petrovich von

Kaufman and the Military Commandant of the Zarafshan okrug (military district), Major-General
Alexander Konstantinovich Abramov. I argue that their decision was partly fiscally motivated, as they struggled to understand and manage a tax-collection system based around the amlākdār and with apparently myriads of special exemptions, and that it also stemmed also from a deep suspicion that all Bukharan landowners belonged to religious descent groups, and were thus fosterers of 'Muslim fanaticism.'

I. Russian Encounters with Amlākdārs and Kharāj
Fifty years after the Russian conquest, Senator Count Pahlen, the leader of an Imperial commission enquiring into Turkestan's administration, wrote that to begin with the Russians introduced little by way of reforms to the land-tax system in Turkestan: At first our power was not yet acquainted with the native revenue system and did not have the essential organs for the assessment of data, because of which the revenue was remitted to the treasury in very modest amounts. Out of a feeling of solidarity with the native population, and in accordance with their 10 own interests, both sarkārs and the zakātchīs took the side of the payers, which they were able to do without any danger to themselves, as the Russian power was unable to have any real control over them. 42 Von Kaufman had made a similar assertion, stating that for four and a half years after the conquest the administration of the Zarafshan okrug in particular was left unchanged from Bukharan times as far as taxes and their collection were concerned. 43 Although Pahlen was quite right about the small amount of revenue the Russians were able to collect immediately after the conquest, both were exaggerating the degree of continuity with the Muslim regimes even at this early stage. Despite the fact that the Zarafshan okrug was only formally annexed to the Russian Empire in 1886, eighteen years after the conquest, the Russians set about reorganising and altering its administration in 1871, though they continued to hint to Bukhara and to the British that they might be willing to hand it back. 44 The local bīks and hākims were immediately removed from the equation as most of them had fled to Bukhara or Khoqand before the Russian advance, and Samarqand was no exception, as General von Kaufman symbolically occupied what he described as the "Khan's palace, known in Asia under the name of the 'Kök-Tash' (blue stone)", which had once been part of the throne of Tamerlane. 45 Whilst some members of the old elite, notably Jura-Bek and Baba-Bek, the former hākims of Shahrisabz and Kitab, were eventually allowed to join the Army in largely honorary positions (one a major-general, the other a colonel), 46 they were not given any further role in the collection of land revenue or local administration. The Russians do not seem to have made any attempt to find substitute local dignitaries whom they could co-opt to their side. His detailed description of the amlākdār's functions was composed and published in 1873, and I will attempt to summarise it here. 55 Depending on the size of the tumān (district) concerned, a newly-appointed bīk would in turn appoint one, two, three or more amlākdārs to collect the land taxes there. Occasionally he would leave the existing ones in place, but Kun's local informants assured him that this was a rare occurrence, and that very few amlākdārs remained in their posts even for two or three years.
These amlākdārs would be issued with tanap registers for their tumān, collected by the bīk from their predecessors in the post, which recorded the fixed amount of tax to be paid per tanap of land under valuable cash crops such as fruit or cotton. 56 Occasionally the registers would need to be revised to remove inaccuracies, a task normally undertaken by a muftī (a member of the judicial branch of the administration), who would consult with the local āqsaqāls and amīns to draw up new registers indicating the ownership of land and the crops it carried. In early spring at the time of the first sowing, the amlākdār would proceed to collect the qush-pul. 57 He would be 53 AV: f. 33, op. 1, d. 33, ll. 12ob-14ob;N. A. Maev, "A. L. Kun." TV 46 (22 nd Nov. 1888). 54 A superintendent or manager. The word appears to be derived from a Mongol term meaning 'Governor'. 55 Part of the manuscript is to be found in AV, f. 33, op. 1, d. 20, ll. 1-2ob. It was published as A. L. Kun, "Bukharskie Poryadki. Zametki o poryadke vzimaniya pozemel'nykh podatei." TV 32 (14 th August 1873). 56 Tanāb, which the Russians wrote as tanap, was both a measurement of land (which varied widely between different regions, and was probably determined by the amount of water needed to irrigate it) and a Bukharan tax levied as a fixed charge by area rather than as a proportion of the harvest. It was applied to market-gardens, orchards, cotton and other particularly valuable crops, often in areas near cities. 57 A money tax on the area of ploughed land. Qush means 'pair' or 'couple'. Here it is a measurement unit, probably the notional amount of land that could be ploughed by a yoke of oxen, known as juft-i gāv in Iran, accompanied by his mirzās and dārugahs, and it was the responsibility of the local āqsaqāls and amīns to provide hospitality for him and his suite.
The collection of kharāj on the grain crop from ābī (irrigated) land would not take place until midsummer. Crucially, Kun writes that, unlike the tanap tax, there were no pre-existing registers for this tax, because the size of the harvest and grain reserves varied so much from year to year.
Thus the register of those on whom the kharāj levy fell was drawn up anew every year, usually at the time when the crop was harvested. This was done under the supervision of the amlākdār and his assistants. The dārugahs would place their seals on pieces of damp clay attached to some of the kharmān (stooks or piles of grain) 58 in order to ensure that none of it was disposed of before the kharāj was collected. 59 All the men involved (who included a nānwāy or baker, who placed loaves of bread on the kharmān to wish a prosperous year ahead) were entitled to take a proportion of the grain away in the tails of their shirts or the skirts of their khalats as payment in kind, known as the kifsen. 60 The collection of tax on the harvest would finish at the end of October. The amlākdār would draw up a register in consultation with local āqsaqāls, stating from whom and in what quantities tax had been collected, and took these, together with all the tax (both in kind and that which had been commuted into money) to the bīk. He gave a full account of that which had already been disbursed to members of the fiscal administration in payment for their services, which was also his responsibility. Kun claimed that the tax on lalmī or bahārī (unirrigated, rain-fed) land was collected in the same way, although this seems doubtful given the greater variations in crop.
Kun's article is the most comprehensive account I have yet seen of the role of the amlākdār in the collection of taxes in Bukhara, but for the purposes of this paper it is useful primarily because it tells us how the Russians had come to understand a system of tax-collection which by the time he was writing had already been abolished. On this score the main points to take from and in medieval and early-modern Europe as 'oxgang' or 'bovate'. I am grateful to Beatrice Penati for providing me with this explanation. 58 Steingass defines this as "reaped corn, but unthreshed, and piled up in a large circular stack." Lambton writes that in Iran "the word kharman, which means harvest in general, is also applied in particular to a heap comprising the grain harvest for a particular piece of land." A.K. Lambton, Landlord and Peasant in Persia (Oxford: OUP, 1953): 361, 431. Kun refers to the grain already being threshed at the point when taxes were collected, and also employs the Russian term gumna, so it is probable that here it refers to threshed grain heaped on a threshing-floor. Kun was also the editor of Turkestanskii Al'bom, where in Part 3, pl. 34, no. 160, a photograph purports to show an official (an amlākdār?) measuring a pile of grain with a wooden implement, and the caption "khirmenberdari." It is unclear from the text of the article, but it seems probable that only a certain proportion of the kharmān (presumably 1/5 in most places) were set aside for the payment of tax. 59 O.D. Chekhovich also describes the "archaic" practice in the 19 th century whereby the amlākdār placed a seal upon the new season's harvest on what she refers to as amlāk (state) land to prevent the peasantry from disposing of any of it before taxes had been collected, Dokumenty k istorii agrarnykh otnoshenii, ed. A.K. Arends and O.D. Chekhovich: xiv-xv. According to Lambton a similar system of collecting taxes in kind from the threshing-floor existed in Iran and dated back to Sassanian times. Lambton, Derived from kif, which according to Steingass can mean both a 'handful' and 'hemming a garment.'

14
Kun's account are first, that the amlākdār was the single most important Bukharan tax-official (which may or may not have been true), but above all his statement that under the amlākdāri system the assessment for kharāj was carried out afresh every year. This was the aspect of Bukharan land-tax collection which the Russians would find most difficult to deal with, and which appears ultimately to have led to the system's abolition.

II. Pressures on the Fiscal System in the 1870s
Von Kaufman was under considerable pressure to raise revenue in Turkestan because of the immense cost of the annexation, and the degree to which the administration and military presence there was being subsidised by St Petersburg. In 1868 the Steppe Commission had complained that at least a half of the potential revenue from Turkestan was being lost through inefficiency, corruption and lack of control over collection, something the metropolitan press quickly seized upon. 61 A year later Russian expenditure in Turkestan amounted to 4,233,482 roubles, and receipts to just 2,356,241 roubles. In the period 1868 -1872 the revenue in Turkestan fell short of costs by 19,600,000 roubles, 62 and this ratio of income to expenditure would if anything grow worse over the next ten years. 63 Von Kaufman was acutely aware that his enemies in Moscow and St Petersburg, led by the disgruntled General Chernyaev, were using these figures to mount bitter political attacks on him. 64 The Governor-General spent most of 1868 complaining about low kharāj returns from Samarqand and the fact that very little zakāt was being collected at the border with Bukhara. Abramov explained rather sheepishly that: "As the region was finally taken in June, a part of the tanāb and qush-pul levies, which in some areas are collected early-were demanded and carried off by the Bukharan officials." 65 The Russians found considerable difficulty in collecting taxes using the personnel they had inherited from the previous regimes. Not only did they decide that these agents were unreliable, the lack of any comprehensive survey of agricultural land in the region meant that the authorities had very little idea of what area was being harvested each year, and with what crop.
This information was essential if they wanted to maintain a revenue system based largely on 61 "Po povodu uchrezhdeniya novogo Turkestanskogo General-Gubernatorstva i Voennogo Okruga." Golos 194 (1868). In TS 1 (1868) 15 kharāj, which was now meant to be paid wherever possible in cash. An early example of such complaints comes from the region of Ura-tepe near Khujand, a few months before the Zarafshan Valley was annexed, in a region which by then had been under Russian rule for two years.
Captain A. P. Chaikovskii, the then sub-commandant of the Ura-tepe division explained: The kharāj cess […] presents really the most equitable system of taxation, -since the people pay according to the goods they actually possess, taking into account the harvest, -but given the unsatisfactory result, gross abuses and the lack of control, we are forced to wish that the kharāj cess be replaced by a different tax, and in that case a land tax would be the most satisfactory […] At the same time the kharāj cess requires an endless number of eyes and hands, in order to ensure that movable objects subject to tax should not be hidden, unpaid for etc. 66 He claimed that under the ancien régime (which in Ura-tepe could have been either Bukhara, Khoqand or local rulers at different times) kharāj had been collected primarily to support the military, and that because the tax-collectors were also drawn from the military, they had a direct interest in maximising receipts. 67 This was no longer the case, and now he thought the whole system should be replaced with a simple charge on the area of cultivated land, on the model of the tanap cess, as the Russians simply did not have the knowledge or the personnel to carry out the annual harvest assessments necessary for the maintenance of kharāj. The tax proposed by Chaikovskii was to be levied on all cultivated land, at a rate of 10% of the average harvest. As he said, this would require a comprehensive land survey (of a kind that would be unsuccessfully attempted in Ferghana in the late 1870s). 68 He calculated that 20 tanābs of wheat would produce an average crop of 21 poods, worth 6 roubles and 30 kopeks, of which 63 kopeks would be due in cash. Chaikovskii estimated that on this basis (and ignoring more valuable crops, such as rice), such a tax would bring in 249,000 roubles a year, or three times the current receipts.
Finally, using this means, we will do away with the abnormal position of our power, when-so far as tax is concerned-we do not have control in our hands, and have to be satisfied with what they give us. In this instance we will benefit in two ways, materially and morally, since the natives clearly see our failure and the ease with which they can deceive the authorities. This situation cannot be prolonged, we must, and are obliged to take into our hands that control, which at the moment, I can confirm we do not have. 66 Chaikovskii to Abramov, 01.03.1868, TsGARUz, f. I- 1, op. 14, d. 11, ll. 1-2. 67 This offers some independent confirmation of Semenov's claim that the revenue from amlāk was used to pay the Bukharan military, although the connection is somewhat unclear. Semenov,Ocherk pozemel'nopodatnogo i nalogovogo ustroistva: 54. 68

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The sole means of verifying the current system of revenue collection, is to conduct a poll of names of all the inhabitants. It is necessary only to recall our religious difference, a few verses of the Koran, asiatic cunning-to see that the method outlined above has become a comedy, in which, once again, the comic role is played by us. 69 Chaikovskii's suggestions were not heeded immediately, but from 1871 the Russians began to make some sweeping changes in the structure of local government they had inherited from Bukhara. In 1874 Kun published a retrospective article about the amlākdārī system of taxcollection, saying that whilst he was unaware how well or badly the system had worked under the Bukharan regime, since the Russians had taken over the Zarafshan Valley in 1868 problems of corruption had become so acute that in 1872 a commission (of which he was a member) had been set up to look into their activities. This concluded that most amlākdārs, even if honest, had so many kharmans to assess (80-100 per day) that it was impossible for them to judge accurately how much grain they contained, and that peasants were withholding much of the harvest and avoiding assessment altogether. In many cases the amlākdārs and their assistants, the dārugahs and amīns, were taking a larger share of the harvest for themselves than was reaching the treasury. This was because, Kun wrote, the peasants considered the kifsen-the perquisite to which tax officials were entitled as their payment-to form a part of the kharāj tax, and deducted it from the amount they gave to the state. Furthermore, whilst the size of the kifsen was determined by the amount an official could carry away in the skirts of his khalat, the kharmān from which they were taken varied widely in size, so that sometimes the kifsen comprised the state's entire share of that particular pile. He gave a series of examples uncovered by the commission in Aforinkent and Aq-tepe: in the latter case, a kharman of grain belonging to Mullah Raḥmat Raziqulov had been assessed by the amlākdār at eight poods. On being weighed it turned out to contain 9 ½ poods. The state's share of this amounted to 1 pood 36 funts. However, the dārugah took 1 pood 7 ½ funts, the serker 70 13 funts, and the amin 10 funts, making two poods 13 funts altogether, the officials pocketing the difference. The further away from 69 Chaikovskii to Abramov, 01.03.1868, TsGARUz, f. I- 1, op. 14, d. 11, ll.5ob-6. 70 This is the first mention of a sarkār in Kun's writings on the Bukharan tax system, and in the other examples he cites in this article the equivalent official is an amlākdār. For him, at least, the terms seem to have been interchangeable. One article in the liberal St. Petersburg daily, Golos, which seems to be at least partly based on Kun's work, explicitly notes that a sarkār is "the same thing as an amlākdār": "Podatnaya sistema v Turkestanskom krae." Golos 134. In TS 152 (1875): 38; the term sarkār seems to have been more current among Russian officers before Kun conducted his researches, and amlakdars are not even mentioned in the description of the Samarqand, the more common such problems became. When the commission questioned the inhabitants in the bazaar of Aq-tepe as to why they had not petitioned the authorities about this abuse, they replied that they did not know that Samarqand was the seat of government, and that the amlākdārs had threatened them that the Russians would send them to Siberia if they petitioned: "how can we petition against the amlākdārs, they are powerful people." 71 Babajanov notes that in Khoqand before the Russian conquest many of the Khan's fiscal practices were contested by the ʿulamā as arbitrary and contrary to the sharīʿa, whilst some zakātchīs seem to have been very successful at enriching themselves, so this emphasis on corruption may have been more than just a Russian trope. 72 After 1870-1 in Samarqand I have found no further references to amlākdārs, sarkārs and zakātchīs in Russian territory except as agents of the Bukharan Government, and the Pahlen report suggests that all these Bukharan-era posts were abolished in 1871. 73 In 1872 the Russians also began to simplify the tax-system itself, as von Kaufman recalled Notwithstanding the more developed and energetic supervision of the Russian Administration, and all the attempts at betterment and improvement in the correct collection of taxes, the administration of tumans and amlyakstv [sic], under the old Bukharan system it turned out to be unsustainable. I was forced, having refused to consider it capable of further improvement, to decide on an essential reorganisation, which began to get underway in 1872, -after all attempts at improvement, based on the foundation of unchanged Bukharan conventions, had brought about all the useful results they could, they were unable to overcome the greatest insufficiencies in the system, which lay in its very fundamentals. 74 The Bukharan system of taxation was replaced in 1873, when it was simplified to zakāt, tanāb and 10% kharāj (reduced from 20%) and some detailed surveys were undertaken by Russian officials seconded from their normal duties. One of these, Ozerov, who had been the president of the Semirechie oblast' land commission, remarked in an unsolicited project for the reform of the revenue system in the Zarafshan okrug, that corruption amongst the āqsaqāls had been endemic under the Bukharans and that the Russians still had no means of imposing effective control over them. 75 Ultimately these investigations were supposed to have revealed that over the previous three years a total of 165,184 roubles had been withheld from the Russian authorities in the Zarafshan okrug by native revenue officials. 76   He went on to express his satisfaction with this move, pointing to the marked increase in the amount of revenue collected by his chosen intermediaries. This was certainly true (although it did not affect the overall deficit) and was in some ways quite impressive given the concurrent reduction in the rate of kharāj. However whilst overall it seems likely that the tax burden declined in Turkestan as a result of this change, it was no longer as responsive to the vagaries of the harvest as it had been. This led to complaints from some inhabitants. Commenting on a series of petitions from the inhabitants of the large town of Peishambe, Abramov wrote: The substance of most of the petitions of the inhabitants of the tumān of Peishambe who are cultivating amlāk (state) land does not lie in the fact that they have been taxed unjustly with regard to the quantity of land and confirmed prices, but in the fact that, in their view, the kharāj tax should not have been levied in full in some areas of the Peishambe tumān where there was allegedly no harvest in 1871.
[…] The reason for the petitions of the inhabitants of Katta-Kurgan about the onerousness of the collection of taxes above all lies in the sudden transition from the former amlākdāri system of collection, to the new order, more strict and just. In this respect the amlākdāri system entirely spoiled the people, accustoming them never to pay in full, that which was due from them. 78 Amongst the many things Abramov failed to acknowledge here was the fact that under Bukhara the tax burden in each locality had been set annually according to the actual size of the harvest, and determined at least in part by officials appointed by the centre who could monitor the activities of local āqsaqāls. The Russians, because they had neither the manpower nor the expertise to maintain a system of comparable flexibility and supervision, had simply devolved all these functions to the sel'skoe obshchestvo or 'agrarian society,' which in Central Asia was a new, and often rather artificial entity which might comprise one large village or several small ones which had never formed a unit before. 79 After 1875, when a rudimentary land survey was completed, each obshchestvo (also known as an aksakalstvo) was assessed for a certain amount

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of land revenue on the basis of the land, crops and prevailing bazaar prices in that year. 80 This amount rapidly become out of date over the succeeding decade, so that in practice far less than 10% was being collected. More importantly, however, under this system the Russians effectively washed their hands of the trickiest element of all -the distribution of tax within villages and aksakalstvos. Instead this would now be determined by the āqsaqāl in collaboration with the illīkbāshīs (electors, chosen from amongst heads of households) who had chosen him, which increased the possibilities of corruption and unfair distribution of the burden. 81 In the absence of a detailed cadastral survey of arable land in the Zarafshan Valley, this decision ensured that the colonial regime would remain a shallow one, with only weak extractive capabilities.

III. Problems with Mulk
Apart from the basic means of assessing and collecting kharāj and other land taxes, the other major question facing the Russians as they sought to reform the land revenue administration in the aftermath of the conquest was that of pre-existing tax privileges and property rights. The new colonial regime seems to have found the complex patterns of landholding and tax privilege subsumed under the label mulk as inconsistent and confusing as later historians have done.
Officials complained that mulk privileges eroded the tax base, and that much of the income thus diverted went to undesirable religious elites. It thus seems likely that when referring to mulk they were talking mainly about mulk-i ḥurr-i khāliṣ, that exempt from all forms of taxation, and mulk-i ʿushrī, that which (according to Davidovich) paid half the usual rate of kharāj, although it is equally possible that many more types of mulk and justifications for exemption from tax had evolved. Kun's efforts to study and explain the Bukharan tax system do not appear to have extended to this question, and it was the orientalist M. N. Rostislavov, who  20 albeit temporarily in private hands (possibly a confused reference to tarkhān status), 83 whilst what he called amlyak was state land from which all revenue was meant to go to the central treasury. 84 In the version of his text published in 1879, however, he claimed that in Turkestan the term mulk referred only to ʿushrī lands (subject to a 10% tax), whilst kharāji land subject to the usual assessment was known as amlyak. He went on to state, on the basis of nine unspecified Islamic juristic sources, that mulk and amlāk referred respectively to private and state land, and that they were separate legal concepts. However given his apparent reliance on advice from the Samarqand qāżīs (who had probably produced an interpretation that suited their own purposes) it seems unlikely that he had consulted these sources himself. 85 The Girs Commission's Report was probably following this part of Rostislavov's interpretation in asserting that amlāk land was subject to the taxes of kharāj and tanap, whilst mulk land was entirely free of them, even if Girs did not agree with his interpretation of these terms as relating to property rights rather than fiscal privilege. 86 However, Rostislavov then went on to say that in contemporary Turkestan the difference between amlāk and mulk had been eroded even before the conquest, and that they were now, to all intents and purposes, the same form of tenure, largely thanks to the Russian decision to impose the same fiscal settlement on both: In general the question of amlyak lands must be considered settled, in the sense that all amlyaks have now taken on almost entirely the character of mulk land, especially under our rule, when mulk, with regard to the imposition of taxes, is on an equal footing with amlyak. There can be no other resolution to the question, albeit, from the point of view of fiscal gains and the demands of justice, it ought to have been resolved somewhat differently. 87 Rostislavov was writing at the end of a decade in which the question of the legitimacy of mulk tenure and, above all, of the tax privileges it carried, had been a subject of fierce (and often frustrated) debate amongst Russian administrators. As this passage suggests, whatever exemptions from tax the owners of some types of mulk (whom the Russians, at least, generally 83 Editorial note: A tarkhān grant was a conferral of fiscal privileges. This procedure usually involved descent groups such as sayyids, īshāns, khwājas, and shaykhs, cf. William Wood, A Collection of Tarkhan Yarliqs from the Khanate of Khiva, Papers on Inner Asia no. 38 (Bloomington, IN: RIFIAS, 2005): 30. The tarkhān grantees were exempted from the payment of various taxes, which instead fell on the rest of the population. Wood also suggests (Ibid.: 29) that these grantees were also freed from the obligation to the military service; in addition, it seems that tarkhān also conferred a sort of immunity with regard to a number of infractions. Though many royal warrants for the conferral of tarkhān status have been published, nothing is known of the way in which these grantees made use of fiscal privileges. See also, Paul, Forming a Faction: 535. 84 M. Rostislavov, "Ocherk vidov zemel'noi sobstvennosti v Turkestanskom krae." TV 5 (29 th January 1874) and 19 (14 th May 1874). 85 M.N. Rostislavov, Ocherk Vidov Zemelnoi Sobstvennosti i Pozemel'nyi Vopros v Turkestanskom Krae (St Pb.: Tip. brat. Panteleevykh, 1879): 5-7. My thanks to Paolo Sartori for this suggestion. 86 Girs,. 87 Rostislavov,Ocherk Vidov Zemelnoi Sobstvennosti: 7. 21 referred to as mulkdārs) 88 might have had before the conquest, the Russians had decided not to recognise them.
In the earliest years of Russian rule in Turkestan three commissions were set up by von Kaufman to look into the question of land rights and taxation. The first, under Colonel M. N.
Nikolaev, began work in January 1868 and concluded that a clearer definition of land rights was needed, not least in order to facilitate Russian settlement. This was followed by another concentrating on the Syr-Darya oblast under Major-General Gomzin, and finally, from 1871-2, a third land commission under the chairmanship of Major-General Abramov which drew its evidence from the Zarafshan okrug. 89 Once again, problems over the question of taxation and land tenure were already manifesting themselves in Ura-tepe before the conquest of Samarqand and the Zarafshan Valley. In April 1868 Captain Mikhailov, the commandant of the Ura-tepe division, wrote to the head of the Syr-Darya oblast' administration, asking if a blanket rate of kharāj could be applied to what he referred to simply as mulk land (presumably implying that it was a variety which had previously been exempted from kharāj) and some of the special tax privileges of its owners revoked. He remarked that the list of mulk owners which he had from the old regime included so many mulks that were in his view illegal, as their current owners had bought them rather than inheriting them, that the Russians need have no qualms about abrogating their privileges. 90 His subordinate in Ura-tepe, the afore-mentioned Captain Chaikovskii, disagreed, and argued that the introduction of kharāj on mulk land would mean considerable hardship for a class of tenant labourers: Almost all these mulkdārs give their land in permanent rent, to peasants, muzhiks, who do not have their own land and who settle around their rented land, and give the impression of being serfs. In order to protect landless peasants from exploitation, customs are established and defined by sharīʿa. 91 Chaikovskii claimed that as these peasants already gave a proportion of their crop to the mulk owner they were in danger of being taxed twice if kharāj was levied by the state as well.
Chaikovskii wrote that some inhabitants of Ura-tepe had told him they would prefer to see the general level of kharāj return to its previous level of 20%, provided it wasn't levied on taxexempt mulk land, and he urged the Nikolaev Commission to consider the question very carefully first. 92 Chaikovskii's objections to the levying of tax on mulk were rejected by his superior, Mikhailov, who wrote that it would severely reduce revenue receipts-always a 88 The term is used in modern Samarqandi Tajik to refer to a property-owner or wealthy person. 89 A.P. Savitskii, Pozemel'nyi vopros v Turkestane: v proektakh i zakone 1867-1886gg (Tashkent: Izd. SamGU, 1963 Mikhailov to the President Obl. Prav. Syr-Dar'inskoi Oblasti, 20.04.1868, TsGARUz, f. I-1, op. 14, d. 11, l. 16. 91 Chaikovskii to Abramov, 22.04.1868, TsGARUz, f. I-1, op. 14, d. 11, l. 11ob. 92 Chaikovskii to Abramov, 27.04.1868, TsGARUz, f. I-1, op. 14, d. 11, ll. 12-13. 22 greater priority for the Russians than the maintenance of earlier privileges or rights on the land. 93 Slightly later that year the question of mulk land was considered in the newly-created Zarafshan okrug, where it provoked a correspondence with Tashkent that lasted three years.
General Abramov estimated that there were 70,000 tanābs of mulk land in the Samarqand division, 94 plus an unknown quantity in Katta-Kurgan. Almost from the beginning, Abramov linked the question of mulk to the question of how to deal with the khwāja lineages of Turkestan.
He reported to von Kaufman on the existence of a category of land: Otherwise the private property of independent individuals acquired by purchase. One out of four of the owners have documents from the father of the current Amir, others from the previous owners of the property. The income from this land does not go to the treasury, but into the hands of khwājas and other private individuals. 95 He estimated that these taxes could potentially be worth 20,000 roubles a year, but that the Russian administration had no idea to whom they were being paid. Abramov added that the class of khwājas who were the main beneficiaries of mulk land were a hostile influence that needed to be contained. these private individuals [who enjoy their land] on unknown grounds, without paying tax, especially khwājas […] are trying to gather and arm the people against the Government, as they did under the Bukharan administration, -when they were the leaders of the popular movements, as for instance Omar-Khwāja of Dahbid, who agitated the town of Samarqand, at the time when we took that town. There is no doubt that others were not far behind, often bearing the title of khwāja illegitimately. There is no way of verifying their antecedents. Because of all this cossack elder Serov 96 proposes levying taxes on mulk land on the usual basis. 97 The Bukharan historian Sāmī's account offers independent confirmation of Īshān ʿUmar Khan Makhdūm-i Aʿẓamī's contribution to the attack on the Russian garrison of the Samarqand citadel in 1868, 98 but even without this concrete example of the threat presented by the khwājas and their influence over the people, given the prevailing Russian attitude towards Islamic elites, it is unlikely that they would ever have considered trying to make use of these sacred lineages, as the British did in Sindh. 99 Abramov suggested that the revoking of their taxation privileges might just be a temporary measure until their rights were established one way or the other. Von

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Kaufman was becoming increasingly impatient however, complaining that since Samarqand had been taken in June 1868 too little revenue had been collected in the Zarafshan okrug, totalling just 6,033 roubles to August 1868. 100 In August 1868 Abramov wrote indignantly to von Kaufman that "Some of the natives, receiving the revenues from mulk, do not even understand the meaning of the term mulk" 101 and argued that in the vast majority of cases titles to mulk land were fraudulent. Von Kaufman's response gives a fascinating insight into the rigid Orientalist interpretation of religious status which informed his thinking on this question. I suggest to Your Excellency that, apart from the documents giving them the right to use mulks, you also demand from those khwājas with pretensions to the income from mulk land their genealogical documents, which will then leave no doubts as to the descent of the khwājas from Hanafie 102 and of the Sayyids from Fatima. For the analysis of these documents you should appoint a commission from amongst the ʿulamā of Samarqand, under the chairmanship of an inquiring and able officer or chinovnik. Those who are recognised as being legal sayyids or khwājas, should be placed on a special list, with a description of the size of the mulk ascribed to them and the quantity of money demanded from it. This list Your Excellency should present to me for the authorisation of any disbursement from taxes collected to be returned to sayyids and khwājas. 103 unpublished researches seem to have been extensively relied upon in the earliest years after the conquest, so he is the most likely source of von Kaufman's sudden and unexpected expertise in Islamic genealogy. 106 Von Kaufman was quite well aware that as far as the local population was concerned the definition of a sayyid or khwāja was a good deal less rigid than that which the Russians were now insisting upon, but this was evidently of little concern to him: Individuals-bearing the title sayyid or khwāja because of descent from some holy man or other, or using this form of address because the people gave the title of sayyid or khwāja to a few generations of some family or other-do not, it would seem, need to enjoy freedom from taxation, unlike those who bear the title of sayyid or khwāja in the strict Mussulman sense. 107 If Abramov ever did establish the genealogical commission envisaged by von Kaufman, something unclear from this file, then the khwājas of the Zarafshan Valley were either unable or unwilling to provide it with a set of nasab-nāmas that would satisfy the Russian authorities -nor, one suspects, was it ever intended that they should succeed in doing so. Abramov and his fellowofficers evidently came to the conclusion that khwāja claims to special status and separate descent did not need to be taken seriously so far as landholding and taxation were concerned. By Khwājas, as is well known, are descendants of Muḥammad through the female line. All those who consider themselves to be khwājas, are obliged to have a document confirming their descent. In the okrug there are no real khwājas: all those who call themselves khwājas are impostors; nevertheless, once they have been called khwājas, they try, so far as their strength and ability suffices, to confirm their titles. Thus, they give blessings to the people, do not enter into marriage with ordinary mortals, at tamāshās [entertainments] strive to occupy the most honoured place, say little; and if they do speak, then try to turn the conversation towards their ancestors. They are all in large part stupid; they conceal their tribal origin, not calling themselves either Uzbek, or Tajik, but simply "khwāja", and assert that khwājas are a separate tribe. 108 Even if they had been able to furnish Abramov and von Kaufman with nasab-nāmas of the kind which related Kazakh descent groups were still producing in the 19 th and 20 th centuries, 109 it seems highly unlikely, given Abramov's hostile remarks about their influence, that this would have been used as a reason for preserving their tax privileges. On the contrary the very real authority which they clearly wielded, whether sanctioned by written genealogies or not, was much more likely to be seen by the Russians as a compelling reason for seeking to reduce their status. Other documents outlining rights to mulk land which might have satisfied the Governor-General also turned out to be few and far between. In August 1869 Colonel Nikolaev's Commission on the land question had concluded that in cases where there was no documentary proof of mulk status, all tax privileges would be removed and the land would be considered amlāk, 'state land'; this seems to have been based at least in part on the information with which Abramov supplied them from the Zarafshan Valley. 110 The correspondence between Kaufman and Abramov suggests that they were seeking reasons for the abolition of the tax privileges attached to mulk land because they thought the income from it helped to sustain dangerous religious elites: a legal justification would not prove hard to find.

IV. A Legal Fig-leaf?
In September 1869 a group of landowners from Samarqand claimed that they were being deprived of their rents from the chairikeri 111 who farmed their land, because the state was now levying taxes on it: All of us gave our plots-mulks, bought by us for money, assembled through much sacrifice-in rent to farmers and they carry out work, from the receipts they paid us out of four batmans, 112 one batman, and the other three batmans they used themselves. This order (law) has existed since ancient times; none of our rulers have interfered with it, and we cultivated this land ourselves. From last year up until the present time, the sarkārs have been using that, which ought to be used by us, the remainder is used by the farmers themselves, and nothing comes to us. Having lost both land and money, we have become poor. We 108 A.D. Grebenkin, "Melkie Narodnosti Zarafshanskogo Okruga." Russkii Turkestan: Sbornik, Izdannyi po povodu Politekhniyaeskoi Vystavki, vyp.2 ed. V. N. Trotskii (Moscow: Univ. Tip., 1872): 117-8; I owe this reference to DeWeese, "Foreword": 23. 109 A group of six of these are described, published and translated in Islamization and Sacred Lineages in Central Asia: 51-276. 110 Savitskii,Pozemel'nyi vopros: 23. 111 The Russified term for the Tajik Choryakkor or sharecropper. Although, as the name suggests, conventionally they paid their landlords a quarter share of the crop, in practice it could vary considerably, and sometimes it was more than this. See N.N. Ershov, Sel'skoe khozyaistvo Leninabadskogo raiona Tadzhikskoi SSR pered Oktyabr'skoi Revolyutsiei (Stalinabad: Izd. AN TadzhSSR, 1960): 50-1. 112 A measure of weight, which according to Dal's dictionary was equivalent to 12 poods (432 lbs) in Bukhara.
have turned a few times with petitions to our hākims and have received the answer that the Senior Governor is coming who will return your plots, and gladden you. […] Now you have happily come into your domain, and have taken into your own hands all the affairs and hearts of us inhabitants. We turned to you about this matter, but you would not permit us and, leaving, now leave us poor ones with uneasy hearts. We await this from your Excellency: that you, in cherishing us, poor ones, and showing us, the inhabitants, your love-restore to us the ancient law and return us our mulks, so that we may not lose our welfare and property, and we would pray for the White Tsar and the Senior Governor-Lord, and occupy ourselves with our own affairs. 113 There are a number of interesting questions which arise from this document. It dates from before any official reform of the fiscal administration had taken place, and interestingly it appears that the Russians were still using officials inherited from the previous regime to collect kharāj. The petitioners refer to the taxes being collected by sarkārs, something which was certainly possible as in 1870 the Russians were still using Bukharan-era revenue officials. This suggests that what was intended to be largely a fiscal measure, namely the removal of tax privileges from mulk land, could, in cases where the land was let out to sharecroppers, lead to the nominal owners losing all effective title over it, as their right to collect a tithe from those who farmed it had now been usurped by the state. It is possible that, as the petition claimed, these mulkdārs paid no taxes before the conquest, but that now Russian-backed sarkārs were collecting the taxes on their plots, and collecting them directly from the sharecroppers. The sharecroppers then refused to give the share due by them to the owner of the mulk because they had already given that as land-tax. This would only be the case, however, if the mulk had been totally exempted from land-tax before the conquest, and it is perfectly possible that this was not so and that mulk owners, knowing that this was what the Russians thought, were trying on a sob-story to be exempted from taxes they had previously been liable to. 114 Unfortunately I have no means of knowing how common such cases were, and in any case petitions only ever offer a very one-sided view of any dispute.
What is more certain is that this plea provoked Abramov into writing a lengthy disquisition on the origin and legitimacy of mulk land in order to explain to von Kaufman why he did not think the pleas of these mulk owners should be countenanced, in which he offered the following conclusion: The origin of mulks, it seems, was laid down by Amir Tamerlane. Legend has it, that Timur, needing some cash, after advice from his counsellors, sold into private hands a portion of Government land, with the right of hereditary ownership and freedom from taxes in the future. 115 113 Translation of a petition for the attention of the Starshii Gubernator (presumably von Kaufman) from 'some poor dwellers of Samarkand,' 18.09.1869, TsGARUz, f. I-1, op. 14, d. 28, ll. 13-14. In Russian Rule in Samarkand: 109 I misinterpreted this petition as coming from the sharecroppers themselves. 114 I am grateful to Beatrice Penati for this suggestion. 115 Abramov to von Kaufman, 22.04.1870, TsGARUz, f. I-1, op. 14, d. 28, l. 17ob. 27 Such, he argued, were the purest and most legal type of mulk. However, Abramov claimed that almost none of Samarqand's mulk owners had the necessary documentation to substantiate their claims. Too many mulks had changed hands by sale too many times, which in his view invalidated them altogether: "There are no mulks in first-hand ownership, none even in the hands of direct descendants of the first and therefore legal owner of the mulk. All of them have been re-sold through perhaps hundreds of hands and are being re-sold all the time." 116 A. P. Khoroshkhin, a Ural Cossack officer who served in Samarqand at this time, tells a very similar story of Bukharan amirs "sometime in the distant past" returning from campaign in urgent need of money, and alienating the right to collect taxes on particular plots of land to powerful qāżīs, khwājas and sayyids. These rights were supposed to be supported by documents, and only to pass by descent from father to son. Now, however: All the evidence shows that there are no grounds for considering such lands to be mulk, that is the property of private individuals, still less now because the latest pretenders have nothing in common either by blood or background with those on whom the Amir at some point bestowed the right to collect taxes. At the present time, furthermore, when we demand the original documents from them, it turns out that they struggle to produce them, because it would appear that they do not have them. 117 The village of Saidan in the Aforinkent volost' seems to have acted as a sort of test-case for Russian policy towards mulk privileges. Abramov's own land commission, which began work in 1871, found that here most mulk owners had lost (or were concealing) their documents and could not prove descent from the original grantees of the mulks they claimed to own. Abramov's commission obtained its information on the existing tax-burden from an amlākdār's register (daftar or tetrad'), suggesting that these officials were collecting kharāj on all forms of land there. 118 This register also shows that by 1871, at least in some places, a uniform level of kharāj was being levied on both amlāk and mulk land, at a rate of 1/5 of the crop. 119 In 1872 the question had still not been officially settled, but in practice it seems that kharāj was consistently being levied from mulk land at the same rate as from amlāk, despite the protests of owners that it infringed the privileges they had enjoyed before the conquest. Abramov's comments to von Kaufman when the mulkdārs in the large town of Peishambe petitioned against being taxed make this clear enough: he stated that these were simply expressions of discontent by the richer classes of society who had previously evaded their fair share of tax, and now did everything they could to encourage and organise petitions against the reform of the taxation system amongst the 28 poorer classes. Whilst suggesting the question was still open, he clearly also had little time for the legal claims that certain types of mulk should be exempt from taxation.
The former owners of mulk land, founded on documents some of which are in their hand, and some of which in Bukhara-deem the demanding of taxes from them an unlawful action, and petitioned to be freed entirely from taxes. […] The pretensions of the owners of mulks that tax demands on them are unlawful are widespread. The degree to which such pretensions are justified-is a question which is unresolved for the time being. 120 Although in principle the Commission's draft plan on the land question recognised mulk-i ḥurr-i khāliṣ as private property "in cases where it has not been occupied by outsiders and is in the direct use of the owners", it made no mention of other forms of mulk, or indeed of the continuation of the tax privileges attached to it. Savitskii suggests that the commission's eventual recommendations set the burden of documentary proof so high as effectively to deprive mulk owners of any possibility of proving either their proprietary rights or exemption from taxation. 121 Three years later the explanatory appendix to the temporary Turkestan statute, which was probably summarising the commission's findings, acknowledged that under Bukharan rule the loss or disappearance of documents had not meant the automatic revocation of tax privileges on mulk land because everyone knew its extent and to whom it belonged.
However, it added that now mulk owners would be obliged to pay the full amount to the treasury unless they could produce documents entitling them to exemption or reduction. 122 Whether such demands for documentary proof sprang from a genuine Russian belief that there was a 'pure' Islamic judicial notion of rights in mulk which had become corrupted over time, or whether (perhaps more likely) this was simply a cynical excuse for removing awkward tax privileges and undermining a troublesome and untrustworthy group of elite intermediaries whom they no longer wanted and suspected of being religious 'fanatics,' there seems little doubt that the view of mulk expressed above was far more rigid and legalistic than the reality. It is still unclear to me whence the idea arose that mulks could not be transferred by sale, or why the Russians would not accept more recent documents from Bukharan rulers as proof of the right to exemption from taxes. Possibly they confused mulk with the status of tarkhān, a temporary grant of tax exemption, although there are no references to it in Russian documents. Whatever the 29 precise reason, they quickly decided that the institution of mulk as they encountered it was corrupted and illegal. 123 The new tax regime in the Zarafshan Valley would not become fully operational until 1875 after the completion of a rudimentary agricultural survey, and the thorny question of land rights would only be settled under the new Turkestan statute of 1886 (and not fully even then). In practice however, well before this date the Russians had substantially altered the taxation system: they had abolished the office of amlākdār and thus the practice of carrying out fresh annual assessments for kharāj, abolished the tax privileges formerly enjoyed by the owners of mulk land, and, at least in theory, severely weakened the property rights of mulk owners. The long-term social and legal consequences of this policy are more difficult to establish.

V. Abandoning the Aristocracy?
Despite the protests of some officials that this represented a gross misreading of Islamic law, Russian legislation would formally refuse to recognise that any kind of mulk land in Central Asia constituted absolute private property, and instead asserted that all land in Turkestan other than waqf belonged to the state. The discontinuities with the situation before the conquest were, however, less severe than this would suggest, largely because there were limits to what state ownership of land actually meant in practical terms. 124 Under the 1886 Turkestan statute the Russians chose to recognise, if not full property rights, then at least effective occupation of the land by Turkestani cultivators with full rights of sale and inheritance subject to pre-existing Islamic law and custom. 125 Only land which was left idle could be assumed by the state, and in sedentary regions this happened very rarely, if at all: on the contrary, peasants seem to have been able to occupy and cultivate wasteland and acquire effective ownership rights over it more 123 Savitskii suggests that on questions of Islamic law the Russians were relying on the work of the Orientalist Nikolai Egorovich Tornau, Izlozhenie Nachal Musul'manskogo Zakonovedeniya (St Pb.: Tip. Sobst. E. I. V. Kants., 1850). This may have been true in the case of waqf, but Tornau only makes very brief reference to mulk, and the context is the ownership of slaves, rather than land. Tornau, Izlozhenie: 352-3; Savitskii, Pozemel'nyi vopros: 22; Ekaterina Pravilova also notes the importance of Tornau's work (E. Pravilova, "The Property of Empire. Islamic law and Russian Agrarian Policy in Transcaucasia and Turkestan." Kritika 12/2 [2011]: 361-6): but goes on to assert that the work of French orientalists and translations of the Ottoman Law Code were the decisive influences on Russian thinking, which was not the case in Turkestan in the 1870s, when the most important debates took place. Instead, as we have seen, it was the work of home-grown orientalists-Khanykov, Geins, Kun and Rostislavov-together with information obtained from local informants and pre-existing prejudices about Muslim 'fanaticism,' which proved most important. 124 P. Sartori, "Colonial legislation meets Sharī'a: Muslims' Land Rights in Russian Turkestan." Central Asian Survey 29/1 (2010): 43-60. 125 Article 255 of the statute refers to this as zemli amlyakovye. PSZ: sob.3, vol. VI, no. 3814 12th June 1886, 338; Beatrice Penati has argued that it effectively constitutes a formal renvoi to Islamic law on the question of property rights in her "Swamps, Sorghum and Saxauls": 61.

30
or less at will. 126 Ekaterina Pravilova is thus correct in stating that the colonial project to extend the state domain in Central Asia proved to be a 'bust': the principle was asserted, but it was impossible to put into practice, not because of opposition from St Petersburg, but because of local conditions. 127 So far as we know, land transactions continued to be regulated by the qāżīs' courts which the Russians had preserved, although changes in legal practice did start to emerge. 128 In nomadic and semi-nomadic regions, the claim to state ownership of land would come to form the legal basis for the expropriation of land for Russian settlement, and was thus of considerable significance, although even this was challenged by some Tsarist officials, most notably Count Pahlen. 129 However, it was never used systematically to oust settled cultivators and create large, state-owned tracts of land for colonisation or cotton plantations. In sedentary areas with dense population, at least, the claim to state ownership of land in Turkestan remained largely a dead letter, although this situation was under a concerted challenge from the newlycreated Glavnoe Upravlenie Zemleustroistva i Zemledelie by the early 1900s. 130 The abolition of what the Russians referred to generically as mulk was thus primarily a fiscal measure, rather than an abrogation of property rights. Those who had formerly enjoyed the privilege of lighter taxation or none at all, had now lost it. It thus proceeded from the same concerns which caused the Russians to abolish the system of land-tax collection based upon the amlākdār-namely, the desire to simplify revenue collection, and to undermine Bukharan-era elites. The Russians made no attempt to preserve or create a class of Muslim landowners and rentiers in Turkestan who could act as agents of the colonial state. Instead, they often claimed that a landed aristocracy as such did not exist in the Turkestan, at least not as it would be understood in Europe: General Staff Officer L. F. Kostenko confidently asserted, (perhaps following Alexander Burnes), that "in Central Asia an aristocracy and in general a privileged class does not exist." 131 V. P. Nalivkin also wrote that there was nothing that could be described 126 In 1884, for instance the Nachal'nik of the Katta-Kurgan otdel reported to the head of the Zarafshan Okrug that not only did the natives in his district enjoy de-facto ownership not only of land they already farmed (which they could buy, sell and inherit "in accordance with customary rights", regulated by the qāżīs) but that they seemed automatically to acquire the same rights over any wastelands which they occupied and cultivated, even though these nominally belonged to the Government: 23.08.1884, TsGARUz, f. I-5, op. 1, d. 893, ll. 22-24ob. 127  31 as a landed aristocracy in Khoqand; 132 but this is open to question. In fact these seem to be ex post facto judgements delivered after the Russians had decided they had no interest in working through landowners, senior Bukharan officials or other 'aristocratic' or pseudo-aristocratic intermediaries. Instead they would attempt to create a class of petty officials who owed their influence, such as it was, to their positions within urban and village hierarchies, and increasingly the access they had to the power of the Tsarist state.
Why did this happen? The correspondence between von Kaufman and Abramov reveals that they believed that a substantial proportion of those landowners claiming tax privileges in the Zarafshan Valley were sayyids or khwājas: the idea that lower taxation under the Muslim regimes was closely linked to high religious status was far from wholly erroneous, but what is more important in this context is that the Russians thought this was the case. 133 Whilst they were wary of interfering directly with waqf, they decided that mulk land could and should be tackled more aggressively, not least because the religious lineages which they believed it sustained were more dangerous than the 'organized' Islam of the mosque or madrasa. In his posthumously-published draft for a new Turkestan statute von Kaufman recalled that immediately after the conquest the native population had had little confidence in Russian authority or justice, and had looked to traditional leaders in the countryside, particularly the ishāns of the Sufi brotherhoods, who were trying to whip them up for a ghazawāt or holy war. 134 Von Kaufman considered the whole population of Turkestan to be fanatical, but its elites, whether political or clerical, particularly so. This helps to explain his refusal to countenance claims to exemption from tax on mulk land, and his use instead of an extremely tendentious reading of Islamic law and custom to dismiss them. Von Kaufman, in common with many other officers in Turkestan, cut his teeth fighting in the Caucasus, a war which in general seems to have deeply coloured Russian attitudes towards Islam, fostered a deep suspicion of all forms of Sufism (or myuridizm, as the Russians called it) and brought about a sea-change in the imperial policy of trying to co-opt local elites. 135 Once a key tactic in securing newly-conquered regions for the Empire, by the latter half of the 19 th century the incorporation of local aristocracies into the Russian nobility had been decisively abandoned. 136 Instead the Russians tried to marginalise pre-existing elites when they created what Ronald Robinson called the 'Non-European foundations of European Imperialism' in Turkestan. They attempted to ensure the loyalty of their agents by choosing people who would owe everything to the Russians, and giving them judicial and tax-collecting powers as qāżīs, volostnye upraviteli and āqsaqāls. Whether they succeeded in this or not is another, more complex question.
Understanding Russian policies and purposes in Turkestan is always a great deal easier than establishing their actual consequences for local society. Certainly as they created their landrevenue system the Russians sought to break the power both of Uzbek tribal elites-represented by the amlākdārs -and of religious elites, namely the sayyids and khwājas who, they believed, were the main beneficiaries of the tax exemptions on mulk land. However, as yet we do not know how far these elites managed to reconstitute themselves within the structures of the fledgling Russian colonial state, and in the offices which it created or adapted. This will require detailed prosopographical study, and may prove difficult even with the extensive use of vernacular sources.