Brushed Aside by Outside Progress: From Relative Decline to Colonization

This chapter deals with the long and uneven process of economic decline of CA and the SR, following the collapse of the Mongol Empire and a temporary recovery in the fifteenth century. The latter had benefited from new wide-ranging, although extremely violent, empire formation by Tamerlane, followed by his Timurid successors. From the early sixteenth century, increasing pressure was exerted on overland trade by European seaborne competition, following the discovery of the maritime route to India and China by the Portuguese. Meanwhile one can speak of a short-lived “mercantilist” renaissance of SR trade in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, featuring the simultaneous rule of strong political leaders (from Muscovite Russia to Mughal India) who carried out economic reforms and largely maintained peace. This was followed by renewed political destabilization, the unraveling of economic reforms, the intensification of maritime competition, and the spread of religious dogmatism. The use of artillery put an end to the political and economic power of nomadic empires in the eighteenth century. The “last glimmer” of the SR (around the beginning of the nineteenth century) brought a lease of life for what remained of traditional trade in the landlocked, newly isolated C Asian space difficult to access for modern European shipping technologies. Bukharan merchants played an important role at this stage. The mid-nineteenth century finally featured European (Russian) colonial conquest and the transformation of CA into a raw material appendage of the industrial world economy.