The Samarkand cotton mill that very nearly was: history and historiography

This paper offers a rebuttal to the long-standing myth whereby there was a law that prohibited the establishment of mills to transform locally Tsarist Central Asia's cotton, by reconstructing the story of the attempts of a Bukharan Jew, Pinkhas Abramov, who tried hard to establish one such mill close to Samarkand, until the 1917 revolution put an end to his hopes. On the basis of archival documents from St. Petersburg and Tashkent, one can identify three obstacles Abramov had to face: first, the complexity of land and water rights combined in the colony with structural issues in the empire's regulation of corporate ownership; second, antisemitism among officers at all levels made it practically hard for Abramov to exert his rights as a Bukharan Jew (which were different from those of Jews in Russia's Pale of Settlement); third, skepticism and opposition among the Muslim population in the designated area. This story is an interesting case-study for the history of capitalism and industrialisation in Tsarist Turkestan, whilst its historiography reveals a chain of misunderstandings or ideological manipulations of the available evidence.