The Red Silk Road: Modernization and the War on Nature

Abstract: The effort to conquer nature through new scientific practices and the quest for transnational scientific knowledge was not unique to Asia.  In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, development in Russian Turkestan modeled U.S. hydrologist and agronomist experiences from the American West and South.  After World War II, these same projects to transform the landscape of Central Asia were taken over by states that claimed to have a new kind of scientific knowledge--this one socialist and uniquely Asian instead of Western.    After the Soviet Union took over the project to develop new farms in Central Asia using properly "socialist" pseudo-science, they marketed and exported the Central Asian experiment as a model of development and the new center of the Red Silk Road.  Their targets for export of this model: South Asia and Southeast Asia.  After 1949, the Chinese Communist Party imported and adapted this model as well in their own war on nature.  This presentation discusses how to weave the concept of the Red Silk Road and the efforts of modernizing states to conquer nature into narratives taught in world history and Asian history surveys.  The case study of the Red Silk Road reveals the ways in which it is useful not just to draw comparisons between modernizing states, but also understand the ways in which their modernizations informed each other and their relationship with the environment.