The Sufis and the Great Houses: How an Islamic Pious Endowment Adapted to Merchant Encroachment

The Qing reincorporation of Xinjiang (East Turkestan) after 1877 involved the close collaboration of a merchant network from the port city of Tianjin, who were meant to fund extensive “land reclamation” projects. Those merchants took advantage of a lend-lease system to funnel money from the provincial government while capturing agricultural surplus in the form of debt. Their newfound power, as well as ecological changes brought about by reclamation, threatened the status of Islamic pious endowments (waqf, pl. awqāf), who captured surplus from the same areas through rent. This talk explores how one ancient Sufi lineage attempted to recast their pious endowment in the form of a Chinese-style merchant network, leading to a conflict of competing economic elites that came to the head in the 1910s. Their story reflects a broader set of issues related to aridization, enclosure, dispossession, and the emergence of a labor market. From this perspective, we can trace the dominance of a form of Chinese capitalism in Xinjiang to a specific set of historical actors and forces, and so to some degree decenter “the West” in the story of the emergence of capitalistic phenomena.