Colonial Policy, Social Trust, and Economic Resilience: The Long-term Impacts of Imperial Russian Settlement in Southern Kazakhstan

Abstract

Almost every country on the planet has a colonial past as colonizer or colonized. Yet scholars still do not fully understand how differential experiences of colonialism affect social and economic processes in the long-term. In this dissertation, I focus on the impacts of colonialism on two linked outcomes: social trust and rural resilience. How do colonial legacies shape social trust in the long-run? And how does the level and type of social trust present in a community affect the resilience that community will demonstrate in the face of unexpected disasters? I address these two broad research questions by analyzing the politics, economics, and history of Kazakhstan, which experienced settler colonialism under Russian Imperial rule. Bringing to bear a wide variety of data sources, including historical records, surveys, images shared on social media, nighttime lights satellite imagery, and interviews, I find that geographic patterns of social trust in southern Kazakhstan are linked to Imperial Russian policy decisions about colonial settlement. In Almaty oblast, where 19th and early 20th century colonial settlement was relatively intense compared to neighboring Jambyl oblast and was coupled with higher rates of Kazakh land displacement, I find lower rates of social trust in the early 21st century. In particular, Almaty oblast has lower vertical social trust in formal state institutions. Those social trust patterns also map on to variation in rural village resilience after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Communities in Almaty oblast were better able to rebound after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, suggesting that lower vertical trust may be a boon for rural community resilience.