Information and Empire in Central Asia: Anglo-Russian Rivalry and the Making of an Imperial Information Order, 1834–1908

The Great Game is conventionally understood as a geopolitical rivalry between the Russian and British Empires over Central Asia. This article reinterprets it as an asymmetrical struggle over the production, circulation, and governance of information. It examines primary materials reproduced in fifteen volumes of the Turkestanskii sbornik (Turkestan Collection), a curated multivolume compilation of printed material, including newspapers, travel narratives, parliamentary debates, military journals, economic studies, maps, and diplomatic publications dating from the 1830s to 1908. Combining historical source analysis with comparative discourse analysis, the study distinguishes five overlapping phases: exploratory intelligence and geographical knowledge (1834–1864); territorial expansion and mediated rivalry (1865–1873); intensified newspaper and expert competition (1874–1885); commercial, cartographic, and infrastructural consolidation (1886–1906); and the post-Convention reorientation towards information governance (1907–1908). The comparison does not treat Britain and Russia as equivalent imperial formations. British practices were shaped principally by the defence of India, maritime reach, indirect frontier management, and liberal-commercial claims, whereas Russian practices accompanied contiguous conquest, administrative incorporation, state-sponsored commerce, and settler-colonial projects. The article develops the concept of an imperial information order to describe the contested relations among media, knowledge practices, infrastructures, and institutions through which Central Asia was rendered strategically knowable and politically governable. It thereby connects the history of the Great Game to comparative imperial history while demonstrating that common media forms could serve substantially different imperial projects.