[Book Review] Hofmeister, U 2019, Die Buerde des Weissen Zaren: Russische Vorstellungen einer imperialien Zivilisierungsmission in Zentralasien (The White Tsar's Burden: Russian Ideas of an Imperial Civilizing Mission in Central Asia)

Abstract

A review of Ulrich Hofmeister's 2019 monograph 'Die Buerde des Weissen Zaren: Russische Vorstellungen einer imperialien Zivilisierungsmission in Zentralasien' (English translation of the title: 'The White Tsar's Burden: Russian Ideas of an Imperial Civilizing Mission in Central Asia'). Hofmeister interrogates 'Russian-language debates about Central Asia' (present-day southern Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan) from the region's conquest by the Russian Empire in the 1860s to the Bolshevik coup in 1917, using Foucauldian discourse analysis to illuminate 'the forms taken by the concept of the civilizing mission under differing historical and ideological conditions' (16). Show more