From saddles to harrows: adoption of agriculture under the Russian peasant colonization in Kazakhstan

The principal objective of this study is to understand the influence of the massive in-migration of peasants on the adoption of agriculture by the nomadic population, the role of socio-economic factors and environmental conditions in this process basing on the historical data from the Northern Kazakhstan, end of XIX – early XX cc.
The main hypothesis is that the arrival of migrants had a considerable impact on the autochthone nomadic society. On the one hand it destabilized the equilibrium of the functioning of the nomadic society within the ecological zone of semi-arid steppes and rendered difficult practicing the nomadic herding; on the other hand it favoured the encounter between the nomads and the sedentaries, induced a learning process and the subsequent adoption of the new technology.
This study benefits from a unique detailed data set coming from the materials of the first statistical survey of the steppe areas of Kazakhstan.
The main funding is that the proximity to the Russian settlements matters for the agriculture adoption by the Kazakh economies, even after controlling for socio-economic and environmental factors. Even within the environment favourable for practicing agriculture, those Kazakh economies that are closer to the Russian settlements choose to specialize in agriculture.