Joo Yup Lee. The socio political phenomenon of Qazaqlïq (2013)

Joo Yup Lee. The socio political phenomenon of Qazaqlïq in the Eurasian Steppe and the formation of the Qazaq people: a thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Degree. [Toronto, ON]: Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations of University of Toronto, 2013, XII+281 p.

Abstract

This dissertation is concerned with the formation of the Qazaqs in the context of the custom of political vagabondage known as qazaqlïq in post-Mongol Central Eurasia. More specifically, my study addressed the process whereby the Uzbek nomads inhabiting the eastern Dasht-i Qipchaq bifurcated into the Qazaqs and the Shibanid Uzbeks in the sixteenth century in consequence of the qazaqlïq activities led by two rival Chinggisid families: the Urusids and the Abū al-Khairids.

Qazaqlïq, or the qazaq way of life, was a form of political vagabondage that involved escaping from one’s state or tribe, usually from a difficult social or political situation, and living the life of a freebooter in a frontier or other remote region. The custom of political vagabondage was by no means an exclusively post-Mongol Central Eurasian phenomenon. It existed in other places and at other times. However, it was in post-Mongol Central Eurasia that it became a widespread socio-political phenomenon that it came to be perceived by contemporaries as a custom to which they attached the specific term, qazaqlïq.

During the post-Mongol period, the qazaq way of life developed into a well-established political custom whereby political fugitives, produced by the internecine struggles within the Chinggisid states, customarily fled to frontier or other remote regions and became freebooters, who came to be called gazaqs. Such Chinggisid and Timurid leaders as Muhammad Shībānī and Temür became qazaqs before coming to power.

The Qazaqs came into being as a result of the qazaqlïq activities of Jānībeg and Girāy, two great-grandsons of Urus Khan (r. ca. 1368-78), and of Muhammad Shībānī, the grandson of Abū al-Khair Khan (r. ca. 1450-70) that resulted in the division of the Uzbek Ulus into the Qazaqs and the Shibanid Uzbeks in the sixteenth century.

The Tatar and Slavic cossacks (Russian kazak, Ukrainian kozak) who appeared in the Black Sea steppe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were the products of the qazaqlïq, or cossack phenomenon. Significantly, Ukrainian cossackdom led to the formation of the Ukrainian Hetmanate, which eventually contributed to the consolidation of a separate Ukrainian identity.