Communicating Colonial Space: How Imperial Discourse Produced “Surplus Land” in the Kazakh Steppe

This article examines how Russian-language press debate and official statistical reporting produced, disputed, and operationalized “surplus land” in the Kazakh Steppe and adjoining Turkestan territories. It analyzes 43 items reproduced in the Turkestanskii sbornik : 37 newspaper and publicistic texts and six Resettlement Administration studies published between 1885 and 1915. Rather than treating the archive as a unified imperial voice, it distinguishes advocacy, regional criticism, and official calculation. Claims made availability plausible; counterclaims exposed instability; statistical practices converted disputed assumptions into surveys, pastoral norms, tables, maps, and calculable surpluses. A comparison with Port Phillip in 1835 distinguishes Crown authorization of possession from the calculation of pastoral requirements. Communicative legibility is a general process of making representations actionable across genres. Its colonial configuration here joined imperial authority, the subordination of Indigenous territorial claims, and settler allocation, rather than constituting a mechanism exclusive to colonial governance.