The Governor-Generalship of Russian Turkestan is established under General Konstantin Petrovich Von Kaufman, with its headquarters at Tashkent, in 1867.

Russian interference in Central Asia had been minimal throughout the 1860s, leaving native ways of life intact and local government structures in place for the most part.

With the conquest of Turkestan after 1865 and the consequent securing of the frontier, the Russians have gradually expropriated large parts of the steppe and given these lands to Russian farmers, who begin to arrive in large numbers.

This process is initially limited to the northern fringes of the steppe.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Qing Dynasty had made several campaigns to conquer the Dzungar Mongols.

In the meantime, they had incorporated parts of Central Asia into the Chinese Empire.

Internal turmoil has largely halted Chinese expansion in the nineteenth century.

Yakub Beg had led a rebellion in 1867 that had seen Kashgar declaring its independence as the Taiping and Nian Rebellions in the heartland of the Empire prevented the Chinese from reasserting their control.

Instead, the Russians have expanded, annexing the Chu and Ili Valleys and the city of Kuldja from the Chinese Empire.

Russia annexes the Transcaspian region in the course of a campaign led by Generals Mikhail Annenkov and Mikhail Skobelev from 1881 to 1885.

Ashkhabad (taken from Persia), ...

...Merv and ...

...Pendjeh (taken from Afghanistan) all come under Russian control.

Russia’s conquest of Central Asia had been prompted by almost purely military concerns, but Turkestan has come to play a reasonably important economic role within the Russian Empire in the 1870s and 1880s.

Cotton had shot up in price in the 1860s because of the American Civil War,  becoming an increasingly important commodity in the region, although its cultivation is on a much lesser scale than it will be during the Soviet period.

The cotton trade has led to improvements: the Transcaspian Railway from Krasnovodsk to ..

...Samarkand and ...

...Tashkent, and the Trans-Aral Railway from Orenburg to Tashkent have been constructed.

In the long term, the development of a cotton monoculture will render Turkestan dependent on food imports from Western Siberia, and the Turkestan-Siberia Railway will already be planned when the First World War breaks out.

Russian rule still remains distant from the local populace, mostly concerning itself with the small minority of Russian inhabitants of the region.

The local Muslims are not considered full Russian citizens.

They do not have the full privileges of Russians, but nor do they have the same obligations, such as military service.

The Tsarist regime leaves substantial elements of the previous regimes (such as Muslim religious courts) intact, and local self-government at the village level is quite extensive.

Russian expansion is halted in 1887 when Russia and Great Britain delineate the northern border of Afghanistan.

Bukhara and ...

...the Khanate of Khiva remain quasi-independent, but are essentially protectorates along the lines of the Princely States of British India.