This blog started as a blog about the lives of Thomas and Lucy Atkinson, explorers of Siberia and Central Asia. Thomas Witlam Atkinson travelled to Russia in 1846 where he met Lucy Sherrard Finley, whom he later married. Together they spent almost six years travelling through the remotest parts of southern Siberia, present-day eastern Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Djungaria in northern Xinjiang. Thomas wrote two books about their travels and Lucy also wrote what is one of the earliest travel books by a woman.

My research resulted in a book, South to the Great Steppe: the travels of Thomas and Lucy Atkinson in Eastern Kazakhstan 1847-1852 (First Publishing), published in 2014. Since then I have continued my research into the exploration of the Great Steppe region. In 2020 I published Travellers in the Great Steppe: from the Papal Envoys to the Russian Revolution (Signal Books), which gave a broader history of the steppes, and brought out of obscurity a host of explorers who had travelled through these often desolate and remote regions.

In 2020 I also published Selected Works of Chokan Valikhanov: Pioneering Ethnographer and Historian of the Great Steppe (CUP), which made available for the first time in English the writings of this remarkable man. Then in 2021, together with Marianne Simpson, I published a new edition of Lucy Atkinson’s wonderful book Recollections of Tartar Steppes and their Inhabitants (Signal Books), first published in 1863. Our new introduction provided a mass of biographical data that had not previously been published.

Having published several hundred articles on the Atkinsons on this blog, I have now broadened its remit to cover the history of the exploration of Central Asia and southern Siberia, as well as the history of this vast region, extending back as far as the ancient Scythian/Saka culture that dominated the steppes more than two millenia ago. If you would like to contribute to this project please write to me via this blog or email me at nicholas.fielding@btinternet.com

Nick Fielding