Long Abstract:

This author-critic forum assembles prominent historians to discuss the significance of: Scott Levi, The Rise and Fall of Khoqand, 1709-1876: Central Asia in the Early Modern World (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017). Beyond its status as the first English-language history of Khoqand, Levi's pathbreaking study is one of the very few monographs on modern Central Asian history to engage the fields of world and environmental history respectively. The work is centered on the Ferghana Valley as a window into questions such as state-building, economic trends, and demography -- all of which reveal Central Asia's place in a rapidly globalizing world and connectedness to adjacent regions. Levi's bold arguments are likely to animate the field for some time to come, and in this forum leading experts in Central Eurasian, Islamic, and environmental history offer critical perspective on the the book's principal interventions.