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- Convenors:
-
Ali Igmen
(California State University, Long Beach)
Nurten Kilic-Schubel (Kenyon College)
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- Theme:
- HIS
- Location:
- Posvar 3610
- Start time:
- 27 October, 2018 at
Time zone: America/New_York
- Session slots:
- 1
Long Abstract:
The papers on this panel present new approaches to the study of Central Asian history from the 17th to the 19th century. Employing both new source bases and innovative methodological approaches to previously studied sources, these papers explore a series of interlocking themes including causality, sovereignty and hegemony within the political, social and religious history of early-modern Central Asia.
In his paper, Scott Levi examines afresh the causes of the eighteenth century crisis in the Khanate of Bukhara. Moving beyond the overwhelming focus on the decline of the overland trade offered in older historiography, Levi presents an innovative and multi-causal explanation for the weakening of the Khanate beginning in the late 17th century and its eventual collapse in the early 18th century. James Pickett's paper explores the largely overlooked history of the city of Shahrisabz from the 17th to the 19th century. Pickett's paper examines the means by which Persian chroniclers sought to obscure the status of Shahrisabz as an autonomous city-state and to write it into submission to Bukhara. Pickett pursues a non-hegemonic reading of hegemonic Persian writing in order to recover the history of Shahrisabz and the complex network of sovereignty in which it resided.
Daniel Beben's paper examines a unique genre of religious literature that appeared among the Ismailis of the Badakhshan region of Central Asia in the 19th century, namely a series of hagiographical narratives concerning the legendary saint of Turkestan, Ahmad Yasavi, in which Yasavi is imaginatively transformed into a purveyor of Ismaili doctrine. Beben's paper explores how these narratives sought to re-envision the sacred history of the Ismailis within the evolving political and social environment of Central Asia in the 19th century, in which new groups sought to lay anti-hegemonic claims to established religious traditions within the region. Finally, Alexander Morrison's paper offers a new approach to the use of local Central Asian sources for the study of the Russian conquest of the region in the second half of the 19th century. While previous scholarship has relied almost exclusively on Russian sources for the study of the conquest, Morrison's paper examines the portrayal of these events in the local historiography of Central Asia, finding in these sources unique perspectives on both the experience of the conquests and the causes behind the Russian military successes.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Daniel Beben (Nazarbayev University)
Paper long abstract:
The rise of the Khanate of Khoqand in the 18th century led to a sweeping realignment of the political and social map of Central Asia. The rulers of Khoqand developed relationships with previously marginalized peoples in the mountainous territories adjoining the Ferghana Valley. Among these was the territory of Shughnan, the majority of whose population consists of adherents to the minority Ismaili Shiʿi Muslim community. The Ferghana Valley under the rule of Khoqand became a magnet for Shughnanis and other peoples from peripheral mountain regions beginning in the 18th century, first as traders and later, in the first decade of the 19th century, as a critical source of military labor. These troops, known as the Ghalcha, performed a key role in a number of campaigns waged by the Khoqand ruler ʿAlim Khan against Bukhara and into the southern regions of the Qazaq Steppe along the Syr Darya River. It was likely during this period that Ismailis among the Ghalcha troops came into contact with both oral and written traditions concerning the legendary Central Asian Sufi figure Ahmad Yasavi, whose renown is particularly strong among communities along the Syr Darya region.
Subsequently, a body of textual works connected with Ahmad Yasavi, including genealogical and literary materials, were developed and circulated among the Ismailis of Badakhshan, which displayed an imaginative transformation of this figure into an Ismaili missionary and a purveyor of Ismaili doctrine. While this body of narrative materials has previously received some brief attention (mostly in an effort to dispute the historicity of the claim to Ahmad Yasavi's status as an Ismaili missionary), so far it has not been subject to any critical analysis or efforts to trace its origins or its significance amongst the Ismailis of Badakhshan. In this paper I will assess this body of material from two interrelated vantage points. First, I examine it as an artifact of the social and political environment of 19th century Central Asia, and particularly of the new trajectories of social contact that resulted from the rise of Khoqand. Second, I analyze them in terms of the religious meaning they had for Ismaili communities. I suggest that these narratives served in part as a means of addressing certain social and religious tensions that emerged within Ismaili communities in the early 19th century as a consequence of this new contact environment.
Alexander Morrison (University of Oxford)
Paper long abstract:
One of the principal challenges facing a historian of the Russian conquest of Central Asia (ca.1830 - 1900) is dealing with the massive imbalances in the source base. Russian sources, published and archival, are enormously abundant, including the minutes and memoranda of decision-making committees, chains of correspondence regarding logistics, campaign reports and later memoirs. While their perspective is far from uniform, they rarely reflect on what it was like to be on the receiving end of Russian campaigns of conquest, or the experience of colonial subjugation. A partial corrective to this can be found in the historiography of Khiva, Bukhara and Khoqand. Some of these chronicles contain vivid accounts of battles, and laments for lost independence or the humiliation of 'the people of Islam'. While they largely reflect the perspective of clerical elites, and thus are not exactly voices 'from below', they unintentionally reveal why resistance to the Russian advance was so ineffective. This paper will examine passages from Bukharan, Khoqandi and Khivan chronicles to show how they are far more concerned with internal political struggles and score-settling than with the looming Russian threat, which appears largely as a form of external chastisement for the chroniclers' enemies.
Scott Levi (Ohio State University)
Paper long abstract:
Until recently, studies of Central Asian history that address the period between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries have tended to portray the region as isolated, disengaged, and pushed to the margins of the rapidly globalizing early modern world. Some continue to advocate for just such an interpretation. Efforts to explain this downward turn remain focused on the presumed collapse of Central Asia's historical role in overland Eurasian trade and the assumption that the resulting economic isolation not only undermined the Bukharan Khanate, but caused the region as a whole to suffer a civilizational decline. Recent work by researchers in multiple fields of history now clearly demonstrates that Central Asia's mediatory role in transregional trade continued throughout the early modern era, and that in some measurable ways it actually increased.
That is not to say that early modern Central Asians did not suffer political and economic crises or that, in the early eighteenth century, the Bukharan Khanate did not fall into decline. These points are well documented in the historical sources, and they are presented quite clearly in the secondary literature. However, in this paper, I argue that the actual causal factors propelling the Bukharan crisis have remained obscure. In an effort to resolve that problem, this paper will present a new and multifaceted explanation for the weakening of the Bukharan Khanate in the late seventeenth century, its fall into a state of deepening crisis during the early eighteenth century, and its utter collapse in the wake of the Persian invasions of the region in 1737 and 1740.
James Pickett (University of Pittsburgh)
Paper long abstract:
Nadir Shah Afshar's invasion of Central Asia in the mid-eighteenth century was a death knell for the already weakened empires of the steppe that preceded him. What followed was an era of fractured, competing polities throughout the region. The three khanates of Khoqand, Bukhara, and Khiva are the most well known, but this paper focuses on the lesser-known polity of Shahrisabz. This city-state was has long been a historical footnote, widely regarded as an unruly "province in rebellion" plaguing its more powerful overlords in Bukhara during the 17th through late 19th centuries. In fact, it was an autonomous city-state in its own right, and the mechanisms through which it has been written into submission in the historiography reveal much about historical methodology and premodern logics of sovereignty. To recover Shahrisabz's story, this study pursues a non-hegemonic reading of hegemonic Persian writing (a strategy more frequently employed against colonial sources), and pieces together scattered textual fragments composed in the city itself. In doing so, it illustrates the ways in which variegated forms of symbolic submission and coercive power intersected into complexes not easily mappable to modern binaries. Seemingly contradictory forms of sovereignty routinely coexisted within a single polity, and greater specificity is necessary to capture a kaleidoscope of permutations.