Post-Cold War historiography of modern Central Asia has been characterized by a focus on cultural history. Most of this scholarship rests on a set of assumptions about traditional institutions and social practices which merely reflect the bias of Soviet or even Tsarist-era historiography. 'Explorations in the Social History of Modern Central Asia addresses the need for a remedy to this state of affairs and thus offers new insights on a number of subjects relating to the social history of the region. It includes essays dealing with property relations, resource management, forms of local...

This book aims to shed light on the juridical field of the Khanate of Khiva at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. The ‘Khanate of Khiva’ is the term employed in Western historiography to denote the political formation that was put in place by the Qonghrats. The latter was a dynasty of Uzbek origin that ruled roughly between the last quarter of the 18th century and 1920. It ruled over the region known as Khorezm (Ar. Khwārazm), one of the biggest oases of Central Asia, traversed by the Amu Darya and nestled within the territory of what is today Uzbekistan,...

This book looks at how Islamic law was practised in Russia from the conquest of the empire's first Muslim territories in the mid-1500s to the Russian Revolution of 1917, when the empire's Muslim population had exceeded 20 million. It focuses on the training of Russian Muslim jurists, the debates over legal authority within Muslim communities and the relationship between Islamic law and 'customary' law.Drawing on difficult-to-access sources written in a variety of non-Russian languages (Arabic, Chaghatay, Kazakh, Persian, Tatar), the contributors offer scholars of Russian history, Islamic...