Kategoria BISAC: History >> Asia - Central Asia

During the summer of 1916, approximately 270,000 Central Asians--Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Tajiks, Turkmen, and Uzbeks--perished at the hands of the Russian army in a revolt that began with resistance to the Tsar's World War I draft. In addition to those killed outright, tens of thousands of men, women, and children died while trying to escape over treacherous mountain passes into China. Experts calculate that the Kyrgyz, who suffered most heavily, lost 40% of their total population.

This horrific incident was nearly lost to history. During the Soviet era, the massacre of 1916 became a taboo...

A Best Book of the Year: The Economist, Slate, Kirkus Reviews

In 1839, nearly 20,000 British troops poured through the mountain passes into Afghanistan and installed the exiled Shah Shuja on the throne as their puppet. But after little more than two years, the Afghans exploded into rebellion. The British were forced to retreat--and were then ambushed in the mountains by simply-equipped Afghan tribesmen. Just one British man made it through. But Dalrymple takes us beyond the story of this colonial humiliation and illuminates the key connections between then...

State failure is a central challenge to international peace and security in the post-Cold War era. Yet theorizing on the causes of state failure remains surprisingly limited. In State Erosion, Lawrence P. Markowitz draws on his extensive fieldwork in two Central Asian republics Tajikistan, where state institutions fragmented into a five-year civil war from 1992 through 1997, and Uzbekistan, which constructed one of the largest state security apparatuses in post-Soviet Eurasia to advance a theory of state failure focused on unlootable resources, rent seeking, and unruly...

Islamic Central Asia is the first English-language anthology of primary documents for the study of Central Asian history. Scott C. Levi and Ron Sela draw from a vast array of historical sources to illustrate important aspects of the social, cultural, political, and economic history of Islamic Central Asia. These documents--many newly translated and most not readily available for study--cover the period from the 7th-century Arab conquests to the 19th-century Russian colonial era and provide new insights into the history and significance of the region.

The Ferghana Valley can reasonably be said to lie in the heart of Central Asia. As such, the Valley has made an inordinate contribution to the history and culture of the region as a whole, as well as significantly affecting the economic, political and religious spheres. This book looks at the region over time, from its early history to the present. It embraces not just the obvious fields of politics, economics and religion, but also ethnography, sociology and culture, and includes the insights of leading scholars from all three Ferghana countries. The book discusses various questions of...

• Provides an overview of the government, religion, and politics of the Mongolian Empire
  
• Considers the effects of Mongol military campaigns on other countries and peoples in China, Russia, Persia and Europe
  
• Assesses the astonishing military career of Chingiz (Genghis) Khan
  
• Now includes a new epilogue assessing the contribution of recent scholarship to our understanding of the Mongols'...

Afghanistan's history is a sad one: Soviet invasion in 1979; Pakistan-backed internal conflict in the 1980s; the Taliban regime and then the US invasion after the catastrophe of September 11th. Why does Afghanistan remain so vulnerable to domestic instability, foreign intervention and ideological extremism? Amin Saikal provides us with a sweeping new understanding of this troubled country that grounds Afghanistan's problems in rivalries stemming from a series of dynastic alliances within the successive royal families from the end of the eighteenth century to the pro-Communist coup of...

For five millennia, the peoples and cultures of East and West have met and mingled in Central Asia. For explorers and travellers it is a promised land, a region of white spaces on the map, forgotten cities and archaeological treasures. Christoph Baumer has spent a lifetime travelling through the countries of Central Asia, making extraordinary discoveries along the way. Traces in the Desert follows in his intrepid footsteps as he finds evidence of Indo-Europeans in the steppes of Western Mongolia, discovers lost oasis cities in the Taklamakan and unearths art treasures in Tibet. He...