Here are 100 books that Central Asia fans have personally recommended if you like
Central Asia.
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I am a historian of Russia and Eurasia at Hamilton College. I teach courses on Russian history, Central Asia, and the modern Middle East. We usually think of these as separate regions of the world, but in fact they are all connected across the vast Eurasian continent. Russians, Turks, Iranians, Mongols and more have been intertwined with each other throughout their histories. My formal research specialty is Soviet Central Asia. I have written on Stalin’s attempt to destroy Islam, on education and creating a historical narrative for Uzbekistan, and on cotton and manual labor under Khrushchev.
Many people are fascinated by the ancient Silk Road, but don’t know much about how we got from there to the “Stans” that emerged out of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. These books showcase the most recent scholarship on how Central Asia was gradually taken over by the Russian and Chinese empires, and how the republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan were created, as well as Xinjiang Province in the People’s Republic of China.
The Kazakhs suffered a devastating famine 1928–1932 that was caused by Stalin’s collectivization campaign. Because the Kazakhs were nomadic herders, the first step was to “modernize” them by forcing them to become settled farmers. Cameron uses Russian- and Kazakh-language sources to show how Soviet communism’s obsession with creating modern nations led to near-genocide.
The Hungry Steppe examines one of the most heinous crimes of the Stalinist regime: the Kazakh famine of 1930-33. More than 1.5 million people, a quarter of Kazakhstan's population, perished. Yet the story of this famine has remained mostly hidden from view. Sarah Cameron reveals this brutal story and its devastating consequences for Kazakh society.
Through extremely violent means, the Kazakh famine created Soviet Kazakhstan, a stable territory with clear boundaries that was an integral part of the Soviet economy; and it forged a new Kazakh national identity. But ultimately, Cameron finds, neither Kazakhstan nor Kazakhs themselves integrated into Soviet…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I am a historian of Russia and Eurasia at Hamilton College. I teach courses on Russian history, Central Asia, and the modern Middle East. We usually think of these as separate regions of the world, but in fact they are all connected across the vast Eurasian continent. Russians, Turks, Iranians, Mongols and more have been intertwined with each other throughout their histories. My formal research specialty is Soviet Central Asia. I have written on Stalin’s attempt to destroy Islam, on education and creating a historical narrative for Uzbekistan, and on cotton and manual labor under Khrushchev.
Many people are fascinated by the ancient Silk Road, but don’t know much about how we got from there to the “Stans” that emerged out of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. These books showcase the most recent scholarship on how Central Asia was gradually taken over by the Russian and Chinese empires, and how the republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan were created, as well as Xinjiang Province in the People’s Republic of China.
This lively historiographical essay (yes, there is such a thing) blows up the old story of a stagnant Central Asia cut off from world trade by the maritime empires of early modern Europe. Levi looks at the economic, environmental, and military causes of dynastic collapse in Bukhara to show that the region was deeply connected to global currents even as it careened from one political crisis to another. This is a must-read for anyone interested in early modern world history.
In the first half of the eighteenth century, Central Asia's Bukharan Khanate descended into a crisis from which it would not recover. Bukharans suffered failed harvests and famine, a severe fiscal downturn, invasions from the north and the south, rebellion, and then revolution. To date, efforts to identify the cause of this crisis have focused on the assumption that the region became isolated from early modern globalizing trends. The Bukharan Crisis exposes that explanation as a flawed relic of early Orientalist scholarship on the region.
I am a historian of Russia and Eurasia at Hamilton College. I teach courses on Russian history, Central Asia, and the modern Middle East. We usually think of these as separate regions of the world, but in fact they are all connected across the vast Eurasian continent. Russians, Turks, Iranians, Mongols and more have been intertwined with each other throughout their histories. My formal research specialty is Soviet Central Asia. I have written on Stalin’s attempt to destroy Islam, on education and creating a historical narrative for Uzbekistan, and on cotton and manual labor under Khrushchev.
Many people are fascinated by the ancient Silk Road, but don’t know much about how we got from there to the “Stans” that emerged out of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. These books showcase the most recent scholarship on how Central Asia was gradually taken over by the Russian and Chinese empires, and how the republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan were created, as well as Xinjiang Province in the People’s Republic of China.
Morrison’s book is the first in-depth account of Russia’s military campaigns in over 50 years. It is both a good read for fans of military and imperial history and an important corrective to the image of the “Great Game” between the Russian and British empires. Morrison not only gives readers extensive and telling quotes from Russian military and diplomatic documents, but from Bukharan and Khoqandi sources as well. No other historian has written such a comprehensive history of the conquest.
The Russian conquest of Central Asia was perhaps the nineteenth century's most dramatic and successful example of European imperial expansion, adding 1.5 million square miles and at least 6 million people - most of them Muslims - to the Tsar's domains. Alexander Morrison provides the first comprehensive military and diplomatic history of the conquest to be published for over a hundred years. From the earliest conflicts on the steppe frontier in the 1830s to the annexation of the Pamirs in the early 1900s, he gives a detailed account of the logistics and operational history of Russian wars against Khoqand, Bukhara…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I am a historian of Russia and Eurasia at Hamilton College. I teach courses on Russian history, Central Asia, and the modern Middle East. We usually think of these as separate regions of the world, but in fact they are all connected across the vast Eurasian continent. Russians, Turks, Iranians, Mongols and more have been intertwined with each other throughout their histories. My formal research specialty is Soviet Central Asia. I have written on Stalin’s attempt to destroy Islam, on education and creating a historical narrative for Uzbekistan, and on cotton and manual labor under Khrushchev.
Many people are fascinated by the ancient Silk Road, but don’t know much about how we got from there to the “Stans” that emerged out of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. These books showcase the most recent scholarship on how Central Asia was gradually taken over by the Russian and Chinese empires, and how the republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan were created, as well as Xinjiang Province in the People’s Republic of China.
Since the 1960s Central Asia has been the center of the largest man-made water crisis in history with the drying up of the Aral Sea. Peterson’s book, based on work in Central Asian and Russian archives, provides a long-term environmental history of irrigation and its effects in the imperial and Soviet periods up to World War II. She includes a profile of the eccentric Grand Duke Nikolai Konstantinovich Romanov, who set himself up as a local “sultan” near Tashkent, and rich material on the steep challenges that irrigation engineers faced.
The drying up of the Aral Sea - a major environmental catastrophe of the late twentieth century - is deeply rooted in the dreams of the irrigation age of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a time when engineers, scientists, politicians, and entrepreneurs around the world united in the belief that universal scientific knowledge, together with modern technologies, could be used to transform large areas of the planet from 'wasteland' into productive agricultural land. Though ostensibly about bringing modernity, progress, and prosperity to the deserts, the transformation of Central Asia's landscapes through tsarist- and Soviet-era hydraulic projects bore the…
I traveled to Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in the summer of 2019, where I saw for myself many of the tools of surveillance and control that the Chinese Communist Party has used to turn the region into an open-air prison. Since returning to the United States, I have tried to draw attention to the Uyghur genocide through my published articles and through my book, Middle Country, where I tell the story of the Uyghur genocide by weaving facts, history, and analysis into a narrative account of the week I spent in Xinjiang. I hope that my book can make this profoundly complex and multifaceted issue more accessible to the average person.
Eurasian Crossroads is an essential resource for anyone seeking to learn about the complex historical context of the genocide taking place in Xinjiang today. James Millward, who is widely regarded as the leading historian of Chinese Central Asia, provides an accessible-yet-thorough examination of the various peoples and empires that have called the region home.
Since antiquity, the vast Central Eurasian region of Xinjiang, or Eastern Turkestan, has stood at the crossroads of China, India, the Middle East, and Europe, playing a pivotal role in the social, cultural, and political histories of Asia and the world. Today, it comprises one-sixth of the territory of the People's Republic of China and borders India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Mongolia.
Eurasian Crossroads is an engaging and comprehensive account of Xinjiang's history and people from earliest times to the present day. Drawing on primary sources in several Asian and European languages, James A. Millward surveys Xinjiang's…
I am a reporter and author with a passion for seeking out stories less told, and there are plenty of those in Central Asia, where I made my home more than two decades ago: first in Uzbekistan and, since 2005, in Kazakhstan. I have found telling overlooked tales from an overlooked region that is overshadowed by its mighty neighbours – the Russian bear to the north and the Chinese dragon to the east – to be both rewarding and valuable. I hope these book selections will bring more stories about the people who populate Central Asia to the attention of readers with inquisitive minds.
The exquisite blue-domed mosques and madrasahs in the fabled Silk Road cities of Samarkand and Bukhara took my breath away when I first visited them while living in Uzbekistan in the early 2000s. But behind this dazzling façade lay an ugly truth: the persecution of thousands of Muslims incarcerated, tortured, demonised, and dehumanised for the crime of being too pious for the liking of Islam Karimov, the paranoid dictator who ruled for a quarter of a century. Bukharbayeva tracks down victims of these atrocities to give a voice to the voiceless, aiming to show the “real people behind the terrible but cold and faceless statistics of human rights abuses.” In this important chronicle that records this repression for posterity, written with passion and oozing with empathy, she succeeds beyond measure.
As a young reporter in Uzbekistan, Bagila Bukharbayeva was a witness to her countrys search for an identity after the collapse of the Soviet Union. While self-proclaimed religious leaders argued about what was the true Islam, Bukharbayeva shows how some of the neighborhood boys became religious, then devout, and then a threat to the country's authoritarian government. The Vanishing Generation provides an unparalleled look into what life is like in a religious sect, the experience of people who live for months and even years in hiding, and the fabricated evidence, torture, and kidnappings that characterize an authoritarian government. In doing…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I am an associate professor at Nottingham Trent University and my interest in the Mongols first began many years ago during my MA at Royal Holloway University. I had always been interested in the historic relationships between nomadic and agricultural societies, but what I found fascinating about the Mongols was the sheer speed and range of their expansion—how could they have conquered the greater part of the Asia within only a few decades? Exploring how the Mongols grappled with the realities of ruling such a vast imperium remains a very thought-provoking issue, so too is the question of how the peoples they overthrew accommodated themselves to Mongol rule.
As the Mongol Empire expanded it seized control over many different regions, peoples, and religious communities. Among these were many Islamic societies, especially in the Near East. In this remarkable piece of scholarship Peter Jackson examines the nature of Mongol rule in the Near East providing analysis on topics such as: how the onset of Mongol rule influenced the region’s trade, how the Mongols treated the Muslim peoples under their control, and also why the Mongols in the Near East themselves ultimately converted to Islam.
An epic historical consideration of the Mongol conquest of Western Asia and the spread of Islam during the years of non-Muslim rule
The Mongol conquest of the Islamic world began in the early thirteenth century when Genghis Khan and his warriors overran Central Asia and devastated much of Iran. Distinguished historian Peter Jackson offers a fresh and fascinating consideration of the years of infidel Mongol rule in Western Asia, drawing from an impressive array of primary sources as well as modern studies to demonstrate how Islam not only survived the savagery of the conquest, but spread throughout the empire.
I am a reporter and author with a passion for seeking out stories less told, and there are plenty of those in Central Asia, where I made my home more than two decades ago: first in Uzbekistan and, since 2005, in Kazakhstan. I have found telling overlooked tales from an overlooked region that is overshadowed by its mighty neighbours – the Russian bear to the north and the Chinese dragon to the east – to be both rewarding and valuable. I hope these book selections will bring more stories about the people who populate Central Asia to the attention of readers with inquisitive minds.
Socialist realism meets magic realism in this novel by Kyrgyz writer Chingiz Aitmatov, which took me by surprise when I came across it just over a decade after its publication in 1980. The Soviet literature I had read was staid, but this pushed the boundaries of both literary style and censorship. In parallel plots, a railway worker marches with his camel and dog across the Kazakh steppe to bury his friend, while two cosmonauts blast into space and go visiting extra-terrestrials. The themes are way ahead of the book’s time, touching on taboos such as Stalin’s repressions and even hinting at climate change: the extra-terrestrial planet is plagued by a cosmic version of global warming. A quirky tour de force that conjures up the spirit of Soviet-era Central Asia.
" . . . a rewarding book." -Times Literary Supplement
Set in the vast windswept Central Asian steppes and the infinite reaches of galactic space, this powerful novel offers a vivid view of the culture and values of the Soviet Union's Central Asian peoples.
I am researching how elites and societies in Russia and East Central Europe have adapted to the social, political, and economic transformation processes following the end of Communism. What fascinates me about this topic is understanding why many of these countries continued to fall back to the same patterns of re-autocratization as they did during the Communist times. My answer is that it is because many institutions and elites in these regions have continued certain policies and behaviors from Communist times, which are still affecting their politics and economics. I also examine the impact of the transformational shock on Russia's international revisionism and democratic backsliding across the region.
Like the above, the book analyses the social consequences of the transition across the post-communist region. It tracks how painful and shocking some of its aspects were to the corresponding countries. It helps us understand why the reform overachievers, the countries that did best in reforming their economies (like Hungary and Poland), subsequently suffered some of the most pronounced political backlashes against these reforms.
The book is well-written and fun to read despite the serious topic.
Kristen Ghodsee and Mitchell A. Orenstein blend empirical data with lived experiences to produce a robust picture of who won and who lost in post-communist transition, contextualizing the rise of populism in Eastern Europe.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, more than 400 million people suddenly found themselves in a new reality, a dramatic transition from state socialist and centrally planned workers' states to liberal democracy (in most cases) and free markets. Thirty years later, postsocialist citizens remain sharply divided on the legacies of transition. Was it a success that produced great progress after a short recession,…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I’m an OB/GYN, passionate about adventuring beyond what’s expected. This has led me to pivot multiple times in my career, now focusing on writing. I’ve written a play, The Post-Roe Monologues, to elevate women’s stories. I cherish the curiosity that drives outer and inner exploration, and I love memoirs that skillfully weave the two. The books on this list feature extraordinary women who took risks, left comfort and safety, and battled vulnerability to step into the unknown. These authors moved beyond the stories they’d believed about themselves–or that others told about them. They invite you to think about living fuller and bigger lives.
I found the author's gorgeous writing and deep reflection to be irresistible. Harris is a true explorer of the world and the self as well as a brilliant writer.
This book showcases the curiosity and awe that drove Harris and her best friend to bicycle across the Silk Road. While pedaling out of bounds on her bicycle, she effortlessly led me to new territories of thought and imagination. Her descriptions are vivid, and I identified fully with her love of wildness.
"Lands of Lost Borders carried me up into a state of openness and excitement I haven't felt for years. It's a modern classic."-Pico Iyer
A brilliant, fierce writer, and winner of the 2019 RBC Taylor Prize, makes her debut with this enthralling travelogue and memoir of her journey by bicycle along the Silk Road-an illuminating and thought-provoking fusion of The Places in Between, Lab Girl, and Wild that dares us to challenge the limits we place on ourselves and the natural world.
As a teenager, Kate Harris realized that the career she craved-to be an explorer, equal parts swashbuckler and…
