The Qing conquest of Xinjiang in 1754–59 proved to be consequential. In spite of its often turbulent relations with Beijing after the conquest, the area still remains a part of the People's Republic of China in the early twenty-first century. What exactly did this political reorientation entail? How much did the Chinese conquest change both the settled and nomadic societies of Xinjiang? Written by an international group of experts whose research is in varying stages of development, this collection addresses the important issue of Xinjiang's eastern turn and its impact, legacy, and limitations.

Most if not all of the articles in this collection challenge or qualify the dominant thesis of peripheralization. Most recently represented by Christopher I. Beckwith in his influential survey of central Eurasian history Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present, the thesis states that the Chinese and Russian empires’ expansions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries resulted in the partition of central Eurasia, relegating an area that used to serve as a pivotal center of world trade and politics into the exclusive peripheral domain of two land-based empires (260). This volume aims to highlight the persistent local social practices as well as transregional or transnational connections with other parts of Eurasia that continued to shape the life of the people of Xinjiang after the eighteenth century in spite of the region's political integration with China.

Yet it is not clear whether the fascinating pictures of Xinjiang after the eighteenth century that each individual study describes amounts to any consensus, except that it was not a process of simple Sinicization and increase of exclusive connections with China. The individual authors seem to locate the transformations of Xinjiang in discreet, sometimes even conflicting spatial and temporal frameworks. However, the lack of consensus does not appear to be a weakness of the volume. Rather, it is a candid reflection of the productivity and strength of the entire field in which previous theses are reexamined and challenged by new studies that draw on newly-available empirical data.

Overall, the book succeeds in presenting Xinjiang after the eighteenth century as the crossroads of the diverse political and social influences of Eurasia: in this area competing transregional influences, including but not limited to the Chinese one, shaped the life of the Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other local residents. In so doing, the collection also provides new empirical data drawn from multilingual sources (Turkic, Chinese, Manchu, and Russian), and introduces new historical actors and episodes not known to a wider readership. These are the most significant contributions of the collection as a whole.

For instance, Onuma Takahiro provides strong support to the peripheralization thesis that Xinjiang became an exclusive periphery of China after the Qing conquest. He shows that the Qing empire and Muslim native officials (begs) worked together to restrict eastern Turkistan's long-distance trade connections with Eurasian people beyond the Qing border. Rian Thum paints a different picture. While Chinese influence was clearly in ascendance after the Qing conquest, he argues, South Asia remained a major influence in Xinjiang, in particular in the southern oasis town of Yarkand, well into the late nineteenth century. Other authors argue that the arrival of the Russian empire in the nineteenth century and Chinese warlord regimes in the twentieth century added yet another layer of spatial connection to Xinjiang. The colonial connections with Beijing and Moscow significantly changed the political and social identity of local residents in Xinjiang. Thus David Brophy's Tatar intellectual, Gabdulgaziz Munasib (1888–1922), internalized the new political identity as a subject of the Russian empire, and displayed colonial bias in his writing about the Uyghur residents in Chinese Xinjiang. According to Joshua L. Freeman, under the authoritarian regime of Chinese warlord Sheng Shicai, who had strong political ties with Soviet Russia, a new Uyghur identity emerged in large part due to the spread of print capitalism and local newspapers that contributed to the rise of the vernacular Uyghur language.

Ablet Kamalov's chapter on child adoption in Kasghgaria highlights the long-term continuity in the realm of social practice in Xinjiang that transcended the eighteenth and nineteenth century divide. Kamalov shows the surprising endurance of the unique institution of bondage and servitude in the oasis society of Kashgaria well into the time of the takeover by People's Republic of China in 1949. However, Rune Steenberg's study on the kinship organization in Kashgar, another study on Uyghur social practices, argues that the mid-eighteenth century constituted a watershed moment in Xinjiang history. The article shows that Uyghur residents strategically transformed kinship practices to consolidate, as the most important social and economic units, affinal relations forged through marriages within neighborhoods. They did so in order to cope with the new political and economic environment introduced by the Qing empire: the introduction of a bureaucratic administrative structure and market-based money economy. These new kinship organizations have generally continued until the present day. In arguing this, Steenberg articulates a parallel pattern between Europe and Xinjiang since the eighteenth century, and puts Xinjiang's transformation in a wider spatial context.

Ironically, the study of the multiple Eurasian connections raises a crucial question about the foundation of the strength and resilience of the Chinese influence in Xinjiang: why does Xinjiang still remain part of China in spite of the thriving connections with Russia, Central Asia, and South Asia that this collection presents so vividly? An easy and convenient answer would be to emphasize military occupation and top-down political oppression by the Chinese state, increasing Chinese migration into the area, or historical contingency such as Sheng Shicai's opportunistic decision to ally with the Nationalist Party of China. Although these may all be important factors, they are not enough. In order to answer this question, further studies of the local agency of the Xinjiang people and their decision to work with as well as resist the Chinese state may be necessary.