This concise but comprehensive textbook outlines the transformation of Central Asia from prehistory to the collapse of the USSR, covering issues ranging from economic transformation, urbanization, and the formation of territorial units, to linguistic developments, the role of religions (such as Manichaeism, Zoroastrianism, Islam, and Buddhism), and the movement of peoples. The scope is ambitious and, although this undoubtedly entails omissions, the book is chronologically, spatially, and thematically wide-ranging without sacrificing the level of detail in the narrative. It is published at a time of brimming public and scholarly interest in Central Asia, and the two main strengths of this book will ensure that it appeals to both of these audiences: the lucidity of its exposition and the range of recent scholarship that has been incorporated in its writing.
Central Asia in world history will help globally minded historians to continue to push back and complicate the rigorous study of globalization, because it foregrounds the importance of earlier and less-recognized civilizations to the creation of long-distance interactions. The Kushans (discussed in Chapter 2) are one such example: descendants of the Yuezhi (who moved out of western China into Central Asia and formed an empire encompassing much of southern Central Asia and northern India), they facilitated land- and sea-based Silk Road trade, extended agriculture through irrigation projects, and also had an artistic heritage passed down from earlier Graeco-Roman colonists. The Central Asian role in historical globalization has, however, largely been studied in conjunction with empire (and usually those of the Mongols and Timurids (discussed, respectively, in Chapters 6 and 7) rather than the Kushans) and only to a lesser extent in relation to technology or diasporas (for example), something that this book can also help to augment. Golden brilliantly demonstrates (throughout Chapters 1–4) that the ancient Sogdians had trading colonies and exerted much political influence across Eurasia but never had an empire as such. Their impact was felt from Japan to Belgium, not only because of their economic activities (as merchants, producers of manufactures, and agriculturalists) but also because of the technical and financial expertise they provided and their chameleon-like cultural identity, playing a significant role in the development of the major Silk Road religions, cultures, and polities.
The most thought-provoking chapters are the first five, covering the ancient and medieval past as well as aspects of social and cultural history. This reflects the expertise and interests of the author but also highlights the focal points of scholarly interest in the region. In these chapters, Golden collates the insights of linguists and philologists, archaeologists and anthropologists, as well as historians, both to enrich our understanding and to correct common misconceptions. He reconstructs nomadic life (in Chapter 1), for example, from research in various disciplines in which he is expert. Nomads, he maintains, were constructive rather than destructive to economic life in Central Asia. They plundered only when they could not trade, and both strategies were based on the desire to consume the agricultural and manufactured goods available in the oases settlements. Moreover, nomads were often better fed and better off than other agriculturalists and – although ‘pure’ nomadism was uncommon – they had a sense of status anxiety about adopting the lifestyle of settled agriculturalists. They were, in short, far from being barbaric or uncivilized.
There are, inevitably, limits to the Golden's expertise. This is reflected in the chapters dealing with Central Asia after Tamerlane (Chapters 8–9). In these, the impact of new research is less evident, and the narrative becomes the familiar story of the European trading companies’ injurious impact on the Silk Roads, and growing European influence in the region leading to the Great Game (which is hardly discussed), culminating in absorption into the Soviet Union. Golden describes, for example, how the Ottoman, Safavid, Qing, and Muscovite empires encroached on the Eurasian heartland, and how the development of Europe–Asia maritime routes transformed the economic role and significance of the region. Yet, in simply listing what revisionist historians of early modern Central Asia have unearthed about the persistence and reorientation of older trade (and associated sociocultural) exchanges, this narrative only qualifies rather than punctures older histories proclaiming the triumph of the West over the East – something that global historians have done so much to challenge and overturn. S. A. M. Adshead's book of the same name (1993) is not only more consciously oriented towards world history but also structures the argument about the global role of Central Asia (after direct Asia–Europe trade was established) around the reorientation of Eurasian trade routes from east–west to north–south – and without the advantage of recent scholarship.
Indeed, although the series editor positions these volumes as ‘new world histories’ (or, more accurately, ‘global histories’) that take a vantage point from outer space conducive to a focus on connections and comparisons, it is questionable whether this text engages with either task. On the one hand, it is impossible to write a history of Central Asia that is not also a global history. Golden highlights the well-known story of the region as a global thoroughfare (particularly in Chapter 4), as the birthplace of empires (such as of the Mongols or the Mughals), and as the focal point of the expansionist drives of alien empires (including those of the Classical Greeks and the Russians). The lesson that globally or regionally minded historians can take from this book – and what makes it useful – is that it is impossible to understand the Near East, Russia, China, and India in particular, without reference to Central Asia.
On the other hand, rather than explicitly focusing on contrasts and connections, Golden's book presents a chronologically ordered narrative history of the region – and there are now several others available (although none so temporally wide-ranging are quite as pithy and succinct). Central Asia, when viewed from a globalist perspective, ought to be seen as more than a thoroughfare: it was also the producer of globally desired commodities (such as horses, or the less well-known brightly coloured silks of medieval Zandan, still produced in the late nineteenth century); it played home to merchant and religious diasporas (who doubtless left their own cultural imprints); and it was the locus of institutional development that continued in neighbouring empires (as Jos Gommans has argued in this journalFootnote 1). Central Asian historical experience also ought to be compared to that in other parts of the world, and its conspicuous absence from the new institutionalist and global economic histories highlights a major lacuna in current scholarship.
The publication of this book nevertheless reflects the broader influence of global history. This perspective has encouraged the assimilation of research from various disciplines and has repositioned Central Asia in the academic mainstream in a way that was not possible within the confines of earlier imperial, colonial, or national histories. It is best read alongside its equally accessible companions in the series (which examine, for example, the history of the Silk Road or of South Asia); in so doing, students – as well as their teachers – will learn how much and how very little we know about the region, and how far we are from the publication of a truly global history of Central Asia that is as provocative as this book is evocative.
