Scott Levi's terrific survey of Khoqand's rise and fall accomplishes something far more exciting than what it promises. The introduction primes the reader for a kind of transregional history (in the author's words, “engaging the historiographies of Qing China, the Russian Empire, and the fields of Indian Ocean and world history” [5]), a prospect that worried me. Here, I feared, would be another work ostensibly about Central Asia that is invested mostly in what Central Asia tells us about some other place.
Instead, Levi provides one of the only truly accessible books in recent memory that is fully invested in Central Asia's history for its own sake. We learn about Khoqand's commerce, agriculture, and royal scandals mostly because they reveal something about Khoqand, not St. Petersburg. While the scope of the book is therefore narrower than the introduction would suggest, the potential audience is quite broad. Thanks to its thoroughly engaging coverage and Levi's elegant prose, this is the rare book on early modern Central Asia that I would not hesitate to assign to undergraduates and recommend to colleagues in other fields.
Indeed, Khoqand has never before been brought to life so vividly. The khanate's rulers emerge in full color here, from the tyrannical ʿAlim Khan to the lauded conqueror ʿUmar Khan to his debauched son/successor Madali Khan, whose most notable “conquest” was his own stepmother. Levi enriches these striking character studies with bold interpretive interventions: ʿAlim Khan the tyrant is cast as an effective, dynamic ruler; the beloved ʿUmar Khan is revealed as a bit of a tyrant; and, most intriguingly, the Bukharan conquest of Khoqand is alleged to be an effort by Khoqandi elites to liberate themselves from Madali Khan.
Given this book's overall achievements and the absence of comparable works in English, my biggest criticisms feel petty, especially as they concern the book's framing rather than the bulk of its contents. Nevertheless, in the interests of being petty, I'll say that the book's framing made me uneasy. First, the emphasis on “connected histories” (x, xi, 5, 8, 210) seems a bit overstated. There are no fewer than eight references in this book to “integrative structures” (4, 13, 210, 215), “integrative processes” (xi, 223), and “integrative patterns” (44), as well as five references to “globalizing forces” (9) and “globalizing processes” (4, 210, 223). The motive here is to tell the history of Khoqand as one of “integration, not isolation” (4), but these efforts are undermined by an equally strident retreat: “I do not mean to say,” the author writes, “that early modern Central Asia was uniformly on a trajectory of increased integration. One can identify many political, social, economic, and intellectual institutions and processes that had earlier linked Central Asia to distant regions and that deteriorated or even collapsed during this period” (4). Whether or not Levi's argument is altogether intelligible or convincing, the most glaring problem is that it is—in stark contrast with the rest of this book—uninspiring. Any scholars with the intellectual firepower to target “integrative structures” should probably save their ammo.
A lesser problem is that this discussion sets up a potential irony—a veritable loose thread for academic beaks. If Levi's argument is that Khoqand's rise owed much to trade with China in the eighteenth century (a key “integrative process”), this could be taken to imply that the Ferghana region was relatively isolated before that trade developed. Cynics will likely argue, therefore, that Levi's presentation simply shifts the characterization of Ferghana as an isolated region to an earlier period. This potential critique is likewise called to mind by the book's subtitle: if the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were part of the “Global Age,” does that make prior centuries part of the “Local Age”?
Finally, I ought to mention the 700-page elephant in the room: Bakhtiyar Babadjanov's Kokandskoe khanstvo: Vlast΄, politika, religiia, published in 2010. This history is the most extensive, in-depth survey of Khoqand ever written, and I was surprised to see it go mostly undiscussed here. By way of contrast, it is worth noting that Levi engages extensively, and profitably, with Laura Newby's excellent book, The Empire and the Khanate: A Political History of Qing Relations with Qoqand (2005).
Fortunately, the critiques above concern a mere fraction of the book as a whole. The rest is a treasure, and if Levi can be convinced to write surveys of Khwarazm and Bukhara to stand alongside this one, he will merit a ride on a white felt carpet and a khanate to call his own.
