Abstract
Central Asia has long been considered a remote periphery with little importance for world politics and world history. Only recently has the importance of Central Asia and its relations with larger states and state formations, such as Russia, the European Union, China or India, been reconsidered by politicians and historians. In this context, Peter B. Golden’s Central Asia in World History provides a very welcome treatise of a region, which has connected East and West via trade routes that came to be known as the ‘Silk Road’ since antiquity, and which plays an increasing role also within modern world politics. The author covers Central Asia’s history from antiquity until modernity, that means with a clear view up into the second half of the twentieth century, and argues that Central Asia continued to function as ‘a highway of commerce’ up to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It ‘remained a part of the world trading system’, although commodities and routes changed (pp. 115–16). What the reader may perhaps miss is a kind of prospect into actuality at the end of the book, but perhaps this has been skipped intentionally in order not to interfere into actual world politics. Great emphasis throughout the volume is also paid to ethnic and linguistic particulars and interrelations throughout Central Asia.
For millennia, the macro region functioned as a bridge between China, India, Iran, the Mediterranean lands and more recently Russia; it was the ‘meeting ground’ of various ethnic, religious and linguistic groups (p. 1). In the first chapter (The Rise of Nomadism and Oasis City-States), Golden discusses the rise of nomads as tribal units and the emergence of oasis city-states as larger political units. Great emphasis is paid to linguistic similarities and borrowings among different but related ethnic and tribal groups. Essential for Central Asia’s history was the continuing interaction on all levels of political, economic, social and cultural life (p. 20).
The next chapter (The Early Nomads: Warfare Is Their Business) introduces groupings of linguistic communities and political developments, focusing finally on the Xiongnu, an ethnic group that emerged in the third century BC and whose origins are still obscure. Sometimes they have been identified with the ‘Huns’, but scholars still disagree on this matter (p. 33). Golden also summarises the political relations between China’s Han Dynasty (206 BC–220 AD) and the Xiongnu as their northern neighbours. The gradual collapse of the Xiongnu confederation around the third to fourth century AD eventually prompted a first ‘wave of nomads westward’ (p. 34).
Chapter 3 (Heavenly Qaghans: The Türks and Their Successors) discusses political changes in Northern China, where former ‘barbarian’ tribes took over political control of certain regions and the rise of Turkic tribes in the region. He describes the vivid mix and interchange of commodities (from silk textiles, foodstuffs, wines, exotic plants and animals, precious stones to art works), of religions (Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Christianity and Manichaeism), and ethnic groups or peoples (Sassanids, Sogdians, Türks, Uighurs, Chinese, Mongolians, etc.). The Turks eventually managed ‘to create the first transcontinental empire, from Manchuria to the Black Sea’ (p. 49). Chapter 4 (The Cities of the Silk Road and the Coming of Islam) focuses on the vivid exchange relation throughout Central Asia, a ‘mix of cultures’ that is most clearly reflected in religions (p. 55), but of course also in languages spoken and products exchanged. In addition to Buddhists, we encounter many followers of Nestorian Christianity and increasingly Muslim/Islamic traders. Sogdian merchants were first dominating the contemporary commercial world from the Chinese capital Chang’an via Eurasian cities to the Western Mediterranean world. But in the centuries that followed (approximately since the eighth to the ninth centuries) Islam and Muslim traders came to dominate the trade routes and Turkish tribes ‘formed the ethnic building blocks of the Turkic peoples of modern Central Asia’ (p. 63). Again much attention is paid in the next chapter (Crescent over the Steppe: Islam and the Turkic Peoples) to ethnic and linguistic developments and shifts. ‘The Turks had not only adopted Islam, but had also become its champions in the Islamic heartlands as well as in Central Asia’ (p. 75).
The next two chapters focus on the establishment of the Mongol Empire and Temür’s (1320s or 1330s–1405) empire, whom Peter Golden calls the ‘last of the trans-Eurasian great nomadic conquerors’ (Chapter 6, The Mongol Whirlwind); and Chapter 7, The Later Chinggisids, Temür, and the Timurid Renaissance). The Mongol conquest brought the steppe, the forest zone, and many of the neighbouring states (China, Iran, Medieval Rus’) into a vast ‘world realm, the largest, contiguous, land empire in human history’. The Chinggisid Empire was eventually divided into the Ulus of Jochi, the Ulus of Chaghadai, the Yuan Empire, and the Ikhanite, centred in Iran, with Rus’ principalities and the Seljuks of Rūm at its Western peripheries (map, p. 86). Having created an ‘international networks of communications’, the Mongol Empire can be considered ‘the beginnings of an early world system’ (p. 90)—a thesis that is certainly debatable, as we can observe supra-regional trading and communication networks throughout Eurasia already at least two to three centuries earlier.
The Chaghadaid realm eventually split into a Western and an Eastern part in the mid-fourteenth century. The Eastern zone, comprising modern south-eastern Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Xinjiang came to be known, although ethnographically speaking incorrect, ‘Moghulistan’, in other words, ‘lands of the Mongols’. Actually they were basically Turks or Turkicised Mongols. Muslim authors used the term ‘Moghul’ as a reference to less Islamicised peoples (p. 94). But by the late fifteenth century, Moghulistan was becoming Muslim.
During the early sixteenth century, Central Asian peoples and states were increasingly squeezed between competing empires along their borders. Great political changes occurred, such as the rise of the Ottoman Empire and Muscovite Tsarist Russia (since Ivan IV the Terrible, r. 1547–84), the adoption of Shi’ite Islam as a state religion in Iran and of Tibetan Lamaistic Buddhism by the Mongols, as well as the rise and expansion of the Manchus in Northeast Asia and their eventual foundation of the Qing Empire, all of which greatly changed the balance of power in Central Asia. The expansion of the Qing and of Muscovite Russia specially posed a permanent threat to Central Asia. With Jungaria, for example, in 1757 the last steppe empire fell, and came under Qing influence. With the rise of importance of firearms, the ‘heyday of the nomad-warrior had passed’ (p. 105). Chapter 8 (The Age of Gunpowder and the Crush of Empires) discusses the far-reaching political changes in Central Asia that took place during this period, changes that had long been considered as causes for Central Asia’s marginalisation. Only recent scholars have begun to challenge this view arguing that Central Asia ‘remained part of the world trading system’ (p. 115), albeit under different conditions.
The final chapter of the book discusses ‘The Problems of Modernity’. Nomads who stood at the beginning of Central Asia’s history had basically disappeared with the developments discussed in Chapter 8 and with the continuous advance of Russia. Qing China put Eastern Central Asia under its control and founded the province of Xinjiang (lit. new frontier); Russia, between 1822 and 1848 annexed the Kazakh hordes, abolished the power of the Khans and placed local tribes under different administrations (p. 124). Han colonisation of Xinjiang had already started in the late eighteenth century and in the nineteenth century the Russians opened the newly conquered lands not only to agricultural colonists, mainly Cossacks, Russians and Ukrainians, but also to groups from Xinjiang (p. 128). According to Golden, the Russians ‘sought to keep Central Asians divided and isolated from “harmful” modernizing ideas such as democracy’, ‘to extract natural resources and keep the “natives” quiet’ (pp. 127–28). But Russia’s growing control of Central Asia also increased anew the economic importance of the region, which had been characterised by a low population density in the early nineteenth century. Reforms and changes, part of a larger Muslim revival and reaction to the European threat also led to the emergence of national consciousness and nationalism, which build on notions of shared language, culture and territory (p. 130).
The final pages concentrate on Soviet control of Central Asia and China’s influence on Xinjiang. Being confronted with a multi-ethnic macro region, the Soviets created national delimitations according to their own political goals, but rationalised them ‘by ethnographic and linguistic studies’—a massive and successful ‘project of social and ethnic engineering’. They produced ‘a distinct sense of nationality’ among ethnic groups. Former traditional clan and local region distinctions, however, survived among some factions (p. 134).
Unfortunately but probably intentionally, the author does not provide some prospects into the more modern era after the collapse of the Soviet Union, where former Soviet Republics have become independent states and newly risen into the focus of world politics, a geopolitical hot spot considered as military and political base to encircle Russia by the USA and the EU and to function more as a chain of buffer states by Russia.
To summarise, Central Asia in World History provides an important and interesting, concise and very helpful overview of a key region in world history. It should be a ‘must’ in the library of every world historian.