4.  Technologies of Rule: Water, Power, and the Modernization of Central Asia, 1867-1941, by Maya Karin Peterson.

Peterson’s dissertation examines the Russian Empire and then early Soviet efforts to irrigate the Central Asian borderlands. Spanning more than seven decades and six currently independent states, the history of the irrigation projects in Central Asia is a big story to tell, and Peterson uses a dazzling array of archival materials to do so. Along the way, she addresses several important historiographical questions.

The dissertation has three sections, each pairing a chapter on the relevant political and institutional context (and environmental imaginaries) with a case study of a large irrigation project.

The first, after a genealogy of tsarist-era arguments for hydraulic engineering, focuses on the activities of Grand Duke Nikolai Konstaninovich Romanov, nephew of Tsar Alexander II, a ne’er-do-well exiled from St Petersburg who settled in Tashkent in 1881. The Grand Duke was a fascinating hybrid figure who, while acting independently from local administrators, used his allowance to support development schemes in Turkestan. Chief among these were several canals built on the Hungry Steppe (the left bank of the Syr-Darya River in contemporary Uzbekistan).

The second section is devoted to a period of increased governmental control of irrigation affairs in Turkestan, symbolized by the 1898 nationalization of the Grand Duke’s Nicholas I Canal. At this time, the hybridity of the earlier era was already fading from view; the cultivation of cotton in Turkestan and its colonization by Slavic peasants were paramount for officials like the Minister of Agriculture, Alexander Krivoshein, interested in maximizing the Russian Empire’s productive capacity. The push for more cotton, Peterson demonstrates, preceded the colonization fever; most administrators preferred local Turkestanis as cotton cultivators. Colonization, rather, was required to supply regions transitioning to cotton monoculture with grain. Both projects required the large-scale redistribution of Turkestan’s surface waters. Peterson focuses on the tsarist state’s attempt to irrigate the Chu River valley of Semirech’e, in hopes that it would become a home for grain-growing peasant settlers. Despite logistical problems and the cataclysmic 1916 Central Asian revolt, in 1917, Russians and Central Asians still shared an interest in the project and discussed ways of moving forward on it.

The last section brings the narrative of state-driven hydraulic projects forward into the Soviet era, first by discussing the multitude of planning organizations interested in irrigation and then through a case study of the Vakhsh River, in southern Tajikistan, thought promising for growing long-staple Egyptian cotton. In a thoughtful epilogue, Maya Peterson discussesthe 1939 building of the Great Fergana Canal, providing water from the Syr-Darya to cotton fields in the Uzbek and Tajik SSRs.

5. 'Religion is not so strong Here': Muslim Religious Life in Khorezm After Socialism by Krisztina Kehl-Bodrogi, Volume 18 - Halle studies in the anthropology of Eurasia, 2008 University of Michigan ISBN 3825899098, 9783825899097 (251 pages)

This book examines religious life in the province of Khorezm in western Uzbekistan in the context of the overall political transformations, which followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union. As the title suggests, the people of Khorezm consider themselves to be less religious than their fellow countrymen. Also, there has been no sharp increase in the observance of the normative tenets of Islam since independence.

For the great majority, religious practice remains connected to life-cycle events and to concerns about health, well-being and prosperity. The author focuses on the elements of everyday religiosity including domestic rituals, shrine-related activities, and various forms of religious healing.

6. The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. By Peter Frankopan. Bloomsbury; 656 pages;

The author, a historian at Oxford University has covered the creation of the Silk Roads and the story of long-distance trade across the Eurasian continent. In “The Silk Roads: A New History of the World” writes with clarity and memorable detail. When Cyrus the Great, creator in the sixth century BC of the Persian Empire, was killed attempting to subdue the Scythians, his head was carried about in a skin full of blood “so that the thirst for power that had inspired him could now be quenched.” The Huns, destroy of the Roman Empire, bandaged the heads of their children, applying pressure to flatten the frontal and occipital bones, so causing their heads to grow in a pointed fashion. Spending so much of their lives on horseback, when on the ground “they looked like animals standing on their hind legs”: not only was their behaviour out of the ordinary, “so was the way they looked.”

Where other histories put the Mediterranean at the centre of the story, under Mr Frankopan it is important as the western end of a transcontinental trade with Asia in silks, spices, slaves—and ideas. Here he is at his most original. Particularly striking is the rapid conversion Christianity made in the east—right into modern-day China. Asia and the Near East were noisy with religious competition (not least because new rulers and empire-builders wanted divine authority to underpin their rule). In the early seventh century Christian evangelists tried to win over Buddhists with the case that not only was Christianity compatible with Buddhism, “it was Buddhism.” Religious jostling led to borrowings—think of the halo as a common symbol in Christian, Zoroastrian, Buddhist and Hindu art. It also spurred creativity, in the form of the outpourings of devotional Buddhist art from the Bamiyan carvings in modern Afghanistan to the painted caves of Dunhuang in north-west China.

He shows that the period after the sack of Rome really was a Dark Age, he turns to pollution measured in Greenland’s polar ice-caps. They imply smelting activity returning to prehistoric levels. The author challenges received notions: the Black Death, carried into Europe in 1348 from the east  was not the end of Europe, but its making. Catastrophic depopulation altered the balance of power between authority and labourers, who were now in a position to demand higher wages and more rights.

The second half of the book turns to 19th-century Western imperialism and its consequences in Asia. In the conclusion he cites that Central Asia the home of fabled entrepots like Samarkand and Bukhara is now hosting new centres such as Baku and Almaty and  others showing that “new silk roads are rising again” and that the region certainly has the attention of the rising powers Russia and China.