Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. xviii, 556 pp. (Tables, figures, maps, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$35.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-691-16139-6.
Readers seeking an engagingly written overview of the last two hundred years of Central Asian history need look no further. The author, Adeeb Khalid, who is a professor of history at Carleton College, and who has previously published monographs on Uzbekistan and on Islam in post-Soviet Central Asia, provides an accessible narrative that is solidly grounded in the latest relevant scholarship. This book demands no special expertise from its readers and might very suitably be assigned to an upper-division undergraduate course. At the same time, it should prove useful to scholars who may be more familiar with one or another aspect of Central Asian history, but who would like a better general understanding of developments across the wider region. A very important feature of this book is that it includes consideration of the Chinese-administered Xinjiang region, as well as the post-Soviet states of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan.
Central Asia, as a whole, is not an easy region to research or to write about. To begin with, the language demands are daunting. Khalid’s proficiency in this regard is reflected in the range of works he cites. In addition to the extensive number of English-language works referenced in the notes, one finds many Russian-language works, as well as works written in French, Italian, Chinese, Uzbek, Uyghur, and other languages including the now extinct language, Chagatai. Additionally, Central Asia’s position, geographic and otherwise, vis-à-vis the Russian Empire/Soviet Union, the Qing Empire/China, the British Empire, and the Islamic world, means that developments within the region can often best be understood in relation to political, intellectual, religious, social, and economic trends emanating from the disparate territories that surround Central Asia. It is no wonder that Khalid concludes at one point that “there often seems to be a clear trade-off between accessibility and quality in works that survey the history of Central Asia” (530). Happily, we can count his contribution as an exception to the above rule, and no other authors have attempted to cover the same period and area.
Khalid’s decision to include Xinjiang in the narrative of modern Central Asian history is well justified. This reviewer is, as I suspect is the case with many readers of Pacific Affairs, more familiar with the history of Xinjiang than with the rest of Central Asia, and more familiar with China than with Russia/Soviet Union. Greater understanding of the western Central Asian and Russian/Soviet contexts helps illuminate a number of events in Xinjiang. Khalid’s depiction of the First Eastern Turkestan Republic (1933–1934) as a “Jadid republic” (254), for example, makes sense in light of his earlier skillful discussion of Jadidism, the Central Asian liberal reformist ideology, that competed with other more radical or conservative agendas.
For the period following the establishment of Chinese communist rule in Xinjiang in 1950, and especially after the Sino-Soviet split of the early 1960s, the value of including Xinjiang within the Central Asian narrative lies more in the comparison it provides of Soviet and Chinese Central Asia, than by the delineation of influences across regions. During the 1960s and 1970s Soviet and Chinese Central Asia were relatively cut off from each other, and although Chinese policies regarding the treatment of its “national minorities” were in theory based on the Soviet model, on the ground they differed substantially. Indeed, the comparison of the two administrative approaches may give as much valuable perspective on the Soviet and Chinese systems as it does on the two regions.
Once Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan each declared independence in 1990, the comparison with Xinjiang becomes all the more telling. The post-Soviet states have not fared uniformly well; each is affected by the varying circumstances of available resources, the severity of environmental degradation, and other issues, and all are to some degree hampered politically by differing degrees of corruption and authoritarianism. Nevertheless, Khalid concludes convincingly that, “[t]he Soviet past has been more of a blessing than a curse for the independent states of Central Asia” (474). Despites its many flaws, the federalist approach that guided Soviet policy ultimately resulted in the establishment of independent and legitimately Central Asian nation states.
The contrast with the fate of Xinjiang is expressed in the title of this book’s final chapter, “A Twenty-First-Century Gulag.” Khalid relates here the tragic story of the systemic suppression of Islamic faith and cultural practices of Xinjiang’s Central Asian folk, especially the Uyghurs, and their wide-spread incarceration in political re-education camps. Khalid also describes key features of the “high-tech totalitarianism” (496) that furthers the Chinese state policy of what he flatly calls “cultural genocide” (495, 502). If the policy of Sinicization in Xinjiang continues, as seems likely, there will in the future be less reason to include the Chinese-administered region in studies of Central Asia, but this book ably demonstrates that including it for the period covered is revelatory on a number of levels.
Richard Belsky
Hunter College, City University of New York, New York