Arash Khazeni’s Sky Blue Stone: The Turquoise Trade in World History is a meticulously researched account of the turquoise trade in early modern Eurasia that traverses between global, cultural, and environmental history with ease. The book should be praised for its methodological insight, its nuanced use of diverse source material, its ability to place the Middle East in its broader inter-Asian context, and its analysis of the cultural meaning of a commodity across time and place.

The book charts the trade and cultural meaning of turquoise as it travelled through the tributary imperial networks of early modern Eurasia, which are principally the Timurids, the Safavids, the Mughals, and the Ottomans. These Islamic empires that stretched between the Near East and South Asia were land-based multiethnic imperial systems where power was complexly negotiated and rulers collected tributes and revenues from subjects and kingdoms within their respective domains. Turquoise, known as firuza in Persian (and associated with piruzi, or victory), is a stone of unstable color that comes in many shades. The most prized color in early modern Eurasia was the sky blue from the old mines of Nishapur region in Khorasan. In these “empires of pastoral nomadic origins that moved from the tent to the throne to build imperial cities … turquoise became an imperial stone and color in the tributary economies and material culture of early modern Islamic empires” (pp. 2‒3).

Khazeni’s chronological reach and geographic scope is ambitious. The geographic scope of Sky Blue Stone traces the global turquoise trade from the outskirts of the modest city of Nishapur through the Near East, South Asia, Central Asia, on to Europe, and finally to the Americas. The author adopts a Eurasian framework that places Iran within its broader inter-Asian context, thus addressing the trade of turquoise across contiguous lands that are often and simplistically perceived as separate civilizations. Instead Khazeni presents “a history of Asia from the inside out” (p. 9), centering the regions that are peripheral to European-dominated networks of trade and the flow of capital. In Sky Blue Stone, the cities and steppes of Eurasia were “a crossroads of imperial interactions, of economic and cultural exchange” (p. 9).

Cultural historians will welcome the care with which Khazeni traces the cultural meaning of turquoise—“as a stone of imperial victory and power and as a celestial shade of blue” (p. 13)—that traveled with the stone as it was traded across the land-based Eurasian tributary empires. The sky blue of Nishapur turquoise was seen as one of the seven colors (haft rang) of heaven, and turquoise blue became a defining color of the imperial cities and architecture of Islamic Eurasia. Rich in meaning as a stone of imperial power and victory among the Eurasian Islamic tributary empires where it circulated, turquoise lost its cultural meanings when it traveled to Europe and its commercial economy.

The Eurasian turquoise trade, with the best mines in Nishapur, flourished through the early eighteenth century until the fall of the Safavid Empire in 1722. Imperial instability led to a deterioration of the old mines, and by the time the Qajars attempted to revive the turquoise mines in the 1880s, it was too late: the once-lost Aztec turquoise mines in New Mexico were reopened in the 1890s, and Persia lost its monopoly on turquoise. With ample sources for turquoise and the rising trade in the American Southwest, the Eurasian traffic declined, and with it the cultural meanings of the sky blue stone evaporated.

Khazeni makes several contributions, one of which is his focus on land-based tributary empires c. 1500–1850 and “their encounters with—and quest to lay claim to—the natural world and its resources” (p. 5). It is in this context of the “vernacular economy and culture of inter-Asian exchanges based in the tributary networks of early modern Eurasian empires” (p. 7) that the author traces the circulation of turquoise. This is a welcome contribution, since the author’s perspective shifts the focus away from global flows of capital, with European empires at the center and the natural resources of colonized territories on the periphery, and instead to inter-Asian exchanges and their cultural meanings within and between land-based imperial spheres. There have been many histories of commodities—sugar, coffee, salt, and spices—as well as a more recent cultural turn in study of commodities—such as pineapples and porcelain—and these studies fundamentally see the exchange and circulation commodities as emblematic of a globalized capitalist economy.

In contrast, Sky Blue Stone focuses on the inter-Asian turquoise trade, which “conveys the limits of Europe’s familiarity with Asian economies and material culture and details vernacular economic networks and exchanges that Europe and its East India trading companies could not absorb” (p. 7). The Timurid, Safavid, Mughal, and Ottoman empires negotiated power and sovereignty between ruler and subject kingdoms in complex and multidimensional ways, one of which was the circulation of turquoise. Challenging the assumption that silk, followed by opium and tobacco in the nineteenth century, were Iran’s only exportable commodities in the early modern period, Khazeni shifts our perspective “from silk roads to steppe roads and from commercial interactions between Asia and Europe to an exploration of the material culture of inter-Asian encounters and trade” (p. 8).

In studying this “vernacular economy” of inter-Asian exchanges of turquoise, Khazeni makes good use of largely untapped source material, the javahirnama genre of Persian “jewel books.” In its ability to harness javahirnama to understand the cultural meanings of turquoise, Sky Blue Stone is particularly inspired, since trade records—such as those of the colonial East India Company—do not yield this kind of cultural data. The fact that these javahirnama are slim on the quantitative details—on price, shipment, quantity, and transactions—that historians have mined from commercial and trade archives is no impediment to Khazeni’s agenda, since he explores the more subtle and complex cultural value of turquoise in inter-Asian imperial exchanges.

Another contribution of Sky Blue Stone is framing the circulation of a natural resource within environmental history. As Khazeni argues, “histories of commodities and objects have rarely ventured to adopt an environmental perspective, while environmental histories have yet to take natural substances as a frame of analysis” (p. 6). In so doing, Khazeni explores the circulation of turquoise outside of an economic framework that is premised on currency and European-dominated trading companies and networks of global trade. Instead, what comes into focus is the history of how Eurasian empires sought to use the mineralogical resources in their imperial spheres within the Eurasian context, quite apart from any involvement with Europe and its tentacular imperial reach. Khazeni’s study offers an in-depth study of the turquoise trade in the relevant literatures of environmental history, cultural history, economic histories of commodities and trade, Islamic and European mineralogical literature, and Safavid and Qajar Iranian history.

The book consists of an Introduction, five chapters, and an Epilogue. At the outset, “Introduction: The Turquoise Ring of the Emperor Jahangir” outlines the contours of the book’s argument that turquoise was an imperial stone and color in the tributary economies and material cultures of the early modern Islamic tributary empires of the Timurids, Safavids, Ottomans, and Mughals. “Chapter 1: The Colored Earth” details the javahirnama genre of Persian “jewel books” that the author uses in order to chart the cultural meaning of turquoise within inter-Asian imperial exchanges.

“Chapter 2: Turquoise, Trade, and Empire in Early Modern Eurasia” explores the history of the turquoise trade in early modern Eurasia between the post-Timurid Islamic tributary spheres of the Safavid, Mughal, and Ottoman empires, as well as with the Turkmen pastoralists, tracing the cultural meaning of turquoise as it traveled overland across “the steppe and the sown” in Eurasia (p. 28). Khazeni situates the trade of turquoise within the relevant literature on the circulation of commodities. This approach highlights the virtue of the book’s project, since the turquoise trade captures the “inter-Asian vernacular economy” that lay beyond Europe and its trading companies (p. 28). This places the land-based exchange between Islamic tributary economies at the center of the narrative, displacing the usually dominant emphasis on commercial economy, global capital, and European empires and their trading companies. The collapse of the Safavid Empire in 1722 led to the rapid fall in the trade and value of turquoise, which was followed by a century of political instability in Persia until the Qajar dynasty, which unsuccessfully attempted in the 1880s to revive the old turquoise mines.

“Chapter 3: The Turquoise of Islam” traces the impact of the color of sky blue turquoise on the built environment of Islamic cities, thus situating this work within the literature on Islamic architecture and urban space. Turquoise, the stone and the color, became a color of Islam, and “the turquoise city, with its cerulean domes, minarets, and arches, built between sand and sky, became the expression of the widespread material culture of Timurid Central Asia and the Persianate world” (p. 56), which included South Asian imperial cultures of the Mughal empire.

“Chapter 4: Stone from the East” tracks the journey of turquoise overland from Eurasia through Iran and the Ottoman Empire to Europe, where it was known as a Turkish stone, and therefore as turchese in Italian and turquoise in French. Europeans coveted turquoise as a rare stone from the East, and turquoise became an object of collection and study, along with flora, fauna, and other minerals that the expanding European empires and European travelers sought to acquire. Turquoise lost its cultural meanings when it left the tributary empires of early modern Eurasia and entered Europe, where stones were regarded as global commodities in a region dominated by a commercial economy and flows of capital.

“Chapter 5: The Other Side of the World” situates the Qajar attempt in the 1880s to revive the old and now dilapidated turquoise mines within the broader context of the nineteenth century gold rush and global appetite for stones and precious metals. “Epilogue: Indian Stone” records the impact on Iranian turquoise and the global turquoise trade of the reopening of ancient Aztec mines in the American Southwest that produced spectacular turquoise rivaling the Persian blue, which resulted in the devaluation of Iranian turquoise in an increasingly interconnected global economy. Thus, in the late nineteenth century, “turquoise, known for centuries as a stone mined in eastern Iran and named for the route of its trade to Europe through the lands of the Ottoman Turks, became the classification of stones mined by ‘Indians’ in the American West” (p. 132), and turquoise no longer held the cultural meanings of imperial power and victory that had traveled with it during its peregrinations through the tributary empires of Eurasia.

The book also includes images and illustrations that enhance its various arguments and demonstrate the ways in which the material culture of the Eurasian world was impacted by turquoise. A turquoise-studded Safavid helmet and the Qajar shah’s qalyān, or water pipe, bejeweled with turquoise and ruby, illustrate their value and status. An intricately decorated miniature painting, produced in Mughal India (c. 1618) of the Mughal emperor Jahangir, standing on top of the world, wearing a turquoise ring and embracing a diminutive Persian Shah Abbas I, illustrates both the Safavid‒Mughal power rivalry and the role that turquoise played as a symbol of imperial power. The nineteenth century drawings and paintings of the Islamic urban landscape, dominated by sky blue tiles and minarets, capture the impact of the stone and color of turquoise across Eurasia, while the nineteenth century photographs of turquoise mines and Islamic architecture of eastern Iran capture in granular detail the importance of turquoise. Two maps—one of the turquoise mines of eastern Islamic world, especially Iran (c. 1600) and another of the Eurasian land and sea trade routes, along which turquoise traveled from eastern Iran through Central Asia, South Asia, the Near East, and on to Europe (c. 1600)—illustrate the vast territories linked through the circulation of turquoise.

Sky Blue Stone makes valuable contributions to environmental history, the history of commodities, global history, and cultural history, firmly situating Iran and the Near East in an inter-Asian framework of circulation, connection, and interaction during the early modern period. Specialists and non-specialists alike will appreciate the book’s careful research, creative use of source material, and the author’s ability to craft an engaging narrative about turquoise and its journey across time and different places.