Being a notch less religious than Trotsky, my infrequent prayers are the prayers of a cynic, and I rarely expect them to be answered. Fortunately, I am not the only academic who has prayed for an assignable, up-to-date, well-integrated survey of Central Asian and Russian history—a book, that is, like Shoshana Keller's Russia and Central Asia. The pious ones have now been rewarded, and the rest of us, too.
If Keller's book merely provided a readable, unfussy chronology of Central Asian history, it would already be a welcome addition to the very small shelf of works fitting that description. Is this the right time to confess that my own Modern Central Asia syllabus deploys, as a main textbook, Seymour Becker's fifty-two-year-old Russia's Protectorates in Central Asia?Footnote 1 My sheepishness is no slight against Becker: his LBJ-era book has held up remarkably well (we should all be so lucky). It is, rather, a confession I expect others in the field to find relatable, as it hints at the scarcity of assignable surveys of the expanses that Keller covers. A recent flurry of well-translated Central Asian primary sources (see, e.g., Levi and Sela's wonderful Islamic Central Asia: An Anthology of Historical Sources Footnote 2) stresses the lack of undergrad-friendly narrative scaffolding. To say the least, Keller's book fills a gap in the classroom.
And then it does more. While rarely straying from her chronological march from medieval to post-Soviet times, Keller enriches her grand narrative with erudite, concise commentary throughout. She seizes many an opportunity to deploy the Bigger Picture. Watch how Keller, describing an eighteenth-century Russian diplomatic mission to a Kazakh khan, pivots elegantly from the “local” to the “global” and then back to the steppe again:
In 1742 a Russian diplomatic mission gave Abulkhayr Khan . . . gifts of sugar, green and black tea, spices (pepper and a kind of ginger, inbir’), and a surprising amount of wine and vodka . . . [This] reflects the changes that Peter the Great wrought when he opened Russia to wider trade with Europe, as well as the global reach of maritime trade. The sugar most likely came from European slave colonies in the Caribbean, while the spices could have come from Dutch holdings in Ceylon (today's Sri Lanka) or Java (today's Indonesia). The teas came from China directly to Russia via border towns in Eastern Siberia, which illustrates one of the reasons the Kazakhs were losing control of the steppe: overland trade no longer had to pass through Kazakh lands. (p. 61)
Here, we have a fine sample of “connected histories” done right, to the profit of students and older academics alike. These lines emphasize another important contribution of Keller's book: while Russia gets first billing in the work's title, Central Asia is the real star, and we learn little about Russia (let alone Sri Lanka) that does not also illuminate something about Central Asia. Readers who come to the book hoping to expand their knowledge of Alexander I, Alexander II, or Alexander III are likely to be disappointed. Readers hoping to expand their knowledge of the broad region between the Caspian and China are almost certain to be pleased. There are vast expanses of Keller's book that dare to invert the usual formula, representing Russia as Central Asia's “borderland” rather than vice versa.
While the jacket blurb promises a book “covering early coexistence in the seventeenth century to the present day,” the first chapter (one of Keller's strongest) covers earlier centuries, from medieval Rus’-steppe interactions down to the end of the 1500s. The book's scope therefore encompasses the medieval, early modern and modern periods, devoting roughly equal space to the eras before and after the Bolshevik Revolution. The book's subtitle refers to the three broad periods by which Keller organizes this history: first, an age of “coexistence” during which “Slavic and Turkic peoples shared the steppe” (p. 2); second, the age of Russian conquests in the region; and third, the age of “convergence” during which “Russians and Central Asians both went through communist shock modernization and became connected to global commercial culture” (p. 2).
Any book covering this much ground is bound to find some ground shaky. Admittedly, the book's coverage of the Timurid period—an intoxicating riot of color for many historians—is surprisingly pallid. (By contrast, see Keller's vibrant, memorable pages on the age of the Russian conquests.) Here and there, of course, there are also nits to be picked for sad souls hoping to profit from such a pastime. Arabic speakers might wince at the sight of “Mawrannahr” (missing a crucial “a”: pp. 3, 4, etc.); Uzbek speakers might grimace to see the word bitta (“one” or “a single”) translated as “two” (p. 228); and experts on the eighteenth century might gripe that their favorite era gets short shrift (“as usual!”). Most readers, fortunately, will focus instead on the generous whole. The whole, indeed, is a marvel of synthesis, erudition, and lucid exposition.
