Scott C. Levi's The Bukharan Crisis is an erudite and ambitious work that gathers a wide range of ideas, scholarly fields, and historiographic debates into a slim, readable volume. Although thematically related to Levi's earlier Rise and Fall of Khoqand, this is an entirely different sort of book. Above all, it is an intellectual project—a wholehearted commitment to writing a “connected history,” which places Central Asia into broader Eurasian and global contexts. As such, The Bukharan Crisis is light on historical narrative, and relies little on primary sources. Instead, it synthesizes a diverse secondary literature (largely, though by no means exclusively, recent Anglophone scholarship), in order to characterize the economic and political dynamics of early-modern Central Asia, and to point toward causal explanations for the fall of the Ashtarkhanid dynasty in Bukhara.

Structurally, the book consists of four complementary but loosely-coupled chapters. To begin, Levi provides a concise and fairly conventional political history of early-modern Central Asia, with emphasis on the Bukharan Khanate. Second, he sketches out an intellectual genealogy of scholarly perspectives on the “Silk Road.” Third, Levi draws a stark contrast between this notional “Silk Road,” and recent scholarship that highlights the dense commercial linkages between Central Asia and neighboring regions. Finally, Levi identifies several other global influences on Central Asia, which he presents as contributing factors to the political crisis in Bukhara in the early 18^th century.

In some ways, the second and third chapters appear closest to Levi's heart, and have the most obvious connections to his earlier research. Levi argues that traditionally, scholars have been far too willing to characterize early-modern Central Asia as mired in a centuries-long pattern of “economic isolation” and “civilizational decline”(3)—an outdated perspective he traces back to the positivist methodologies and imperialist sympathies of nineteenth-century Orientalists. Levi acknowledges that such views have been waning in popularity among historians for decades, but cites several recent works as perpetuating those legacies. In response, Levi offers a systematic accounting of contemporary scholarship on the commercial ties between Central Asia and South Asia, China, Russia, and Iran. Taken together, these studies present a strong case that Eurasian overland caravan trade was growing throughout the early modern period; that it was diverse, robust, and lucrative; and that its scale rivaled that of maritime routes. For scholars of early-modern commerce and commodities, these facts will not be revelatory. For those less familiar with the field, however, Levi's survey offers a succinct, thoroughgoing, and persuasive assessment of what has been learned in the last twenty years regarding the dynamics of Eurasian trade.

In his fourth chapter, Levi takes on the challenging task of drawing diverse threads of global history together into an explanatory framework for the political turmoil in eighteenth-century Bukhara. To this end, he examines a diverse assortment of factors—the climate phenomenon of the Little Ice Age; the ravenous silver appetite of the early Qing dynasty; and technical and cultural causes for the late adoption of gunpowder weapons in Central Asia. Connecting these with the Eurasian commercial dynamism he identified earlier, Levi argues for a more nuanced view of the Bukharan crisis of the 1740s—one that acknowledges localized political, military, and economic turmoil, but rejects the broader discourse of long-term “decline,” while highlighting the range of positive and negative outcomes that the crisis posed for various groups and localities. As this summary may suggest, Levi's analysis, although informed by his emphasis on the transregional, also shares many core sensibilities with the “decentralization rather than decline” thesis prominent in Ottoman studies in recent decades.

Both the rewards and challenges of doing connected history are on full display in this final chapter. This is not a history that leads to unambiguous conclusions. Did the Little Ice Age truly have trailing political effects in Central Asia decades after it ended? How clearly can we draw a line between Qing silver demand and Bukharan currency debasement? The patterns are suggestive, but the evidence remains circumstantial. Ultimately, Levi is comfortable with the lack of tidy answers—as he puts it, “complexity is not a vice” (112). This is hard to take issue with; but nevertheless, as an exploration of events in Bukhara in the early eighteenth century, the book is more a call to consider additional factors than a definitive analysis. Where The Bukharan Crisis has its best success is in painting a convincing broad-brush portrait of early-modern Central Asia as complex, vibrant, and globally-integrated; and in undertaking a determined and thoughtful exploration of the craft of writing connected history.