Abstract
I can still remember the moment when I encountered Adeeb Khalid’s first book, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform. Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998—reviewed by Paul Bergne in JIS 11/1 [2000]: 101–4). It was a second-hand copy in Blackwells, Oxford, with extensive pencil annotations. I was in the first year of my D.Phil. research on Russian colonial rule in Central Asia, and floundering for want of any decent historiography. Fifteen years ago the standard references in Central Asian history were still outdated Sovietological texts—the series on the non-Russian peoples of the USSR published by the Hoover Institution, for instance—which unconsciously shared and reproduced Soviet categories and assumptions, notably that these same ‘nationalities’ were primordial, eternal and self-explanatory. As I leafed through this battered paperback (which I still own), I sensed with mounting excitement that this was something in a completely different category from all my reading to date—this was a historian who had worked in the Uzbekistan State Archives in Tashkent, who was a master of sources in Turkic and Persian as well as Russian, who was bringing the same standards of theoretical and methodological sophistication that existed in South Asian or Middle Eastern history to the backwater of Central Asia. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, Khalid was one of the first generation of Western scholars, most of them on North American Ph.D. programmes, who gained access to post-Soviet archives during the USSR’s collapse and through the early to mid-90s. Many of them chose to take advantage of the new possibilities of working in Tashkent, Almaty, Kazan or Ufa to write about the non-Russian peoples of the empire, both in its Tsarist and Soviet incarnations, producing what we now call the ‘Imperial Turn’ in Russian history. Khalid’s book was the pioneer of this trend—and it remains one of the best, a classic in a field with a rather short history of decent scholarship.