SUMMARY: Alexander Morrison critically reviews Alan Lester's edited collection The Truth about Empire: Real Histories of British Colonialism (2024), framing it within the broader context of debates surrounding Nigel Biggar's "Ethics and Empire" research project. Morrison highlights the intense academic criticism Biggar has faced for his attempts at ethical evaluation of the empire, arguing that much of this criticism is politically motivated and exposes double standards. While acknowledging fair criticisms of Biggar on several counts, Morrison points to selective use of evidence, ideological partisanship, and implicit Britain-centrism exposed by most contributors to Lester's volume. Their reliance almost exclusively on Anglophone sources and secondary literature, as well the lack of expertise in broader comparative imperial history amount to parochialism and promotes rather than undermines the idea of British exceptionalism. Ultimately, Morrison argues that the current discourse surrounding the British Empire is often overly simplistic, politically motivated, and fails to acknowledge the multidimensional complexity of historical reality. Резюме: Александр Моррисон критически анализирует сборник под редакцией Алана Лестера "Правда об империи: реальные истории британского колониализма" (2024), рассматривая его в более широком контексте дебатов вокруг исследовательского проекта Найджела Биггара "Этика и империя". Попытка Биггара вынести объективную моральную оценку Британской империи вызвала вал критики, которую Моррисон считает в значительной степени политически мотивированной и демонстрирующей двойные стандарты. Признавая справедливость ряда упреков в адрес Биггара, Моррисон критикует большинство авторов сборника Лестера за избирательный подбор фактов, идеологизированность и подспудный британоцентризм. Они опираются почти исключительно на англоязычные источники и историографию, а также демонстрируют незнание более широкой сравнительной имперской истории, что производит впечатление провинциальности и приверженности идее британской исключительности, которую они пытаются развенчать. Моррисон отмечает, что современные дискуссии вокруг Британской империи тяготеют к упрощениям, они политически мотивированы и не учитывают многомерности исторической реальности.

The article examines the series of assaults by the Russian army of the Caucasus on the Ottoman fortress and city of Kars. The Russians seized the fortress three times, but despite a successful storming in 1828 and a successful siege in 1855, were forced to give the fortress up under the diplomatic settlements which ended these wars. It was only after the last of these sieges in 1878 that Kars was finally annexed by Imperial Russia. Even then it would be returned to Turkey forty years later. The article examines the history of Ottoman rule in this remote region of eastern Anatolia prior to the Russian advance, provides an operational military history of the three successful Russian assaults and the Ottoman defence against them, and examines how Kars was described, visualised and desired by Russian officers and statesmen. It concludes that–partly because it was attained and then lost repeatedly–Kars developed an importance in the Russian military imagination that was completely disproportionate to its real strategic significance.

This compact book offers a closely researched account of the early years of the Qajar dynasty and state, whose political development was permanently marked by the territorial struggle with the Russian Empire in the South Caucasus in its first three decades. Behrooz's work builds on Muriel Atkin's classic Russia and Iran 1780–1928 (1980), and although unlike Atkin he does not make use of any sources in Russian, the range of Persian-language material he draws upon is much greater, and the two books complement each other well. The first two chapters effectively set the political scene, providing a review of the circumstances of Aqa Muhammad Khan's rise to power, his struggle with the Zand rulers of Shiraz, and the extensive preparations he made to secure the succession of his nephew, Baba Khan Jahanbani, the future Fath Ali Shah. These bore fruit when Aqa Muhammad Shah was murdered by his own servants in Shusha in 1797. Significantly, this took place during a campaign to subdue Qarabagh. The central figure of the book, and of the wars against Russia, is Fath Ali's son Abbas Mirza, but a particular strength of Behrooz's account is his close understanding of the family and intertribal relationships among the Qajar elite, as well as of the petty dynasties that ruled in Qarabagh, Iravan, Badkubeh (Baku), and Derbent in this period.

Journal Article On Arid Ground: Political Ecologies of Empire in Russian Central Asia, by Jennifer Keating Get access On Arid Ground: Political Ecologies of Empire in Russian Central Asia, by Jennifer Keating (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022; pp. 252. £75). Alexander Morrison Alexander Morrison New College, Oxford, UK alexander.morrison@new.ox.ac.uk Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, ceae023, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceae023 Published: 21 February 2024

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James Pickett’s much-anticipated book derives from his 2015 Princeton Ph.D. dissertation, and the comparatively slim end product only hints at the wealth of research that lies beneath and beyond. Pickett’s work on the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Bukharan ulema’s education, world-view, career networks, institutions and relationship with the state, is the product of truly exhaustive digging through the incompletely-catalogued manuscript collections of the al-Biruni Institute of Oriental Studies in Tashkent, and those of the obstructively-managed National Archives of Uzbekistan, as well as other collections in India, Russia, the United Kingdom and Tajikistan. He cites no fewer than sixty unpublished manuscripts in Persian and Arabic, including thirteen Jung, or working notebooks used by these ‘Polymaths of Islam’, which can contain texts on a bewildering range of topics, ‘Sufi litanies, occult diagrams, love poems, legal excerpts and medical remedies, all jotted within the margins of a single volume’ (p. 245). Their very eclecticism is both proof and expression of the many different roles both the ulema as a social group and individual scholars could play. The same man might write a juridical opinion condemning the consumption of alcohol and poetry celebrating wine, and while this created tension it was no more than most of them were prepared to live with. Pickett makes a compelling case for not separating the Sufi who renounced power to live as a dervish and the qāḍī who took on a powerful state office and the rewards that came with it—both roles might be played by the same person at different stages in their lives. He gives that simple and ubiquitous but often uninformative label—the ulema—a new depth, resonance and interest that those writing on other parts of the Islamic world would do well to note and imitate. He also ensures that the caricatured view of a ‘traditional’ Islamic education as something narrow, blinkered and dogmatic which we gain from the memoirs of Muslim reformists—Sadriddin Aini’s probably being the best-known example—can no longer stand.

Bab'i bunty – women's riots - were a form of collective action in which women responded to crisis by making conscious and explicit use of their sex to achieve clear political goals. Owing to rapidly rising prices of food and manufactured goods from 1916 onwards the First World War saw widespread bab'i bunty across the Russian empire. In Semirech'e – the only region of Russian Central Asia with a substantial settler population - the class politics of these protests were complicated by questions of ethnicity and religion. This article explores a series of bab'i bunty which erupted in the towns of Lepsinsk and Vernyi and their surrounding districts, in which Slavic soldiers' wives (soldatki) targeted Muslim-owned businesses, but also those owned by their fellow settlers. In between these outbreaks in the summer of 1916 Semirech'e would become the centre of a violent uprising by Kazakhs and Kyrgyz against the Tsarist regime.

"Shoshana Keller. Russia and Central Asia: Conquest, Coexistence, Convergence." University of Toronto Quarterly, 91(3), pp. 356–357

the study of the Samanid period in Khorasan and Central Asia. It can be acknowledged that Tor and Inaba have cleverly chosen the desired article because Tha‘alabi’s works reflect the perspective of the cultural, social, economic and political situation of his life (Samanid period, fourth century AH). His works even pointed to the continuity of Iranian culture in the transition period. Furthermore, the authors have used an article from Gabrielle van den Berg that shows the history of literature and literary works in the Samanid period. Greater Khorasan witnessed the development of highbrow literature during the Samanid period and later during the rule of the Ghaznavid Turks. The Samanid cultural movement created a suitable ground for the growth and development of the Persian language, followed by the growth of literary and historical works. Among these works, Abolfazl Beyhaqi, a writer and historian of the fourth and fifth centuries AH, due to his closeness to the Ghaznavid court, provided comprehensive information in his book History of Beyhaqi, and, on the other hand, to pre-Islamic Iranian cultures such as Nowruz, Sadeh and Mehregan. The author might have made an alternative choice by studying the policy of Nizam al-Mulk to research the continuation of pre-Islamic culture because the policy of Nizam al-Mulk, the minister of the Seljuk king, was greatly influenced by pre-Islamic texts and the way the Sassanid kings ruled. The last article from Dilnoza Duturaeva deals with the situation of Transoxiana in the late fourth century. During this period, the Karakhanids established a government near the Seljuks of Iran. This government was a Muslim Turkic dynasty that had conquered many of China’s trade routes and, as Muslim Turks, expanded its trade with Tibet and China. It can be acknowledged that the entry of the Karakhanids into the politics of the region led to the loss of Iranian political dominance in Transoxiana and its replacement by the domination of Turkic tribes and the narrowing of Iranian political influence in Transoxiana. In general, this book is one of the most complete works in the field of pre-Islamic transition studies to the Islamic period because Tor and Inaba have used research that is the result of excavation reports, first-hand historical texts and literary sources.