Abstract
The Central Asian city of Shahrisabz has long been a historical footnote, widely regarded as an unruly “province in rebellion” plaguing its more powerful overlords in Bukhara during the seventeenth through late nineteenth centuries. In fact, it was an autonomous city-state in its own right, and the mechanisms through which it has been written into submission in the historiography reveal much about historical methodology and premodern logics of sovereignty. To recover Shahrisabz’s story, this article pursues a non-hegemonic reading of hegemonic Persian writing (a strategy more frequently applied to colonial sources) and pieces together scattered textual fragments composed in the city itself. In doing so, it illustrates the ways in which variegated forms of symbolic submission and coercive power intersected to create complexes not easily mappable to modern binaries. Seemingly contradictory forms of sovereignty routinely coexisted within a single polity, and greater specificity is necessary to capture a kaleidoscope of permutations. Thus source methodology and sovereignty stand as two conceptual domains intrinsically intertwined, with insights into the latter possible only with careful attention to the former.
According to an excerpt from Tārīkh-i jaʿlī, the royal chronicle of the renowned Keneges dynasty of Shahrisabz, “The Keneges shahs of Kish-i Dil-kash [i.e., Shahrisabz] rightfully inherited their most wondrous domain from Timur, Lord of the Auspicious Conjunction, whose astrologers had indeed predicted their rise.1 Under their century-spanning reign, the emirate reached new heights of prosperity and might. The dynasty’s kingship was endorsed by the Chinggisid Tuqay-Timurid ruler in Bukhara—whose successor was murdered by Raḥīm Biy Manghit the Accursed, one of Nadir Shah Afshar’s henchmen and a secret Shiite.2 Despite constant and unjustified aggression from the Manghit usurpers of Bukhara, the Keneges were never defeated. Instead, their riches and piety attracted scholars from far and wide and transformed Kish-i Dil-kash into a shining cupola of Islam.” A note scribbled in the margin reads: “In August 1870, the Year of the Dog, it came to pass that the Russian warlord Kaufmann Half-Shah [yarim pādishāh] accomplished what the Manghits failed to achieve by themselves and annexed Shahrisabz to Bukhara, thus bringing to an end the glorious reign of the Keneges khans through a treacherous alliance with the infidels.”3
Or at least that is how an official history of the Keneges might have read. In fact, there is no such chronicle: the above excerpt from Tārīkh-i jaʿlī (lit. “Fake History”) is entirely fictional, a product of my own imagination. Indeed, the Keneges dynasty’s subjugation in historical memory is a direct consequence of the resounding absence of any such source. But why is it that the Keneges dynasty has been forgotten, and what does its erasure mean for historical methodology? How did the enemies of Shahrisabz triumph so totally, vanquishing their foe not only on the battlefield, but also from the pages of history?
Still more troubling is the collateral damage: an organic understanding of sovereignty in the preindustrial world, when core political concepts such as “borders” and “jurisdiction” were rarely as simple as we would like them to be. To address this, historians are de-centering the concept of sovereignty from Europe and expanding it beyond law to include performance, symbolism, and routinized coercive force.4 This is an important step, but these different dimensions of sovereignty rarely came together in a homogeneous package. In fact, not only was it possible for seemingly contradictory forms of sovereignty to simultaneously manifest in a single polity, but before the emergence of the modern nation-state, this seems to have been the norm rather than the exception.
Ultimately, the expurgation of Shahrisabz’s political legacy from history has led to, and is equally consequent of, a failure to appreciate the complex, gradated logics of sovereignty that characterized precolonial Eurasia. Therefore, we might best engage this complexity with greater specificity, through an “à la carte” approach: simultaneously tracing the myriad claims and political symbols specific to the historical context in question (such as royal titulature or administrative geography) and coercive follow-through (such as resource extraction), without assuming that these aspects necessarily align with one another. Thus two historiographical agendas—critical source analysis and sovereignty—intersect in the most unlikely of places: the forgotten emirate of Shahrisabz.
Although the “royal chronicle” of Shahrisabz is a fabrication, its contents are entirely plausible. Central Eurasia from the late seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth century was characterized by political fragmentation and the collapse of already decentralized empires—a veritable laboratory for investigating premodern forms of sovereignty.5 This period witnessed the deposition of the Tuqay-Timurids (1599–1747), who stood as the last Bukharan dynasty boasting direct descent from Chinggis Khan. The Manghits of Bukhara (r. 1747–1920) indeed owed their origins to collaboration with Nadir Shah Afshar, just as the fictional Tārīkh-i Jaʿlī alleges, and it was only under Russian “protection” that they decisively extended control over the Keneges of Shahrisabz in 1870.6 During the intervening period, after the gunpowder empires but before the age of industrialized colonialism, the political landscape of much of Eurasia was filled with quasi-sovereign city-states such as Shahrisabz.7
Now a provincial city in the modern state of Uzbekistan, Shahrisabz is remembered primarily as the birthplace of Timur—if it is remembered at all.8 While most of these basic contextual points are captured in extant secondary literature, Shahrisabz’s status as a sovereign peer competitor with Bukhara and other regional polities is not. Yet the bygone geopolitical arena left an imprint in those sources that do remain, perceptible even through centuries of writing invested in a very different narrative. My sham Keneges chronicle is therefore as much a historical echo as a fabrication.
Questions of voice and agency are as old as the historical discipline itself, but this case study reminds us that deployment of “local” sources written in non-colonial languages is no panacea for escaping the discourse of the powerful: indigenous sources, too, must be read with a critical eye.9 The claims of total dominion over Shahrisabz on the part of rival powers (notably Bukhara) aligned with the Russian colonial desire for discrete, orderly protectorates and emergent conceptions of borders and sovereign jurisdiction (and it was indeed Russian military force that brought about this reality). These claims also align with the expectations of modern scholars, who have similarly projected expectations of binary sovereignty onto this time period, and have tended to read only colonial sources “against the grain.” For all these reasons, the emirate’s status as one of many overlapping, quasi-autonomous city-states was lost to the dustbin of history, as were the particular understandings of power underpinning that geopolitical environment.10
Despite ruling Shahrisabz for well over a century, endowing religious infrastructure, and going toe to toe militarily with Bukhara, the Keneges monarchs almost never speak with their own voice in the historical record.11 As a consequence, the geopolitics of their world has been subordinated to that of their opponents—Bukhara on the one hand, and Russia on the other. It would seem, therefore, that the Keneges qualify as subaltern in the narrow sense of the analytical term, despite being the most powerful individuals within their own society as part of a Turkic military elite, and despite undoubtedly suppressing and distorting the many voices of Shahrisabz subject to their rule.12
Yet we need not accept Shahrisabz as a bona fide “subaltern” entity, with all the baggage the term has accumulated, in order to leverage key insights from early writing by scholars such as Ranajit Guha. Guha’s now-classic essay “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency” exposed the ideological nature of colonial writing as a tool for suppressing peasant revolts by characterizing the uprisings as spontaneous, unpredictable forces of nature, as opposed to deliberate acts of resistance.13 Those same categories that permeated colonial discourse, Guha argued, were adopted in the later secondary literature, which left peasants and other subalterns permanently voiceless.
Scholarship influenced by writing such as Guha’s has overwhelmingly deconstructed colonial discourse, particularly in studies of the Islamic world, where the historiographical divide between colonial and precolonial remains most stark.14 In the case of Central Asia, such methods have been applied extensively to Russian and even Soviet sources, but not—for the most part—to precolonial regimes of writing.15 Elsewhere, notably in the case of Chinese historiography, source-critical methodologies have been enthusiastically and fruitfully applied to non-European sources. Yet this is because the Qing dynasty of China itself has come to be regarded as an imperial—and even colonial—power, which has allowed a cross-fertilization of methodologies unparalleled for other Eurasian spaces.16 If historians have exposed the imperial power inherent in categories permeating Chinese writing as far back as the Han dynasty, the same cannot be said for the Islamic world.17
There are legitimate reasons for this. The excesses of orientalism left quite a hangover, and Edward Said’s exposé of the ideological appropriation of Islamic sources to advance imperial projects informs a reluctance to impose categories from without. Instead, many scholars of Islamic societies have advocated that non-colonial, non-European categories and worldviews be recovered rather than deconstructed.18 This approach has yielded important insights, and echoes the approach of “reading along the grain,” which has been applied to colonial sources as well.19
Yet there is a risk that, by itself, the project of recovering the worldview of texts previously abused by orientalist projects will endow them with a uniform authenticity of the “native” or “indigenous” voice—which in turn makes disaggregating between many, often competing, voices more difficult. Texts written before colonialism, or outside the colonial register, contained “codes of pacification” of their own, to echo Guha’s phrasing.20 Few historians would object to the proposition that all sources must be read critically, but it remains the case that certain registers—particularly Islamic sources—have been isolated from the sorts of interventions advocated by Guha. This point has been argued most forcefully by Shail Mayaram, and a similar line of inquiry can be used to engage the question of sovereignty.21
Only by reading against the grain of texts written by (often hostile) outsiders can we recover a history that is otherwise denied them by the dominant discourse—in this case, that emanating from pre-colonial Bukhara (and later adopted by Russia as well).22 These Persian-language sources produced by Bukhara were not the equivalent of sources produced or influenced by an elite group of native intermediaries to the colonial state; rather, many of them predated the Russian presence in Central Asia entirely. Colonial sources adopted wholesale the power dynamics asserted in Bukharan sources, which happened to align with the colonial project—at least when it came to reifying Bukhara’s lofty claims to supremacy.23 The Russian colonial state demanded discrete, static, legible boundaries demarcating client states; the emirate-cum-protectorate of Bukhara aimed to substantiate longstanding territorial aspirations asserted in its venerable chronicle tradition; and later scholars (both Russian/Soviet and otherwise) assumed sovereign boundaries legible to modern eyes, as manifest in those that conveniently separated the “three khanates” of Central Asia: Bukhara, Khiva, and Khoqand.24
The “Three Khanates” and other quasi-autonomous polities. Maps by the author, adapted from Yuri Bregel, An Historical Atlas of Central Asia (Leiden, 2003), 63. Backgrounds from Natural Earth (http://www.naturalearthdata.com/) and NASA’s Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (https://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm/). The clear political borders depicted in this schematic are exactly the sort that implicitly collapse complex, contradictory power dynamics into simple binaries.
The “Three Khanates” and other quasi-autonomous polities. Maps by the author, adapted from Yuri Bregel, An Historical Atlas of Central Asia (Leiden, 2003), 63. Backgrounds from Natural Earth (http://www.naturalearthdata.com/) and NASA’s Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (https://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm/). The clear political borders depicted in this schematic are exactly the sort that implicitly collapse complex, contradictory power dynamics into simple binaries.
Strategies for countervalent interpretation of hegemonic discourse are essential for precisely the same reason that non-hegemonic primary sources are so few and far between: dominant powers had an interest in marginalizing rival voices. Yet for many marginalized historical actors, scattered non-hegemonic sources have nevertheless survived.25 Reading against the grain is a strategy at its most powerful when combined with the process of sifting through the fragments of sources conceived outside the hegemonic register—colonial or otherwise.26 Some of the very few documents produced by the emirate of Shahrisabz itself offer critical insight for pushing past Bukhara’s “cosmological bluster,” to borrow James C. Scott’s term.27 A series of six religious endowments (waqf) are perhaps the closest we will ever come to listening to partisans of the Keneges dynasty speak with their own voice.28 Even these waqfs, however, evidence the ideological ambition of an adversary, not the dutiful submission of a vassal. While most documents from the Shahrisabz chancellery seem to have been destroyed, some of its waqf documents have been preserved in a Bukharan archive seized by the Soviets.29 As property entrusted to God in perpetuity, such documents remained valid and useful under new administrations, and even bolstered Bukhara’s own claims to sanctity.
The Shahrisabz waqfs offer the faint outline of a story that is not even discernible through the ideological cracks of outside chronicles and Russian sources—one in which Shahrisabz comes across as something more than a “province in rebellion.” Alongside a source-critical examination of Bukharan sources, these scattered fragments offer a much more complex picture of contested, gradated sovereignty.
Bukharan attestations about Shahrisabz obscure a simple fact: the Manghit dynasty and its Keneges rivals originated as Turkic tribes of equal standing under a Chinggisid monarch.30 The Keneges clan owed their connection with Shahrisabz to the Chinggisid Tuqay-Timurid dynasty at the end of the seventeenth century.31 Subḥān Quli Khan (one of the Tuqay-Timurids, r. 1681–1702) had previously been freely rotating governors in and out of Shahrisabz, but when a rebellion broke out in 1693, he called upon the Keneges tribe to put it down, possibly because of their preexisting ties to that area.32 Almost too poetically, they were allied in the endeavor with their soon-to-be arch-nemeses the Manghits. As a reward for his role in the triumph, Subḥān Quli appointed Rustam Biy Keneges as governor of Shahrisabz in 1694, thereby inaugurating a new dynasty.33
Topographical map of Bukhara and the Shahrisabz Basin.
Topographical map of Bukhara and the Shahrisabz Basin.
Amid the anarchy of the first half of the eighteenth century, the Manghits and Keneges essentially competed for de facto control over the figurehead Tuqay-Timurid khan.34 Both dynasties sought to indirectly control the khan ruling in Bukhara. Neither dynasty at this time asserted any kind of de jure independence from the Tuqay-Timurids. During Nadir Shah Afshar’s invasion of Transoxania in 1740, ʿĀlim Beg ibn Ibrāhīm Biy Keneges found opportunity in the upended power dynamics, just as did his clan’s former Manghit allies. Amid the rebellions that seized the region in the years after Nadir Shah returned to Iran, ʿĀlim Beg, too, reasserted independent rule in Shahrisabz. When an Afsharid general marched on the region to put down the rebellion in Shahrisabz (along with many others), not only did ʿĀlim Beg manage to avoid his wrath, he turned Afsharid forces against a Keneges rival in the region and procured the de jure right from Nadir Shah to govern the city.35
Thus, already at the inception of Manghit rule in Central Asia, the Keneges appear in the historical record as a vassal dynasty, but not one subordinate to the Manghits, as the Bukharan chronicles (and much of the secondary literature) would have it. Rather, they were co-equal deputies to the Turko-Persian conqueror Nadir Shah. The rubble of the Afsharid Empire proved fertile soil for a heterogeneous spectrum of successor states with varying degrees of autonomy—a mold that fit both the Manghits and the Keneges.36 The struggle between such city-states would frame much of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, not only in Central Asia, but in Iran and India as well. This contest was especially bitter because the stakes were personal: the two sides were led by former “brothers,” the Manghits of Bukhara and the Keneges of Shahrisabz.37
This backdrop brings us to the central question: Was Shahrisabz “independent,” or was it a province of Bukhara? And what might those descriptors even mean when applied to precolonial Eurasia? The answers depend on where one looks, and with what degree of skepticism.
The secondary literature is fairly consistent in portraying Shahrisabz as a Bukharan province, but that does not mean that previous scholars have been blind to Bukhara’s inability to consistently extract material resources from that territory. The problem lies with the hierarchical—and ultimately teleological—assertion that Bukharan attempts to overcome resistance by the likes of Shahrisabz amounted to “military campaigns against rebels,” or punishment for defying their “nominally subject” status.38 The question remains, therefore: What do we really talk about when we talk about provinces in rebellion?
The “province in rebellion” trope is at best an understatement. During the city-state’s century-spanning history as an Afsharid successor state after 1747, Bukhara occupied Shahrisabz on only two occasions—once in 1751, and then again over a century later in 1858—before a decisive defeat by Russia in 1870; and even during those two fleeting subjugations, the Manghit grip was tenuous and quickly reversed. This was not for lack of effort. So fierce was the fighting between these two clans that the Russian orientalist Alexander Kuhn’s informant during the Russian campaign against Shahrisabz even went so far as to construct a false Persian etymology for the tribal designation, asserting that the name Keneges was derived from the Persian kīna (“hatred”).39 (Perhaps Kuhn, too, understood that fiction might facilitate deeper insight.)40 In a similar vein, another Russian account invoked an Iliad-like origin of the enmity, whereby the Bukharan amir fought to reclaim his Keneges wife after she fled back to Shahrisabz with a lover from her own dynasty.41
In 1751, Raḥīm Khan Manghit (r. 1747–1759) conducted three separate campaigns against Shahrisabz, and on the third try succeeded in occupying the city-state, executing numerous Keneges nobles, and installing a governor.42 Even marrying a Keneges princess, however, did not save Raḥīm Khan’s governor for long, as the son of the slain Keneges ruler returned only a few years later to repay the favor in kind and take back the throne.43 There was no attempt to conquer Shahrisabz under the second Manghit ruler, Dānīyāl Atalïq (r. 1759–1785). Shāh-Murād Manghit (r. 1785–1800) was remembered for his military prowess, achieving such feats as fighting the Afghan ruler Timur-Shah (r. 1772–1793) to a standstill and forcibly relocating half the population of Merv to Bukhara. For all that, Shāh-Murād tried and failed to subdue the Keneges in Shahrisabz, despite building eighteen fortresses around the rival province with the intention of cutting it off from the outside world.44
Amir Ḥaydar Manghit (r. 1800–1826) continued the already time-honored tradition of waging fruitless campaigns against the Keneges in Shahrisabz. In his case, however, not only did he fail to make headway against Shahrisabz, but the Keneges actually gained territory when a vicious war between Khiva (yet another rival city-state) and Bukhara presented an easy opportunity for expansion.45 During the succession struggle surrounding the rise to power of Amir Naṣrallāh Manghit (r. 1827–1860), the Keneges took more territory still.46 By the time Amir Naṣrallāh had settled into the throne, campaigning against Shahrisabz had literally become a seasonal pastime.47
Ultimately, however, Amir Naṣrallāh’s experience waging war with Shahrisabz was more analogous to that of his forebear Raḥīm Khan (who, as has been noted, did briefly occupy the Keneges capital) than to that of his father, Ḥaydar. After ten years of abortive campaigning, Naṣrallāh finally marched into the city of Shahrisabz itself in 1858.48 He succeeded in installing his own governors, who managed to rule for four years, though he pardoned two of the ruling Keneges princes, Iskandar Walnaʿmī and Bābā Beg, and allowed them to retire to Bukhara. Naṣrallāh’s son Amir Muẓaffar (r. 1860–1885) personally visited the city once at the beginning of his reign, but less than two years later the local population ejected his governors and reinstalled independent Keneges rulers, who ruled until Russia conquered the city-state and handed it over to Bukhara in August 1870.49
If the Keneges were consistently defeating Manghit armies for nearly a century, then in what sense was their territory a “province” of Bukhara? After all, it is highly unlikely that Shahrisabz was winning military victories against Bukhara throughout this period while simultaneously sending tribute: victors do not tend to pay taxes to the vanquished.50 While the chronicles imply rather than spell out this fact, the sources do make explicit Shahrisabz’s ability to reject other demands made by Bukhara. Shahrisabz was notorious as a sanctuary for political refugees from Bukhara and elsewhere.51 It was not an impervious sanctuary; in one vivid account, a Manghit ruler succeeded in sending covert agents into Shahrisabz to bring him the severed head of an impertinent refugee poet, one Junaydallāh “Ḥāẕiq,” who had, not incidentally, described a Keneges ruler as “leader of the governors of Turan.”52 The fact that the Bukharan assassins were sent covertly, however, is telling. Moreover, in at least one case, it was the Bukharan amir who offered to pay Shahrisabz, rather than vice versa, in exchange for the latter handing over a political prisoner. It was an offer Niyāz ʿAlī Keneges found that he actually could refuse.53
Engraving of Bukharan troops in formation outside the Timurid-era Aq Sarāy palace in Shahrisabz. From Henry Lansdell, Russian Central Asia: Including Kuldja, Bokhara, Khiva and Merv (London, 1885), 35. Original caption: “Ruins of Tamerlane’s palace at Shahr-i-Sabz, and review of Bokhariot troops.” Engraving likely based on photograph by V. F. Kozlovskii (Institut istorii material'noi kul'tury Rossiiskoi akademii nauk, no. Q 290-52).
Engraving of Bukharan troops in formation outside the Timurid-era Aq Sarāy palace in Shahrisabz. From Henry Lansdell, Russian Central Asia: Including Kuldja, Bokhara, Khiva and Merv (London, 1885), 35. Original caption: “Ruins of Tamerlane’s palace at Shahr-i-Sabz, and review of Bokhariot troops.” Engraving likely based on photograph by V. F. Kozlovskii (Institut istorii material'noi kul'tury Rossiiskoi akademii nauk, no. Q 290-52).
From the standpoint of sovereign control over material resources, therefore, at an absolute minimum we can observe an uninterrupted line of independent rulers from a single dynasty in Shahrisabz from 1759 to 1858: almost exactly one hundred years. If we consider the brief conquests by Raḥīm Khan and Naṣrallāh as interregnums, the dynasty spanned from 1694 to 1870—three years longer than the Manghits ruled Bukhara (1747–1920).
Perhaps Bukhara’s precolonial defeat of Shahrisabz in 1858 justifies the city-state’s exclusion from the ranks of the “three khanates.” Yet this seems all the more inconsistent when we consider that Khoqand was also conquered briefly by Naṣrallāh Manghit in 1842, and by at least one account, Khoqand continued to pay tribute to Bukhara even into the 1860s.54 As in Shahrisabz, popular unrest quickly drove out the Manghit governor in favor of the previous ruling dynasty, but unlike Shahrisabz, Khoqand was established by Russia as a protectorate in its own right (at least until 1876, when it was directly absorbed into Russian Turkestan) rather than as a dependency of Bukhara. These distinctions, alongside the presence of a rich tradition of royal chronicles in the case of Khoqand, appear to account for the difference in categorization in the secondary literature—but have little to do with power dynamics organic to precolonial Central Asia.55 It would seem, therefore, that the categories themselves were a product of colonialism.
Thus we can shake the foundations of the “province in rebellion” narrative simply by tracing the facts of the historical narrative, even as filtered through hegemonic sources. Lofty claims of victory absent any dispatched governors or tax collection are important clues. It is worth also taking a closer look at how such hostile or outside sources (both Bukharan and colonial) packaged those details and thereby transformed inconvenient realities through the written word.
One Bukharan chronicle describes a treacherous rebellion by the Keneges during Ḥaydar Manghit’s reign (1800–1826), and then proceeds to emphasize the apologetic submission of a number of Turkic tribes. The Keneges were notably missing from that list.56 Through this conspicuous omission, capitulation to the Manghits emerges as the larger ideological truth, while dissent is marginalized. In this text, the unsaid carries as much weight as the explicit.
Equally important was the characterization of the nature of challenges to Manghit rule as exceptional to an imagined state of normalcy. Another chronicle contains the following passage: “At this time, the governor of Shahrisabz rebelled and ceased to obey the orders of the master of the realm, and embraced obstinacy and treachery.”57 The implication is that before this state of exception, Shahrisabz had indeed been obeying Bukharan orders, even though that fact is not explicitly stated. By the time of this assertion (the 1850s), it had been nearly a century since Manghit troops had entered Shahrisabz, yet the chronicle characterizes Shahrisabz’s successful autonomy as an instance of exception to an imagined hierarchical norm.58 Thus even while the wording maintains a degree of historicity, it affects how readers interpret the nature of the event in question.
Nearly all Persianate texts followed established literary models, rife with allusions and intertextual references. Yet those tropes played an empowering role for the Manghits, who generally had some influence over textual production, and therefore control over how those genre conventions were deployed. Manghit leaders are equated with the most famous heroes and shahs of the Shahnameh (Persian Book of Kings), whose light and virtue extinguished the darkness of their Keneges enemies—likened in one instance to “dark-faced” Hindus.59 Even when the Keneges are compared to more respectable heroes of the epic, the allusion is used to emphasize their defeat in a fierce battle. Indeed, using such comparisons to underscore the ferocity of the Keneges (even alongside their wickedness and cowardice) rendered the alleged Manghit victories all the more impressive.
Colonial sources illustrate many of the same contradictions, albeit with very different textures. Many Russian sources dealing with geopolitics date to after 1870, which means that colonial military power had already reified the supremacy that Bukhara so coveted.60 In 1863, however, before the conquest, Russia sent an Iranian spy named Mīrzā Yaʿqūb, who had previously been working in the embassy in Tehran, to assess the situation in Bukhara. Yaʿqūb characterized Shahrisabz as a “province” of Bukhara—and Bukhara indeed seemed to exert more control over the city-state after the 1858 conquest. Yet Yaʿqūb also wrote the following: “The amir’s power is strongly established only in the following cities: Bukhara, Samarqand, Qarshi, and Charjuy … But those provinces, which from time to time had their own princes, cannot forget their independence and use any favorable circumstance to stand up against the power of Muẓaffar Khan. Those provinces are Hisar, Khoqand, and Shahrisabz.”61 Mīrzā Yaʿqūb traveled covertly to Bukhara, without personally visiting Shahrisabz, and it would seem that his report is influenced by the same categories as the Bukharan sources, even as the subtext of his writing contradicts those very assertions.
Meanwhile, British intelligence reports tended not to assume an overt hierarchy between Bukhara and Shahrisabz, perhaps due to their greater distance from Bukhara’s aspirational supremacy. For instance, one Indian agent wrote in 1855: “Shuhr-i-Subz is on the road to Samarcand, and the King of Bookhara tries every year to reduce it, but he cannot.”62 Elsewhere the same author explicitly describes even less powerful city-states such as Kulab as “independent.”63 Thus both colonial registers complicate the narrative of Shahrisabz as a “province in rebellion,” and under even less scrutiny than the Bukharan sources.
Even as they insisted on uniform sovereignty over Shahrisabz, Bukharan chronicles—like their colonial counterparts—hinted at a more complex reality, and one that shifted over time. There is some evidence that Bukhara exerted greater influence over Shahrisabz in 1862–1870 than it had in a previous period of the dynasty’s history. Before Naṣrallāh’s successful occupation of Shahrisabz in 1858, Manghit chronicles routinely describe Shahrisabz as having just erupted into rebellion at the start of sections describing one of the frequent wars. Indeed, much of Mīr ʿĀlim Bukhārī’s Fatḥ-nāma-i Sulṭānī is devoted to celebrating Manghit victories over Shahrisabz in epic prose and verse. In this chronicle, Bukhara wins only victories, but consistently “permits” the Keneges rulers to retain their city-state with a stern warning.64
Before 1858 these alleged victories were not victories at all, but after 1862 the chronicles offer specific details, indicating a greater degree of substantive control. Although Amir Muẓaffar Manghit could not fully defeat the reestablished city-state of Shahrisabz, he did manage to threaten the dynasty by taking the fort of Yakka-bāgh, which in turn prompted Ḥakīm Beg Keneges to hand one of his daughters over to Muẓaffar as a hostage. This move suggests some measure of deference to Bukhara during that period, even as chroniclers concede that the city-state had slipped out of Muẓaffar’s control for most intents and purposes.65 However, hostage-taking could be a double-edged sword. A local legend held that a previous Keneges princess taken as a bride by Naṣrallāh in the 1858 conquest murdered the amir by dropping quicksilver into his ear while he slept.66
Thus the now well-worn strategy of reading against the grain of hostile sources puts to rest the fiction of Shahrisabz’s status as an unruly territory of Bukhara. The genealogy of this formulation is traceable not only to colonial discourse, but also to the geopolitical ambitions that predated Russian dominance, as manifest in a deep tradition of Bukharan dynastic chronicles written throughout the long nineteenth century. Bukahra’s indirect influence over Shahrisabz certainly waxed and waned over the decades, but—ironically—it was not until Bukhara was under Russian “protection” that reality matched the rhetoric of precolonial sources.
However, the intent here is not to add Shahrisabz to the roster of “khanates,” as a fourth member of the pantheon. The respective territories of Bukhara, Khiva, and Khoqand were significantly larger than that of Shahrisabz, which was confined to a basin that it shared with its sister city, Kitāb. Instead, the intent is to interrogate the sources in a manner that sharpens our understanding of precolonial power dynamics. The primary casualty of categorizing Shahrisabz as a “province in rebellion” is not the city-state’s status as a sovereign entity, but rather a textured understanding of premodern sovereignty itself.
The contention that sovereignty as a binary, territorially defined construct is a relatively recent phenomenon, inapplicable to preindustrial societies, is not particularly novel or controversial.67 Scholars have invested substantial energy in charting the emergence of the modern state, and its eventual monopoly over political power and claims to authority.68 Yet premodern sovereignty—that is, the intersection between normative authority claims and the ability to make good on those claims—remains, for the most part, a residual category: “layered,” “contested,” “nuanced,” all relative to the world of nation-states we now live in.69 Of course, sovereignty in the preindustrial world was all of those things; that much is clear just from observing the disconnect between Bukhara’s claims and its follow-through, even based only on implications teased out of hegemonic sources invested in proving the contrary. But beyond broad consensus on the relative heterogeneity of premodern sovereignty, our understanding of power relations and claim-making beyond Europe and prior to the twentieth century remains rather vague.70
Is the Mughal state best understood as a centralized empire or as a collection of princely households?71 Was Yemen inside the Ottoman Empire or outside it?72 Wildly different answers are on offer, depending on which section of the literature one consults. In the case of Central Asia, the Manghit dynasty of Bukhara is often described as autocratic and increasingly centralized.73 In other words, just as Europeanists are becoming more and more skeptical of the self-image of the absolute monarch, far less centralized states elsewhere in Eurasia retain the guise of absolutism.74 This disconnect has much to do with default modern assumptions about sovereignty and the nature of the state being projected backward in time.
The remedy is ostensibly a relatively straightforward one: specificity. In what sense was Shahrisabz a sovereign entity? According to whom, and by what criteria? Oftentimes city-states invoked some sovereign symbols, but not others; or they conditionally submitted to certain forms of administrative integration under one set of circumstances, while defying them when conditions changed. Crucially, these seemingly conflicting facets of sovereignty were held by polities at the same time. Evidence of de facto subordination (e.g., exacting tribute or appointing local administrators) routinely coexisted with symbolic performances of autonomy, and vice versa. Debunking Shahrisabz’s status as an unruly territory of Bukhara takes us only so far. To assess Shahrisabz’s sovereignty “à la carte,” rather than according to modern binaries, requires analysis of the scattered textual and material fragments produced by the city-state outside of the hegemonic register.
How did the Keneges monarchs of Shahrisabz view themselves, and what might that reveal about the geopolitics and conceptions of sovereignty that characterized their world? One way of recovering precolonial logics of sovereignty involves tapping into emic symbols of political power—categories, in other words, that are organic to the place and time period in question. Evidence of the twin Islamic symbols of dominion—Friday prayer (khuṭba) and minting coins (sikka) in the sovereign ruler’s name—is inconclusive, but certainly suggestive (at least in the latter case).75 It seems unlikely that the Keneges spent a century thumbing their noses at the Manghits while simultaneously honoring them with the khuṭba, but the practice may have fluctuated along with regional power politics just as it did elsewhere.76 The Keneges did indeed mint their own coins, but those coins were copper, which did not necessarily carry the same claims to sovereignty as silver and gold.77 A leading specialist in numismatics regards the sustained minting of copper coins explicitly tied to Shahrisabz (emblazoned with bilād-i Kīsh-i Dil-kash, “the lands of Kish [Shahrisabz]”) as nothing short of a “political proclamation” intended to signal the city-state’s autonomy from Bukhara.78 Nevertheless, specific reference to the Keneges dynasty on these surviving coins is conspicuously absent—in contrast to those minted by the Manghit dynasty.79
We are on much firmer ground, however, when it comes to titles and religious administration within the city-state. Outside chronicles (usually Bukharan) referred to the Keneges rulers of Shahrisabz by the title “refuge of the emirate” (imārat-panāh), which was a title commonly used to describe subordinate governors, but never the ruler of Bukhara himself.80 Nevertheless, there was overlap in terminology between Bukhara and Shahrisabz: both are characterized variously as “emirates” (imārat), and the rulers of both polities were styled as amirs and hākims (lit. “one who rules”).81 For instance, the Keneges were described as sitting on the throne (sarīr) of the emirate.82 By contrast, the Turkic term for governorship, beglik, has little precedent in the precolonial sources, and appears to be a calque of the Russian begstvo in the rare instances when it appears in colonial-era Persian and Turkic sources.83 While the amirs of Shahrisabz certainly embraced the honorific biy/beg (which is untrue of the Manghit amirs, for the most part), not all members of the dynasty used the term—contrary to what one would expect if it denoted a clear hierarchical rank.
Therefore, just like the title amir itself, the implied sovereignty of the title “refuge of the emirate” is ambiguous, but certainly more restrained than the claims implied by loftier titles invoked at various times by the Manghits—though apparently never by the Keneges—such as amīr al-muʾminīn (“commander of the faithful”) or pādishāh (“emperor”).84 There is also direct evidence from a waqf endowed by the Keneges family in 1780/1781 that members of the dynasty itself embraced the title “refuge of the emirate” and its associated connotations.85 Despite their impressive military victories and their independent minting of local currency, something clearly held the Keneges back from throwing caution to the wind and asserting the title of caliph or khan of khans.86 Whether this was a tacit admission of juniority to the Manghits specifically is difficult to determine with certainty. Nevertheless, there is some evidence that the forbearance in Keneges titulature was referent to a lost Chinggisid order, not that of the Manghits—as illustrated by the curious persistence of the title dīwān-begi.
Dīwān-begi was a rank consistently invoked in Keneges waqf documents—and inconsistently in outside chronicles, referring to a senior bureaucratic position (“master of the treasury/chancellery”).87 At first glance this title seems to signify an obviously subordinate position, which raises the question of why the Keneges rulers so unwaveringly passed it on as a hereditary title. The answer to this puzzle can be found in the fact that the title of dīwān-begi was granted to a Keneges prince not by any Manghit, but rather by the Tuqay-Timurid ruler ʿUbaydallāh (r. 1702–1711).88 Importantly, this was the same rank given to the father of the first Manghit ruler, Muḥammad Ḥakīm Khan Manghit, by Abū’l Fayḍ (r. 1711–1747).89 Granted, Abū’l Fayḍ later also bestowed the more powerful position of atalïq on Muḥammad Ḥakīm Khan Manghit—but the Keneges went to war over that decision, even going to the extreme of proclaiming a rival Chinggisid khan.90 Far from a symbol of lower station, therefore, it seems quite possible that by claiming the rank of dīwān-begi as a hereditary title, the Keneges were in fact reasserting the pre-Manghit Chinggisid dispensation in Central Asia, one in which the Keneges were equal to the Manghits, or at least not directly subordinated to them.91
Importantly, that deference to Chinggisid supremacy was a trait shared by the later Manghits as well, who studiously avoided the title of khan even while embracing other claims to universal dominion.92 By clinging to a symbolic rank conferred by a dynasty that even the Manghits agreed enjoyed an untouchable pedigree, the Keneges matched their de facto autonomy with an implicit critique of the Manghits’ right to rule. Small wonder that Naṣrallāh Manghit was willing to pay such a high price to bring them to heel.
Thus the argument advanced here should not be taken as a call to replace “three emirates” with “four.” Bukhara was by all measures the more powerful polity, and matched status with more ambitious sovereign symbols. Rather, the contention here is in favor of a more complex, gradated understanding of sovereignty for the precolonial world, one that incorporates both hard power and symbolic discourse. The sovereign status of the Keneges appeared equal to that of the Manghits along certain vectors, and lesser along others, but it never amounted to the clearly subordinate province or begstvo posited in the literature.
A near-constant hallmark of precolonial Islamic polities worldwide was the reliance of the military elite on Islamic scholars (ulama) for myriad functions, including those related to running the state. Although the ulama usually wielded significant independence from the state, military elites nevertheless devoted substantial resources to centralizing religious authority at the capital. Perhaps the most telling marker of sovereignty in the Keneges emirate of Shahrisabz was the existence of an independent religious hierarchy, one that competed with parallel religious establishments in rival city-states.
The waqf documents in the Uzbek State Archive were taken from Bukhara, but some of them—including the six examined here—were composed in Shahrisabz. Since Islamic law characterizes waqfs as endowments made over to God, their existence and conditions were meant to continue indefinitely, which means that waqf documents such as these would have remained fully valid even after Shahrisabz was handed over to Bukhara in 1870. Although Manghit chroniclers were at liberty to characterize the Keneges as unruly vassals, and there was no reason to preserve whatever modest collection of pre-1870 administrative documents may have existed in Shahrisabz, these waqf documents were indispensable even within the later context of Bukharan dominance. For these historically contingent reasons, such textual fragments are among the very few surviving sources not refracted through Bukharan or colonial ideology.
Already in 1784, the second Shahrisabz waqf contains the seal of a qāḍī al-quḍāt (chief judge, lit. “judge of judges”), one Ḥājjī Ṣiddīq ibn ʿAbdallāh.93 The presence of the rank of a qāḍī al-quḍāt was itself a marker of sovereignty—or at least elevated standing. The title “judge of judges” implies the presence of a judicial hierarchy, which in turn implies the claim to a domain necessitating a large-scale judicial apparatus. One of the responsibilities of the chief judge in Bukhara, about which we have much more information, was to assign subordinate judges (i.e., ordinary qāḍīs) to subordinate cities.94 In the context of the Bukharan emirate, only Bukhara city and the city of Samarqand contained a chief judge (who often simultaneously served as the shaykh al-islām, a high juridical office).95 When Bukhara conquered Khoqand in 1842, Amir Naṣrallāh appointed a chief judge to the capital city along with a governor, perhaps as a partial concession of local autonomy.96 In stark contrast, after the incorporation of Shahrisabz into the Bukharan protectorate in 1870, which with Russian military support was exponentially more decisive, Bukhara sent only subordinate judges to Shahrisabz.
Just as significant as the presence of a chief judge in Shahrisabz is the fact that the waqfs reveal several cohesive lineages of Islamic scholars rooted in the city-state, who passed on their authority over several generations. The ulama relied on local Turkic dynasties for patronage and authority, and those who appear in the few surviving indigenous records were very much oriented toward the Keneges, not the Manghits of Bukhara.
Evidence for these family dynasties of Islamic scholars is attested through seals imprinted on the waqf documents. For instance, Ḥājjī Ṣiddīq ibn ʿAbdallāh appears as perhaps the first chief judge (qāḍī al-quḍāt) of Shahrisabz on a waqf document from 1784, and next to one of his many seals is that of Muḥammad Rāziq Khwāja ibn Bihbūd Khwāja. In the 1784 waqf, Muḥammad Rāziq’s position was that of mufti (legal opinion writer); perhaps he was Ḥājjī Ṣiddīq’s protégé.97 By the time of the next waqf, endowed in 1811, Muḥammad Rāziq had apparently been promoted to chief judge.98 The seals of the progeny of both former chief judges appear on waqf documents from 1837 and 1849: ʿAbd al-Nabī Khwāja ibn Muḥammad Rāziq, who was then serving as a judge, and Muḥammad Raḥīm ibn Ḥājjī Ṣadīq, also a judge.99
In other words, through the prism of official seals, we can observe at least two separate families active across three generations, spanning almost the entire post-Tuqay-Timurid reign of the Keneges. These are the hallmarks of an autonomous city-state: a rooted political-religious establishment, cosmopolitan in character but nevertheless oriented toward a central locus of power. This does not mean that this religious establishment was comparable in scale to that of Bukhara or even Khoqand, but it was similar in kind—and certainly not a provincial branch of any other power.
There is also evidence that Shahrisabz actively competed with the surrounding city-states to attract Islamic scholars during the precolonial period. Ḥaḍrat Ākhūnd Mullā Īr-naẓar Namangānī (d. 1797/1798) had strong roots in the Farghana Valley, where he developed a following and a base of material support. When the local governor (ḥākim) demanded that Īr-Naẓar serve as a judge (qāḍī), he fled the city in search of less demanding patrons.100 The Keneges rulers of Shahrisabz received Īr-Naẓar with great fanfare as a “spiritual king” (pādishāh-i maʿnawī), contrasting his stature in the religious realm with that of the Keneges in the worldly realm (imārat-panāh).101 The Turkic nobles became his Sufi disciples (murīd), and—perhaps most importantly—one of their number, Khāl Biy Aqasi Keneges, built a madrasa (college) to serve as his scholarly base and bestowed endowments to provide for his followers.102
Thus the Keneges dynasty of Shahrisabz drew in a famous scholar and provided him with the resources necessary to pull in students and disciples from the outlying regions. This rivalry between city-states for the attention of the ulama is even more palpable in the biography of Muḥammad Luṭfallāh Khwāja (d. 1813/1814). Despite enjoying patronage in Shahrisabz, Luṭfallāh Khwāja nevertheless pined for a position in the more famous city of Samarqand. At that time the road between Shahrisabz and Bukhara was a war zone due to Amir Shāh-Murād Manghit’s (r. 1785–1800) campaign against Shahrisabz, but Luṭfallāh nevertheless sent a messenger to Bukhara to petition for his appointment in Samarqand—which was ultimately granted.103 Due to an altercation with a rival scholar in Samarqand, Luṭfallāh was forced to flee the city.104 Nīyāz ʿAlī Dīwān-begi Keneges, who ruled Shahrisabz at the time, was thrilled to steal back a famous scholar from the Bukharan fold.105 Not only do we observe Bukhara’s inability to control religious appointments in its putative province of Shahrisabz, but the rival city-state was deploying resources to compete with its supposed sovereign.
The Keneges of Shahrisabz attracted ulama and enhanced their own prestige not only through investment in infrastructure, but also by burnishing the city’s place in Perso-Islamic history. For instance, the waqf document of 1780/1781 specifies that the madrasa being endowed is located within “the arg [fortress] of Timur Gurgānī, Lord of the Auspicious Conjunction,” reminding readers of the special connection between Shahrisabz and the famous ruler, even though that fact has little to do with the task of describing the location of the madrasa.106 Local intermediaries to Russian colonial ethnographers reported that the “original” foundation of a madrasa endowed in 1848/1849 was in fact laid by Timur.107 As in similar productions devoted to the sacred histories of Bukhara and Samarqand, competing local legends tied the construction of the Shahrisabz arg to Afrāsiyāb, a figure from the Shāhnāma (the very same Persian epic referenced in Bukharan chronicles to imply dominion over Shahrisabz through literary allusions).108
Indeed, the primary purpose of these waqfs was to repair and erect madrasas, khānaqāhs (Sufi lodges), and mosques, all of which provided evidence for the city’s status as an Islamic center in its own right. As a result of these endowments, by the time of the Russian conquest, Shahrisabz was home to no fewer than six madrasas (nine if we include those in the adjacent city of Kitāb), which was dramatically fewer than in Bukhara itself—which boasted over two hundred—but more than in many other cities in the region.109 In several of these endowments, the Keneges rulers set themselves up as administrators (mutawallī) of the waqfs, which they had endowed from their own personal holdings. This not only allowed the Keneges to keep the proceeds of the land within their family, which was a common strategy, but it also emphasized a personal connection between them and the religious landscape of their emirate. Thus the act of building up the city’s status as a regional center of Islam attracted the ulama necessary for an independent religious hierarchy, which in turn established the Keneges as a competitor dynasty enjoying some degree of sovereign status vis-à-vis their rivals—even though that did not entail equal status in the modern binary sense.
Contemporary photograph of the Aq Sarāy (lit. “White Palace”), commissioned by Timur in the fourteenth century as a summer palace. Photo by Hergit, September 20, 2011. Wikimedia Commons.
Contemporary photograph of the Aq Sarāy (lit. “White Palace”), commissioned by Timur in the fourteenth century as a summer palace. Photo by Hergit, September 20, 2011. Wikimedia Commons.
The case of Shahrisabz is instructive not only for appreciating premodern logics of sovereignty generally, but also for following the patterns of imperial breakdown that shaped Persianate Eurasia from the eighteenth century in particular. Nadir Shah’s short-lived empire (1736–1747) played a pivotal role in the fragmentation of the Mughal, Safavid, and Tuqay-Timurid empires, and in precipitating a long nineteenth century of city-states of varying degrees of overlapping sovereignty.110 This arena was by no means different in kind from its predecessors, and the gradated, overlapping forms of sovereignty were characteristic even of the allegedly absolute monarchies of contemporary Europe. Nevertheless, the sheer scale of political fragmentation puts these dynamics in stark relief. Thus Shahrisabz’s multifaceted expression of sovereignty is hardly an outlier—as we can demonstrate by briefly panning outward to other city-states with their own particular assortments of sovereign claims, both in Central Asia and beyond.
We cannot know why the Keneges did not commission any dynastic chronicles, or whether one was written and then destroyed by Bukhara. But a chronicle of sorts was written about an even lesser-known quasi-autonomous city-state, Baljuwān.111 This modest text, consisting of only two folios, is nevertheless suggestive of the larger context within which Shahrisabz was situated. According to the account, in 1827/1828 one Katta-Khan inherited the role of ḥākim of Baljuwān from his father without reference to any direct intercession from Bukhara, though the author does remark that he maintained warm relations with the Bukharan pādishāh. In this case, the juxtaposition between the ḥākim of Baljuwān and the pādishāh in Bukhara implies a hierarchy, with the former clearly the latter’s junior. Just as in the case of Shahrisabz, the rulers of Baljuwān stopped short of claiming the most prestigious titles for themselves. It should be noted, however, that all of the members of Katta-Khan’s dynasty appended the term “khan” to their name—a convention reminiscent of Chinggisid authority, even if it almost certainly did not constitute a genuine claim of universal kingship.
Implicit symbolic deference to Bukhara notwithstanding, Katta-Khan succeeded in passing rulership on to his own offspring. In 1841/1842 Katta-Khan died, and his son Miḍrāb-Khan took over and proceeded to build local infrastructure and pursue trade relations with Khoqand and Tashkent. After Miḍrāb-Khan, rule of Baljuwān passed to several of his brothers in fairly rapid succession beginning in 1853/1854. While one brother, Sara-Khan, spent a year in the city of Bukhara (quite possibly as a hostage), another brother, Hamrāh-Khan, stayed behind and began minting coins in his own name—a symbol of sovereignty never activated by the substantially more powerful Keneges dynasty of Shahrisabz.112 This apparently did not bother the ruler of Bukhara, who granted Sara-Khan the title of atalïq, but in 1870 the Manghit ruler, Muẓaffar (r. 1860–1885), marched on Baljuwān, drove Sara-Khan into exile in Afghanistan, and appointed governors of his own choosing throughout the mountainous territories of Central Asia.113
Unlike Shahrisabz, which at least appears in secondary literature as an uppity vassal of Bukhara, Baljuwān scarcely receives mention even in primary sources, let alone secondary ones. It is implicitly assumed to be a passive dependency, and certainly not an unruly one. And yet, if we consider sovereignty “à la carte,” Baljuwān was in some respects more sovereign than Shahrisabz, boasting coins explicitly minted with the name of the local dynasty and an indigenous chronicle of its own (however modest). Moreover, the decisive end to this world of overlapping, blurry power relationships came at the exact same time, and for the exact same reason, for Baljuwān as it did for Shahrisabz: in 1870, with Russian colonial backing. It is clear from the fact that the Manghits found it necessary to invade that they had previously enjoyed little or no administrative sway over the province, and it is unlikely that Baljuwān sent any taxes to the center, either. One wonders, therefore, how many other combinations of sovereign symbolism and actual administrative integration characterized other polities during this age of city-states.
There is strong reason to suspect that the likes of Shahrisabz and Baljuwān are just the tip of the iceberg. Within the central reaches of Eurasia, we can observe numerous other seeming paradoxes. The Qaṭaghān rulers of Qunduz read the khuṭba in the name of the amir of Bukhara, despite never having been conquered by the Manghits.114 The Yarid dynasty of Badakhshan traced its origins to Alexander the Great himself, and—as with the Manghits—its rulers went by the title pādishāh (a rank ratified by Nadir Shah, alongside the more subordinate wālī).115 As in Shahrisabz, there is also evidence in Badakhshan of a local judicial hierarchy, complete with a chief judge, as well as locally minted currency.116 Despite those potent symbols of sovereignty, Badakhshan was repeatedly conquered and the Yarids vassalized by the aforementioned Qaṭaghān dynasts—almost the precise inverse of the Keneges case vis-à-vis Bukhara.117
Radiating outward, recent research suggests similar patterns elsewhere in Eurasia. Khoqand at times performed the role of a loyal Chinese client state.118 Kabul decisively projected control over what we now consider Afghanistan only in the second half of the nineteenth century, before which time myriad city-states asserted varying degrees of sovereignty.119 The Nizam of Hyderabad continued to insist that he ruled on behalf of the Mughal emperor long after that relationship ceased to have any administrative meaning, and concurrent with the increasing de facto authority of Britain.120 And even as the Qajar dynasty of Iran advanced to integrate the scattered polities left in the wake of the collapsed Safavid Empire, individual subordinate “governors” maintained bilateral relations with one another and cultivated regional courts of their own, complete with select symbols of royal sovereignty.121 On the very eve of the modern state, sovereignty was markedly contested and variegated across much of Eurasia, particularly in the central reaches beyond the surviving gunpowder empires and advancing colonial ones.
Thus Shahrisabz was in good company, both within Central Asia and beyond. Colonialism did not put an end to this patchwork quilt of overlapping sovereignties, but it certainly hardened borders, leaving no room for the likes of Shahrisabz. A curious petition that found its way into the Bukharan chancellery archive drives home this point. It also serves as a fitting epitaph for the sovereign emirate of Shahrisabz.122
Probably sometime in the mid-1870s, thirty-four leading men of Shahrisabz—one of whom was quite possibly the same ʿAbd al-Nabī Khwāja ibn Muḥammad Rāziq who appears on numerous waqf documents—signed a letter sent directly to the governor-general of Turkestan detailing the transgressions the new Bukharan administration had visited upon the population of Shahrisabz.123 After subduing the obstreperous city-state, General Abramov had forbidden the Bukharan amir to forcibly relocate any Shahrisabz residents, but no sooner had the Russian troops returned to base than Manghit troops did precisely that. Five hundred households were compelled to move to various neighborhoods in Bukhara city and Chārjūy, and members of several of them were executed or imprisoned for resisting.124 Making matters worse, Bukhara levied significantly higher taxes than the Keneges had.125 Adding insult to injury, the Manghits sent irreligious (bē diyānat) men to fill the posts of judge (qāḍī) and raʾīs (censor, a.k.a. muḥtasib)—or so complained the local men who had formerly held those same positions. Most egregious, in the petitioners’ view, was the amir’s biannual visit to Shahrisabz, during which time he engaged in untold debauchery, stealing the daughters (already married or otherwise) of respectable denizens of Shahrisabz on a nightly basis, including those of several of the signatories.126
These are the voices of a marginalized elite lamenting fundamentally new structural circumstances ushered in by colonialism. There is nothing extraordinary about the elite of a deposed regime negotiating their place in the new order, whether they be zamindars in the parallel Indian context or dihqāns (landed gentry) in early Islamic Iran. What is unusual about this case is that the voices of elites rooted outside the “three khanates” of Bukhara, Khoqand, and Khiva have been so occluded that the power dynamics of their world have been forgotten along with them.
In that narrow, technical sense, then, the Keneges dynasty and associated elite are subaltern. The world hinted at in the few sources written in their own voice is fundamentally at odds with the one portrayed in Bukharan and colonial sources. ʿAbd al-Nabī and his cohort of judges, village elders (aqsaqal), and members of the (quite likely Keneges) Turkic military elite (e.g., qarawul-begi, mīr-ākhūr) portray the city-state’s annexation at the hands of Bukhara as a rupture with the past. While they do refer to the Keneges as governors (ḥākim), as opposed to loftier titles deployed by Bukharan rulers, they also explicitly state: “It should be known to you [i.e., the governor-general of Turkestan] that this domain (mamlakat) of Shahrisabz from the very beginning to the very end has had absolutely no connection to or dependency (taʿalluq) on the amir of Bukhara.” The letter went on to state that the residents of Shahrisabz would be much happier to pay taxes directly to the White Shah (aq pādishāh) and requested that Shahrisabz be directly incorporated into the Russian Empire.127 Of course, that request was never granted, and given that this document now resides in the Bukharan chancellery collection rather than a Russian archive, the fate of these residual Shahrisabzi elites was likely not a happy one.
Fundamentally modern terms such as “state” and “sovereignty” fit poorly with the messy and overlapping power dynamics of the precolonial period. In Central Asia, the implicit criteria in the secondary literature for “statehood” have heretofore been determined by an invisible schematic: a given polity qualifies as a state if it survived to become a Russian protectorate and—more importantly—bequeathed to future historians a chronicle tradition valorizing the ruling dynasty. Even when recognizing the military victories that Shahrisabz achieved over Bukhara, much of the extant literature is overly credulous regarding the categories that permeate hegemonic Bukharan sources. In an alternate reality where the Keneges had managed to preserve a text glorifying themselves, our appraisal of them would be very different. In the absence of any such documentation, a more critical reading of hostile sources, along with careful analysis of the few surviving sources indigenous to Shahrisabz, reveals a much more complex tapestry of overlapping, quasi-autonomous city-states.
The impetus for recovering this particular subaltern voice goes beyond reconstituting the marginalized voice for its own sake. By ignoring the power of textual production in precolonial sources, along with the hierarchies established by categories carried into colonial and even modern scholarship, we have superimposed the unitary state onto a time period where the term is inadequate.128 Scholars of early modern Europe have made strides in grappling with some of these complexities, and the power dynamics of much of Eurasia during this period are more elusive still.129
By pursuing an “à la carte” approach to precolonial sovereignty—considering markers of power on a case-by-case basis without assuming universal congruity—we can trace power and influence along multiple vectors. Enemy chronicles grudgingly reveal that the Keneges held their own against their more powerful neighbors, and that they successfully managed to resist resource extraction, even though their ability to expand their sphere of influence beyond the surrounding mountains was limited. The few surviving documents produced in their domain show that the Keneges did not symbolically subordinate themselves to their alleged sovereigns, even though something inhibited them from embracing the loftiest titles in circulation. And they established an independent religious hierarchy, even though they could never hope to match Bukhara’s vast madrasa establishment.
There remains much to learn about premodern sovereignty, but a modest first step is precision: sovereign how, over what, and under which circumstances? This specificity helps us move from premodern sovereignty as an implicitly residual category, gesturing toward anything other than the Westphalian variety, to myriad manifestations of the phenomenon intersecting in different times and places. In the case of Shahrisabz, such clarity is achievable through critical readings of hegemonic sources, coupled with fragmentary reconstruction of non-hegemonic ones. Bukhara ultimately triumphed in its century-spanning struggle to subdue its Keneges rival in Shahrisabz—with a crucial assist from the Russian Empire. Even more impressive was the feat of successfully consigning an arch-nemesis to the status of a “province in rebellion.” Yet no victory is absolute, and many other marginalized polities like Shahrisabz lurk beneath the textual morass, waiting to reveal their stories.
James Pickett is Assistant Professor in the History Department of the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently completing a study of Islamic scholars in Central Asia during the nineteenth century, and is beginning an investigation of semicolonialism and cultures of documentation in the Islamic world.
I would like to thank Julia Stephens, Alexander Morrison, Evelyn Rawski, and—most especially—the anonymous AHR peer reviewers for providing critical feedback that made this a much better essay. I am also grateful for Ryan Horne’s invaluable guidance in designing the maps. This research was made possible by a Social Science Research Council Transregional Research Junior Scholar Fellowship (2017–2018). Earlier versions of this article were presented to the Institute of Iranian Studies of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (2015), and the Annual Conference on South Asia in Madison, Wisconsin (2017).
Notes
1Kish is the older name for Shahrisabz and was still used in manuscripts in the early modern period. Dil-kash, the traditional nickname of Kish, means “the charming, the alluring,” or literally “heart-puller.” On the memory of Timur (a.k.a. Tamerlane) as a patron of the occult sciences, see A. Azfar Moin, The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam (New York, 2013); Matthew Melvin-Koushki and James Pickett, “Mobilizing Magic: Occultism in Central Asia and the Continuity of High Persianate Culture under Russian Rule,” Studia Islamica 111, no. 2 (2016): 231–284.
2For an instance of the reciprocal of this accusation—i.e., the Manghit dynast of Bukhara justifying war against the Keneges on the grounds of infidelity (kufr)—see Jung-i Qāḍī Mīr Sayyid Qamar Ṣudūr, ms., Institut vostokovedeniia imeni Abu Raikhana Beruni Akademii nauk Uzbekistana [hereafter IVANUz], no. 2588, fol. 142b.
3A similar point is in fact made in a Persian text collected by the Russian orientalist Alexander Kuhn: “Rasskaz o praviteliakh Shakhrisiabza pered russkim zavoevaniem,” ms., Arkhiv vostokovedov Instituta vostochnykh rukopisei Rossiiskoi akademii nauk [hereafter AV IVR RAN], f. 33 (Kuhn), o. 1, d. 142, http://zerrspiegel.orientphil.uni-halle.de/t1189.html. “Half-Shah” was apparently how locals understood the status of Konstantin Petrovich von Kaufmann (governor-general of Russian Turkestan, 1867–1882) vis-à-vis that of the Russian emperor. M. A. Terent’ev, Istoriia zavoevaniia Srednei Azii, 3 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1906), 1: 384.
4Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Nicole Jerr, “Editors’ Introduction,” in Ben-Dor Benite, Geroulanos, and Jerr, eds., The Scaffolding of Sovereignty: Global and Aesthetic Perspectives on the History of a Concept (New York, 2017), 1–49, here 6, 11. A more detailed engagement with conceptual literature on sovereignty is offered later in this essay.
5How this essay conceives of the fraught dichotomy of “modern/premodern” is discussed subsequently.
6James Pickett, “Nadir Shah’s Peculiar Central Asian Legacy: Empire, Conversion Narratives, and the Rise of New Scholarly Dynasties,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 48, no. 3 (2016): 491–510.
7The neutral term “city-state” is used here heuristically to distance us from the assumptions that go with the modern state, as well as terms that misleadingly appear to be emic categories, such as “khanate.” (While some rulers adopted the title “khan,” as will be discussed subsequently, “khanate” is a direct translation from Russian, and has no equivalent in precolonial sources.)
8Moreover, locals in post-Soviet Shahrisabz seem to have no recollection at all of the aforementioned Keneges dynasty, based on limited interviews that I conducted there in August 2014. In the first centuries of Islamic rule, Shahrisabz (then known exclusively as Kish) was important enough to merit an entry in the Arabic geographical works that proliferated in the ninth and tenth centuries, but it was not enough of a regional center to produce any local histories of its own (in contrast with Bukhara, Balkh, and Termez, for instance). Nevertheless, the ninth-century geographer Aḥmad al-Yaʿqūbī gives Kish pride of place in his Kitāb al-buldān as the chief town of Sogdia, to the extent that it was also known simply as “Sughd.” C. E. Bosworth, “Kish,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, ed. P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, and W. P. Heinrichs, consulted online on April 9, 2018, http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_SIM_4402. But that assessment is probably exaggerated, judging by the relative importance of Kish vis-à-vis Samarqand. Étienne de la Vaissière, Sogdian Traders: A History, trans. James Ward (Leiden, 2005).
9Debates over the colonial production of knowledge in Central Asian studies tend to focus on the language of the sources in question, with Russian sources tantamount to the outsider voice, and Persian, Turkic, and (sometimes) Arabic sources playing the role of “local” or “Muslim” sources. For instance, see Devin DeWeese’s thorough critique of uncritical readings of Soviet sources, “Islam and the Legacy of Sovietology: A Review Essay on Yaacov Ro’i’s Islam in the Soviet Union,” Journal of Islamic Studies 13, no. 3 (2002): 298–330.
10This stands as an instance of “converting [local] forms of knowledge into European objects,” to adopt Bernard Cohn’s argument, with the important distinction that in this case Russian categories happened to align with Bukharan territorial ambitions. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, N.J., 1996), 21.
11Literature focused on territories north of the Oxus River is dominated by what I term the “three khanates model,” which takes for granted the existence of three “Uzbek” states—Khiva, Bukhara, and Khoqand—that were conquered by the Russian Empire and ultimately incorporated into the Soviet Union. See, for instance, Yuri Bregel, “The New Uzbek States: Bukhara, Khiva and Khoqand, c. 1750–1886,” in Nicola Di Cosmo, Allen J. Frank, and Peter B. Golden, eds., The Cambridge History of Inner Asia: The Chinggisid Age (Cambridge, 2009), 392–410; Seymour Becker, Russia’s Protectorates in Central Asia: Bukhara and Khiva, 1865–1924 (Cambridge, Mass., 1968).
12As Rosalind O’Hanlon emphasized in a seminal essay, subaltern groups do not exist independently of the hegemonic forces that render them subaltern. In this understanding, peasants are subalterns not because they are peasants, but because of their subordinate relationship to hegemonic discourse. O’Hanlon, “Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in Colonial South Asia,” Modern Asian Studies 22, no. 1 (1988): 189–224, here 200, 217.
13Ranajit Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” in Guha, The Small Voice of History: Collected Essays (Bangalore, 2010), 194–238, here 195.
14To a fault, in the opinion of critics. Richard M. Eaton, “(Re)imag(in)Ing Other2ness: A Postmortem for the Postmodern in India,” in Eaton, Essays on Islam and Indian History (New Delhi, 2000), 133–155, here 139.
15For instance, Jeff Sahadeo, Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent, 1865–1923 (Bloomington, Ind., 2007); Douglas Northrop, Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia (Ithaca, N.Y., 2004); Paula A. Michaels, Curative Powers: Medicine and Empire in Stalin’s Central Asia (Pittsburgh, 2003). On the debate over Russia’s exceptionalism with regard to colonial paradigms, see Nathaniel Knight, “Grigor’ev in Orenburg, 1851–1862: Russian Orientalism in the Service of Empire?,” Slavic Review 59, no. 1 (2000): 74–100; David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Russian Orientalism: Asia in the Russian Mind from Peter the Great to the Emigration (New Haven, Conn., 2010).
16Peter C. Perdue, “Comparing Empires: Manchu Colonialism,” International History Review 20, no. 2 (1998): 255–262; Michael Adas, “Imperialism and Colonialism in Comparative Perspective,” ibid., 371–388; Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China (Chicago, 2001).
17Tamara T. Chin, “Defamiliarizing the Foreigner: Sima Qian’s Ethnography and Han-Xiongnu Marriage Diplomacy,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 70, no. 2 (2010): 311–354; Alice Yao, The Ancient Highlands of Southwest China: From the Bronze Age to the Han Empire (Oxford, 2016).
18Rudolph T. Ware III, The Walking Qurʼan: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in West Africa (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2014), 33; Paolo Sartori, Visions of Justice: Sharīʿa and Cultural Change in Russian Central Asia (Leiden, 2016), 14.
19Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, N.J., 2009).
20Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” 209.
21Shail Mayaram, Against History, against State: Counterperspectives from the Margins (New York, 2003), chap. 4. Azfar Moin also sets out to “read against the grain” in precolonial sources; The Millennial Sovereign, 15. For an equally illuminating counterhegemonic reading of Islamic sources in a very different time and place, see Patricia Crone, The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran: Rural Revolt and Local Zoroastrianism (New York, 2012). Within Central Asia, intensely source-critical readings of Islamic sources have notably been used to recover nomadic understandings of religion; e.g., Devin DeWeese, Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde: Baba Tükles and Conversion to Islam in Historical and Epic Tradition (University Park, Pa., 1994).
22Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (1981; repr., Baltimore, 1992), xvii.
23As in the Indian case, “the seemingly omnipotent classifications of the Orientalist were vulnerable to purposeful misconstruction and appropriation to uses which he never intended, precisely because they had incorporated into them the readings and the political concerns of his native informants.” O’Hanlon, “Recovering the Subject,” 217.
24Crucially, there are no comparable Shahrisabz chronicles, at least none that have survived. Alexander Kuhn recorded a dozen or so titles from the library in Kitāb, Shahrisabz’s sister city, during the 1870 Russian conquest, but none of them appear to deal with the area’s specific history. “Opis’ knigam sobrannym v Kitabe,” Tsentral’nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Respubliki Uzbekistana, Tashkent [hereafter TsGARUz], f. i-1, o. 69, d. 15, fols. 68a–69a.
25For a superb example of combining fragments of non-hegemonic sources with strategies of reading against the grain, see Devin DeWeese, “Shamanization in Central Asia,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 57, no. 3 (2014): 326–363.
26Continuing from the previous quote on the value of hostile chronicles for recovering microhistory, Ginzburg writes: “even meager, scattered, and obscure documentation can be put to good use”; The Cheese and the Worms, xvii. See also C. Patterson Giersch, Asian Borderlands: The Transformation of Qing China’s Yunnan Frontier (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), 2–3, 8. Of course, many subaltern entities did not even leave fragments to puzzle over, so the strategy applied in this essay is not necessarily applicable to all cases. Nevertheless, sources in non-European languages remain vastly underused relative to colonial sources. Sheldon Pollock, “Introduction,” in Pollock, ed., Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern Asia: Explorations in the Intellectual History of India and Tibet, 1500–1800 (Durham N.C., 2011), 1–16, here 4. For instance, Alice Yao creatively uses burial mounds in Yunnan province to augment a counterhegemonic reading of Han Chinese sources; The Ancient Highlands of Southwest China, 16.
27James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, Conn., 2009), 34.
28TsGARUz, f. i-323, o. 1, dd. 53, 749, 1171, 1125, 581, 751, composed respectively in 1780, 1784, 1811, 1831, 1837, and 1849. Kuhn (who was present at the Russian conquest of Shahrisabz in 1870) reported collecting fifty other waqfs, but the location of those texts (along with many other documents produced by the city-state) is—as far as I am aware—unknown. A. L. Kuhn, “Ocherki Shagrisebzkogo bekstva,” Zapiski Imperatorskago russkago geograficheskago obshchestva po Otdeleniiu etnografii 6 (1880): 203–237, here 203.
29A handful of document collections from city-states other than the “three khanates” have been preserved. See, for example, A. A. Semenov and O. D. Chekhovich, eds., Materialy po istorii Ura-Tiube: Sbornik aktov XVII–XIX vv., trans. A. Mukhtarov (Moscow, 1963). Note also remarks about documents produced in Khujand being indicative of its “liminal position” vis-à-vis surrounding polities in Thomas Welsford and Nouryaghdi Tashev, eds., A Catalogue of Arabic-Script Documents from the Samarqand Museum (Samarqand, 2012), 478. On the Soviet-era fate of Bukharan documents, see Mukhaiyo Isakova, Stanovlenie i razvitie arkhivnogo dela v Uzbekistane (Tashkent, 2012), 65.
30To be clear, at any given time, one or the other side might have had the upper hand, but both were clearly beneath the status of the Chinggisid monarch, and therefore on a broadly even playing field of Turkic military elite.
31Confusingly, the Tuqay-Timurids (sometimes Astrakhanids or Janids) were Chinggisids, but not Timurids. The name of this lineage is derived not from Timur/Tamerlane, but rather from Tuqay-Temur, son of Jochi and grandson of Chinggis Khan (as opposed to Shiban, son of Jochi, whose direct descendants ruled Central Asia from 1500 to 1599).
32Andreas Wilde, What Is beyond the River? Power, Authority, and Social Order in Transoxania, 18th–19th Centuries (Vienna, 2016), 167–168.
33Muḥammad Yaʿqūb Bukhārī ibn Amīr Dāniyāl Biy, Risāla, ms., Institut vostochnykh rukopisei Rossiiskoi akademii nauk [hereafter IVR RAN], no. C 1934, fols. 1b–2a. For greater detail, see also the work of Andreas Wilde, who has painstakingly cross-referenced all of the Bukharan chronicles from the eighteenth through early nineteenth centuries; What Is beyond the River?, 167.
34Shortly after 1719, Keneges warriors even assaulted the arg fortress of Bukhara itself, attempting a coup against the Tuqay-Timurids. Had events played out just a little bit differently, the Keneges might have been lords of Bukhara rather than the Manghits. Ibrāhīm Biy, the “flamboyant” leader of the Keneges during this period, was repeatedly promoted for his transgressions by the impotent khan. Wilde, What Is beyond the River?, 238.
35Kāẓim, ʿĀlam ārā-yi Nādirī, 1105–1108. There were apparently five subdivisions of the Keneges, at least at one point. For a description, see Wilde, What Is beyond the River?, 169; Kuhn, “Ocherki Shagrisebzkogo bekstva,” 218. As a veteran of Nadir Shah’s campaign against Khorezm, ʿĀlim Beg enjoyed connections and familiarity with the Afsharid troops that his opponent in the nearby province of Yakka-bāgh, Qābil Beg, most likely lacked. Sayyid ʿUmar Beg ibn Khudāyār Khan, Anjum al-tawārīkh, ms., IVANUz, no. 11366, fol. 82b; Kāẓim, ʿĀlam ārā-yi Nādirī, 802.
36Pickett, “Nadir Shah’s Peculiar Central Asian Legacy.”
37Kuhn’s informant even provided an origin story in which the originators of the two tribes were described as actual brothers: “From the time of Timur to the time of Ḥusayn Mīrzā, that province [Shahrisabz] was in the hands of the Timurids for around 300 years. After that, Keneges and Manghit were two brothers living together in that province. Their respective offspring multiplied greatly.” (“Az waqt-i Tīmūr tā zamān-i Ḥusayn Mīrzā, ān wilāyat bi-dast-i Tīmūrīyān būda ast kih qarīb-i sīṣad sāl istāda buda ast; baʿd az ān Kēna-gis wa Manghīt dū barādar būda and, kih dar hamīn wilāyat-i Kēsh istaqāmat dāshtand wa jamāʿa-i īn dū barādar jamʿīyyat-i bisiyār shudand.”) “Dnevnik mirzy Abdurrakhmana vedennyi vo vremia Shakhrisiabskoi ekspeditsii,” ms., AV IVR RAN, f. 33 (Kuhn), o. 1, d. 220, fols. 15a–15b.
38A. Mukhtarov, “The Manghīts,” in Chahryar Adle and Irfan Habib, eds., History of Civilizations of Central Asia, vol. 5: Development in Contrast: From the Sixteenth to the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Paris, 2003), 53–62, here 57; Becker, Russia’s Protectorates in Central Asia, 4. This language echoes formulations in earlier Soviet works; see S. V. Bakhrushin, ed., Istoriia narodov Uzbekistana, vol. 2: Ot obrazovaniia gosudarstva Sheibanidov do velikoi oktiabr’skoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii (Tashkent, 1947), 147.
39“Dnevnik mirzy Abdurrakhmana vedennyi vo vremia Shakhrisiabskoi ekspeditsii,” fol. 15a.
40For a biography on Kuhn—who was one of the very first university-trained Russian orientalists to join the Turkestan administration—as well as his informant ʿAbd al-Rahmān Samarqandī, see Olga Yastrebova and Arezou Azad, “Reflections on an Orientalist: Alexander Kuhn (1840–88), the Man and His Legacy,” Iranian Studies 48, no. 5 (2015): 675–694, here 675, 677–679.
41This explanation emerges from the 1859 testimony of a Cossack who had served in the Bukharan military and fought against Shahrisabz as a slave, and eventually returned to the Orenburg line after being released. The informant was almost certainly referring to Amir Naṣrallāh. “Pokazaniia russkikh plennykh vozvrashchennykh iz Bukhary,” Russian State Military-Historical Archive, Moscow [hereafter RGVIA], f. 1441, o. 1, d. 101, fol. 17a.
42Wilde, What Is beyond the River?, 405–406. According to oral tradition collected by Kuhn in 1870, Raḥīm Khan accomplished this by inviting Keneges nobles for a banquet in Bukhara and then treacherously arresting them. Kuhn, “Ocherki Shagrisebzkogo bekstva,” 234.
43Kuhn, “Rasskaz o praviteliakh Shakhrisabza pered russkim zavoevaniem”; Muḥammad Ḥakīm Khan, Muntakhab al-tawārīkh, vol. 1 (Tokyo, 2009), 361.
44Ibid., 369; Muḥammad Yaʿqūb Bukhārī, Risāla, fol. 25a.
45Anonymous, Ẓafar-nāma-i khusrawī: Sharḥ-i ḥukmrawānī-yi Sayyid Amīr Naṣrallāh Bahādur Sulṭān bin Ḥaydar, ed. Minūchihr Sutūda (Tehran, 1999), 65. Ḥaydar managed to take the Keneges fortress of Chirāgh-chī later in his reign (ibid., 87–88), but apparently only temporarily, since his successor spent a great deal of time fighting for that same territory.
46Muḥammad Ḥakīm Khan, Muntakhab al-tawārīkh, vol. 1, 388, 409, 427. Naṣrallāh retook some of those holdings during the wars of the 1840s and 1850s, when the frontier between the two city-states was in a constant state of flux. For instance, in 1855 Bukhara advanced within striking distance of the city of Shahrisabz itself, though it was ultimately forced to retreat. “Pokazaniia Russkikh plennykh vozvrashchennykh iz Bukhary,” RGVIA, f. 1441, o. 1, d. 102, fol. 78b.
47ʿAbd al-Ghafūr Turkistānī wrote that every year, the amir of Bukhara would wage war against the amir of Shahrisabz (“har sāl dū bār lashkar kashīda mē-raftand”), and that during those parts of the year, ʿAbd al-Ghafūr would spend his time in school (maktab) rather than serving as a clerk for Naṣrallāh. ʿAbd al-Ghafūr was born in Shahrisabz and wrote that one of his kin was forced to flee the city-state due to the constant fighting. ʿAbd al-Ghafūr-i Turkistānī, Bayān-i dāstān-i sarguzasht-i ʿAbd al-Ghafūr Turkistānī, ms., Rossiiskaia natsional’naia biblioteka, Otdel rukopisei, no. Khanykov 53, fols. 50a, 52a–53b. In 1847, two separate campaigns were waged; RGVIA, f. 1441, o. 1, d. 102, fol. 76b. These fruitless campaigns against Shahrisabz were even noted in British intelligence reports; see, for example, National Archives of India, Calcutta [hereafter NAI], Foreign Department, December 26, 1851, no. 19–20. Resisting these sieges came at a high price to the local population in Shahrisabz, such as widespread malnutrition. Aleksandr Pavlovich Khoroshkhin, “Uzbeki Kenegez: Etnograficheskii ocherk,” in Turkestanskii sbornik, vol. 116 (St. Petersburg, 1876), 516–519, here 517.
48The victory was celebrated for ten full days throughout the city-state of Bukhara. RGVIA, f. 1441, o. 1, d. 102, fol. 79b.
49Mīr Salmān Samarqandī, Tafṣīl u bayān-i dawlat-i jamāʿat-i Manghit, ms., IVR RAN, no. 661, fols. 176a–177a. The fates of the last rulers of Kitāb and Shahrisabz (including Bābā Beg) are also described in Russian reports; Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv, St. Petersburg, f. 400, o. 1, d. 352.
50Kuhn mentions one instance when a Keneges ruler (Niyāz ʿAlī) sent a supplicatory gift (tartuq) to the Manghits after losing an individual battle to Shāh-Murād. Kuhn, “Ocherki Shagrisebzkogo bekstva,” 235.
51Khoroshkhin, “Uzbeki Kenegez,” 518. T. K. Beisembiev, “Unknown Dynasty: The Rulers of Shahrisabz in the 18th and 19th Centuries,” Journal of Central Asia 15, no. 1 (1992): 20–22.
52This assassination was ordered by Naṣrallāh Manghit, and carried out in 1843. Muḥammad Ḥakīm Khan, Muntakhab al-tawārīkh, vol. 1, 602–603. “Turan” is a term from the Persian epic tradition, contrasted with Iran and referring roughly to what is now Central Asia—a most flattering allusion. The verse about Qulī Bek Keneges begins “Custodian of Kesh [i.e., Shahrisabz], patron of religion” (“Wālī-yi mulk-i Kēsh, ḥāmī-yi dīn; Sar-i ḥukkām-i kishwar-i Tūrān”). Ibid., 600.
53Shāh-Murād (r. 1785–1800) demanded that Nīyāz ʿAlī hand over Ḥājjī Khan, who was a princeling of Merv, which Murād had recently conquered. Muḥammad Ḥakīm Khan, Muntakhab al-tawārīkh, vol. 1, 366.
54“Svedeniia o Tashkente i sredneaziiatskikh khanstvakh, dostavlennye Magomet-sagyt Baem,” Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv drevnikh aktov, Moscow, f. 1385, o. 1, d. 694, fol. 14. For a synthetic treatment of the Bukhara-Khoqand contest, see Scott C. Levi, The Rise and Fall of Khoqand, 1709–1876: Central Asia in the Global Age (Pittsburgh, 2017).
55Interestingly, many (but by no means all) of the Khoqand chronicles were written after the Russian conquest, providing another contrast with the Shahrisabz case, which—aside from in the materials discussed here—did not lead to any such post facto nostalgia. Timur K. Beisembiev, Annotated Indices to the Kokand Chronicles (Tokyo, 2008), 20–23. One partial exception would be the lithographed edition of a Bukharan poetical anthology, which was published by an exiled Keneges prince in Tashkent with the conspicuous addition of a number of Shahrisabz poets. Qārī Raḥmatallāh Wāḍiḥ, Tuḥfat al-aḥbāb fī taẕkirat al-aṣḥāb (Tashkent, 1913–1914), 386–482.
56Ẓafar-nāma-i Khusrawī, 66.
57“Darīn muddat ḥākim-i Shahrisabz tamarrud warzīda sar az khaṭṭ-i farmān-i ān ṣāhib-i dawlat dar kashīda ʿinād wa sarkashī rā pēsha-i khūd sākhta būd.” Mīr Salmān Samarqandī, Tafṣīl u bayān-i dawlat-i jamāʿat-i Manghit, fol. 175b.
58On the power inherent in the discretion to assert a phenomenon as outside the norm, see, for instance, Nasser Hussain, The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2003).
59“Wa liwāʾ-i nūr ū ḍīyāʾ barāyi hazīmat-i lashkar-i hindwī shab tīra sīmā bar afrākht.” Mīr ʿĀlim Bukhārī, Fatḥ-nāma-i sulṭānī, ms., IVANUz, no. 1838, fols. 62a–62b.
60Importantly, the few Russian military reports written prior to the colonial period refer to both the Keneges and Manghit rulers neutrally as “possessors” (vladelets/vladetel’) of their territory. RGVIA, f. 1441, o. 1, d. 102, especially fol. 17b.
61“Svedeniia, izvlechennye iz ob”iasnenii Mirzy Iakub Khana, russkogo sekretnogo agenta o polozhenii del v Bukhare, 1863,” RGVIA, f. 400, o. 1, d. 4725, fol. 2b.
62“Account of Futeh Muhomad’s Intelligence-Gathering Expedition to Turkestan,” NAI, Foreign Department, Secret (December 28, 1855), fol. 35.
63Ibid., fols. 31, 42.
64Mīr ʿĀlim Bukhārī, Fatḥ-nāma-i sulṭānī, ms., IVANUz, no. 1838.
65Mīr Salmān Samarqandī, Tafṣīl u bayān-i dawlat-i jamāʿat-i Manghit, fol. 177a.
66The princess was understandably upset to be snatched from the arms of her former husband, who was a Keneges noble. The legend holds that after she killed the khan, she killed her children from the previous marriage before killing herself. Khoroshkhin, “Uzbeki Kenegez,” 518. Khoroshkhin recognized that this tale of regicide was probably not historically accurate and offered several other explanations for Naṣrallāh’s death—all of which are far less colorful.
67As Lauren Benton has demonstrated, layered sovereignty was “one of the defining characteristics” even of European colonial empires into the nineteenth century. Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge, 2009), 31. Indeed, the very idea of “territory” is a modern concept, as “even the very rare instances of the Latin word territorium do not straightforwardly map onto our modern notion.” Stuart Elden, The Birth of Territory (Chicago, 2013), 11.
68This includes the invention of the “medieval” as a bridge to “the modern.” Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia, 2008). However, many exceptions to the ideal of territorial, binary sovereignty remain, even in the modern state. Robert H. Jackson, Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Third World (New York, 1990).
69This understanding of sovereignty draws on James J. Sheehan, who writes: “The concept of sovereignty has to do with the relationship of political power to other forms of authority … Sovereignty is best understood as a set of claims made by those seeking or wielding power, claims about the superiority and autonomy of their authority.” Sheehan, “The Problem of Sovereignty in European History,” AHA Presidential Address, American Historical Review 111, no. 1 (February 2006): 1–15, here 2, 3. See also Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, N.J., 2011), 16–17. Sometimes the idea of “suzerainty”—a kind of “sovereignty lite”—is deployed to encapsulate the diversity of premodern non-Western societies. See, for instance, Robert Jackson, Sovereignty: Evolution of an Idea (Cambridge, 2007), 7.
70Emergent scholarship on post-caliphal ideologies of universal Islamic kingship has made important advances in this regard, with relevance even through the period of this study. Moin, The Millennial Sovereign; Jonathan Z. Brack, “Mediating Sacred Kingship: Conversion and Sovereignty in Mongol Iran” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2016). On changing conceptions of sovereign borders in the nineteenth century, see Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Frontier Fictions: Shaping the Iranian Nation, 1804–1946 (Princeton, N.J., 1999).
71Munis D. Faruqui, The Princes of the Mughal Empire, 1504–1719 (Cambridge, 2012), 4.
72As Dariusz Kołodziejczyk deftly illustrates, depending on how we conceive of sovereignty, even Poland might be considered part of the Ottoman Empire at certain junctures. Kołodziejczyk, “What Is Inside and What Is Outside? Tributary States in Ottoman Politics,” in Gábor Kármán and Lovro Kunčević, eds., The European Tributary States of the Ottoman Empire in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Leiden, 2013), 421–432.
73See, for instance, O. A. Solov’eva, Liki vlasti Blagorodnoi Bukhary (St. Petersburg, 2002), 16; Bregel, “The New Uzbek States,” 403; Wolfgang Holzwarth, “The Uzbek State as Reflected in Eighteenth Century Bukharan Sources,” in Thomas Herzog and Wolfgang Holzwarth, eds., Nomaden und Sesshafte—Fragen, Methoden, Ergebnisse (Halle, 2004), 93–129, here 99.
74Robert Oresko, G. C. Gibbs, and H. M. Scott, “Introduction,” in Oresko, Gibbs, and Scott, eds., Royal and Republican Sovereignty in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Memory of Ragnhild Hatton (New York, 1997), 1–42, here 3.
75Norman Calder, “Friday Prayer and the Juristic Theory of Government: Sarakhsī, Shīrāzī, Māwardī,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 49, no. 1 (1986): 35–47.
76For instance, see the brief discussion of the khuṭba in Qunduz below.
77Stephen Album, A Checklist of Islamic Coins, 3rd ed. (Santa Rosa, Calif., 2011), 1–2. There may be a practical rather than political reason for this: Shahrisabz lacked mines; all of its metal was imported from Bukhara. Kuhn, “Ocherki Shagrisebzkogo bekstva,” 232.
78V. N. Nastich, “Novoe o monetnom chekane Kesha i Shakhrisabza,” Epigrafika Vostoka 30 (2013): 185–200, here 196. Nevertheless, the same author characterizes Shahrisabz as one of several provinces exercising “autonomous rule” with instances of active resistance. Ibid., 188. However, a tradition of locally authorized minting of copper coin is also evident in centuries prior, so the implications of Shahrisabz’s local currency go only so far. Album, A Checklist of Islamic Coins.
79Michael Fedorov, Boris Kochnev, Golib Kurbanov, and Madeleine Voegeli, eds., Sylloge numorum Arabicorum Tübingen: Buhārā/Samarqand XVa Mittelasien/Central Asia I (Tübingen, 2008), 54–59. Tantalizingly, Kuhn reported that some copper currency minted in Shahrisabz had “the name of the sovereign” (“imia gosudaria”) on one side, without clarifying which sovereign, but seeming to imply the Keneges monarch (“gosudaria pri kotorom chekanilas’ moneta”). Kuhn, “Ocherki Shagrisebzkogo bekstva,” 232. In any case, no such monies bearing the name Keneges seem to have survived.
80For instance, the title takes pride of place in the biography of a particular Turkic noble who rotated through various governorships in the late Bukharan emirate. “Tārīkh-i ḥayāt-i imārat-panāh-i Mīrzā Mahdī-Khwāja Biy,” TsGARUz, f. i-126, o. 1, d. 1160, fol. 1. This seems to be the case in the Khivan khanate as well; a letter from a group of Qaraqalpaqs is addressed to imārat-panāh, but is clearly not referring to the khan himself (perhaps one of the court officials). TsGARUz, f. i-125, o. 2, d. 108, fol. 166.
81For instance, Mīr Saʿādatallah, Luṭf-i buzūrg, ms., IVR RAN, no. B 1932, fol. 21b (referring to Muḥammad Raḥīm Biy), fol. 54a (referring to Shāh-Murād).
82Muḥammad Ḥakīm Khan, Muntakhab al-tawārīkh, vol. 1, 403. For another casual reference to the Keneges as “amirs” of Shahrisabz (and using the same title to refer to the Manghit ruler within a single sentence, strongly implying equality), see Bayān-i dāstān-i sarguzasht-i ʿAbd al-Ghafūr Turkistānī, fol. 53b.
83Similarly, there is no direct parallel to “khanate” (khanstvo) in Persian and Turkic sources. These formulations seem to be analogies to the Russian categories tsarstvo (“kingdom”) and dvorianstvo (“landed aristocracy”). A similar point is made in Andreas Wilde, “Creating the Façade of a Despotic State: On Āqsaqāls in Late 19th-Century Bukhara,” in Paolo Sartori, ed., Explorations in the Social History of Modern Central Asia (19th–Early 20th Century) (Leiden, 2013), 267–298, here 277.
84R. D. McChesney, “The Amirs of Muslim Central Asia in the XVIIth Century,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 26, no. 1 (1983): 33–70, here 35. Unlike their Tuqay-Timurid predecessors, the Manghits were not Chinggisids, and once they tossed out their short-lived policy of keeping on the throne a puppet khan descended from Chinggis Khan, the term “amir” became much more ambiguous in its implications. Interestingly, one chronicler reported an Islamic justification for the Persian title of royalty in the Manghit case. According to Ḥakīm Khan, several of Raḥīm [Biy] Khan’s (r. 1747–1759) most sycophantic (khūsh-āmad-gūy) scholars wrote a fatwa to the effect that any ruler who could support an army of twelve thousand men was entitled to call himself pādishāh, which Raḥīm Khan proceeded to do without delay. Muḥammad Ḥakīm Khan, Muntakhab al-tawārīkh, vol. 1, 358. Based on legal opinions from the period, however, the notion that pādishāh was an Islamic rank was apparently accepted, and it was listed in one manual as one of five ranks that every Islamic polity should have, the others being qāḍī (judge), mufti (legal opinion writer), mudarris (instructor), and muḥtasib (censor). Jung-i Muḥammad Ṭāhir, ms., IVANUz, no. 6029, fol. 381b.
85TsGARUz, f. i-323, o. 1, dd. 53, 751, 1171.
86Despite a general recognition in the Islamic world that only the Ottomans had inherited the caliphate from the Abbasids, such a move was not out of the question for lesser political entities. Shibani Khan (r. 1500–1510) had briefly claimed just such a status. Anke von Kügelgen, Legitimatsiia sredneaziatskoi dinastii mangitov v proizvedeniiakh ikh istorikov, XVIII–XIX vv. (Almaty, 2004), 45.
87In fact, it is not entirely clear what the specific responsibilities of this position were. McChesney, “The Amirs of Muslim Central Asia in the XVIIth Century,” 64. Likely the job description vacillated along with the person holding it.
88Muḥammad Yaʿqūb Bukhārī, Risāla, fols. 1b–2a; Wilde, What Is beyond the River?, 299.
89Wilde, What Is beyond the River?, 217.
90This gambit was ultimately unsuccessful. Wolfgang Holzwarth, “Relations between Uzbek Central Asia, the Great Steppe and Iran, 1700–1750,” in Stefan Leder and Bernhard Streck, eds., Shifts and Drifts in Nomad-Sedentary Relations (Wiesbaden, 2005), 179–216, here 193. Ibrāhīm Biy Keneges also held the position of atalïq for a time under the Tuqay-Timurids. Wilde, What Is beyond the River?, 216. Nevertheless, the title does not appear in the Keneges waqfs, and is not, to my knowledge, applied to Keneges rulers in other sources, either.
91This hypothesis is also supported by the fact that non-Manghit chroniclers such as Muḥammad Ḥakīm Khan consistently listed the title next to the Keneges name, while those chroniclers writing more directly at the behest of the Manghits (such as Mīr ʿĀlim Bukhārī) tended to avoid mentioning it, particularly if they were writing before 1870, while the Keneges were still a threat. On the Chinggisid dispensation more generally, see Martin B. Dickson, “Uzbek Dynastic Theory in the Sixteenth Century,” in B. G. Gafurov, ed., Trudy XXV-ogo Mezhdunarodnogo kongressa vostokovedov (Moscow, 1960), 208–216.
92In fact, the Manghit relationship to the title khan is somewhat ambiguous. The first dynast, Raḥīm Biy, did proclaim himself khan, despite initially ruling through a Chinggisid puppet khan. Von Kügelgen, Legitimatsiia sredneaziatskoi dinastii mangitov v proizvedeniiakh ikh istorikov, 75–76. However, to my knowledge, no Manghit monarchs minted coins with the word “khan” on them after Raḥīm Biy. Florian Schwarz, Sylloge numorum Arabicorum Tübingen: Balh und die Landschaften am oberen Oxus, XIV c Hurāsān III (Tübingen, 2002); Album, A Checklist of Islamic Coins. That said, some authors did append the title khan to the names of later rulers. For instance, there is a reference to “Amīr Naṣrallah Muḥammad Bahādur Khan” in Mīr Musayyab Bukhārī, Kitāb-i maqāmāt-i mashāyikh, ms., Vostochnyi otdel nauchnoi biblioteki imeni Gor’kogo Sankt-Peterburgskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, no. 854, fols. 659a–b. It seems reasonable to assume that titles appearing on coins constitute a substantially stronger claim, given the far greater circulation.
93TsGARUz, f. i-323, o. 1, d. 749. In Central Asia this title was synonymous with qāḍī-yi kalān, “great judge,” the Persian version of the former Arabic term. An earlier Shahrisabz waqf from 1780/1781 (TsGARUz, f. i-323, o. 1, d. 53), however, contains no reference to a chief judge. This could simply be a result of the presiding chief judge not being involved with that particular waqf, or it could indicate that the city-state’s pretensions to symbols of de jure sovereignty were increasing along with the time they spent with de facto sovereign control of their territory.
94At least some of the time; e.g., Ṣadr Ḍiyāʾ, Nawādir Ḍiyāʾīya, ms., IVANUz, no. 1304-II, fols. 39a–39b.
95Shiro Ando, “The Shaykh al-Islām as a Timurid Office: A Preliminary Study,” Islamic Studies 33, no. 2/3 (1994): 253–280.
96This gesture was ultimately inadequate, as the qāḍī al-quḍāt installed in Khoqand was soon driven out of the city, along with the Manghit governor.
97TsGARUz, f. i-323, o. 1, d. 749.
98Ibid., d. 1171.
99Ibid., dd. 581, 751.
100Qāḍī Jumʿa-Qulī al-Mulaqqab bil-Khumūlī ibn Sūfī Taghāy Turk al-Samarqandī, Tarjuma-i ḥāl-i Qāḍī Jumʿa-Qulī Khumūlī, ms., Institut iazyka, literatury, vostokovedeniia i pis’mennogo naslediia imeni Rudaki Akademii nauk Tadzhikistana, no. 294, fol. 15b.
101Ibid., fol. 16b.
102Ibid., fols. 17a–17b.
103Shāh-Murād appointed him mudarris of the Tillā-kārī madrasa, as well as mufti of Samarqand and muḥtasib of Dahbīd.
104Tarjuma-i ḥāl-i Qāḍī Jumʿa-Qulī Khumūlī, fols. 32a–34a.
105Luṭfallāh remained in Shahrisabz amassing a following of students and Sufi acolytes until 1795/1796, when he managed once again to procure through intermediaries an appointment in Samarqand. Ibid., fol. 34b.
106TsGARUz, f. i-323, o. 1, d. 53, lines 88–90. On the special importance of Timur to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers, see Ron Sela, The Legendary Biographies of Tamerlane: Islam and Heroic Apocrypha in Central Asia (Cambridge, 2011).
107A native report written for Kuhn said that Niyāz ʿAlī built the madrasa, but specified further that the original foundation was laid by Timur. “Dnevnik mirzy Abdurrakhmana vedennyi vo vremia Shakhrisiabskoi ekspeditsii,” fol. 18b.
108Ibid., fol. 12a.
109Kuhn, “Ocherki Shagrisebzkogo bekstva,” 223; “Dnevnik mirzy Abdurrakhmana vedennyi vo vremia Shakhrisiabskoi ekspeditsii,” fol. 18a.
110Nadir Shah’s role in catalyzing this fragmentary period of city-states is discussed in greater detail in Pickett, “Nadir Shah’s Peculiar Central Asian Legacy,” 495–497.
111Anonymous, untitled history of Baljuwān [Tārīkh-i Baljuwān], ms., IVANUz, no. 2663/III, fols. 37b–38a. This terse political narrative was copied into a collection of other texts (majmūʿa), and is not written in the elevated prose that characterizes some (but not all) dynastic chronicles. There is no evidence that it was commissioned by the ruler of Baljuwān. Baljuwān is now a district in the Khatlon province of Tajikistan.
112“Hamrāh-Khan ḥākim shuda, sikka bi-nām-i khūd zada tanga bar-awarda buda ast.” Tārīkh-i Baljuwān, fol. 38a. There is no corroborating material evidence, to my knowledge, of coins actually minted in the name of a Baljuwān dynasty. There was precedent in Central Asia for de facto subordination to a higher authority without acknowledging that authority on local coins, such as in the case of the Qara Khitai, albeit in a very different context. Michal Biran, “True to Their Ways: Why the Qara Khitai Did Not Convert to Islam,” in Reuven Amitai and Michal Biran, eds., Mongols, Turks, and Others: Eurasian Nomads and the Sedentary World (Leiden, 2005), 175–199, here 186. But given that Bukhara later felt compelled to invade, it seems equally likely that minting coins in the local ḥākim’s name was intended to make a political point.
113Tārīkh-i Baljuwān, fols. 37b–38a.
114This was likely part of an (unsuccessful) effort to stave off conquest by Kabul. “Narrative of a Journey through Toorkistan made by Futteh Muhummud by Order of Major H. B. Edwards, C. B. Commissioner and Superintendent Peshawar Division,” NAI, Foreign Department, no. 48, December 28, 1855, fol. 32 marginalia.
115Daniel Beben, “The Legendary Biographies of Nāṣir-i Khusraw: Memory and Textualization in Early Modern Persian Ismāʿīlism” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 2015), 282–283; Kāẓim, ʿĀlam ārā-yi Nādirī, 1093–1095, 1099.
116For instance, Ēshān Qāḍī Mullā Mīr ʿĀbid served as qāḍī al-quḍāt in Badakhshan during the reign of Mīrzā Nabāt in the mid-eighteenth century. Faḍl ʿAlī-Bek Surkhafsār and Sang-Muhammad, Tārīkh-i Badakhshān / Istoriia Badakhshana, ed. A. N. Boldyrev (Leningrad, 1959), fol. 22b. As in the case of Shahrisabz, these Badakhshani copper specimens do not bear the name of the ruling Yarid dynasty. Schwarz, Sylloge numorum Arabicorum Tübingen, 64.
117Taʿrīkh-i Badakhshān, especially fols. 87a–92a. This picture is corroborated by British sources, such as NAI, Foreign Department, no. 3–5, fol. 7.
118L. J. Newby, The Empire and the Khanate: A Political History of Qing Relations with Khoqand, c. 1760–1860 (Leiden, 2005), 27–28.
119J. L. Lee, The “Ancient Supremacy”: Bukhara, Afghanistan and the Battle for Balkh, 1731–1901 (Leiden, 1996).
120See Munis D. Faruqui, “At Empire’s End: The Nizam, Hyderabad and Eighteenth-Century India,” Modern Asian Studies 43, no. 1 (2009): 5–43.The Nizam symbolically ceded sovereignty to the Mughal emperor through coinage and the Friday prayer, for instance. Vasant Kumar Bawa, The Nizam between Mughals and British: Hyderabad under Salar Jang I (New Delhi, 1986), 9.
121Assef Ashraf, “From Khan to Shah: State, Society, and Forming the Ties That Made Qajar Iran” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2016), chap. 4.
122Another epilogue to this story would be to follow the last two rulers of Shahrisabz, Jura Beg and Bābā Beg, through their flight to Khoqand and later exile in Tashkent (at the amir of Bukhara’s expense). Khoroshkhin, “Uzbeki Kenegez,” 519. Jura Beg embraced Christianity, becoming a major general in the Russian army, only to be killed by brigands outside his Tashkent dacha in 1906. Beisembiev, “Unknown Dynasty,” 22. For colonial-era photographs of Jura Beg, see T. M. Dzhani-zade, Muzykal’naia kul’tura Russkogo Turkestana po materialam muzykal’no-etnograficheskogo sobraniia Avgusta Eikhgorna, voennogo kapel’meistera v Tashkente (1870–1883 gg.) (Moscow, 2013), 38–39.
123The letter is undated, but references to annual practices of the Bukharan government suggest that it was not sent immediately after the 1870 conquest; meanwhile, the fact that it demonstrates recent memory of independent rule suggests that it was not written decades later, either. Since the letter listed one Ḥājjī ʿAbd al-Nabī Muftī without specifying his father, it is possible that the petition referred to a different individual. My assumption is based on the fact that the scion of a formerly prominent family suddenly deprived of his special relationship with the ruling elite would certainly have had cause for disgruntlement, and the status of ḥājjī (one who has completed the pilgrimage to Mecca) seems about right for his age. TsGARUz, f. i-126, o. 1, d. 200, fol. 2.
124Interestingly, a British intelligence report confirms that the people of Shahrisabz were directly petitioning the Russian government: “The people of Shehr-i-Sebz, having gone to the Russians, stated that either permission should be given them to lay hands on the people of the King of Bokhara (who tyrannise over them), or they should be allowed to depart in some direction, or might be killed. In reply to this, the Russians said that they would come themselves (to Shehr-i-Sabz).” “Cabul Diary,” NAI, Foreign Department, 1871, no. 754.
125A. S. Morrison, Russian Rule in Samarkand, 1868–1910: A Comparison with British India (Oxford, 2008), 112. However, Morrison also notes that—precisely because the Russians devolved tax collection to local elites—it is difficult to assess the actual tax burden of peasants with any certainty. Morrison, “Amlākdārs, Khwājas, and Mulk Land in the Zarafshan Valley after the Russian Conquest,” in Sartori, Explorations in the Social History of Modern Central Asia, 23–64, here 43–44.
126TsGARUz, f. i-126, o. 1, d. 200, fol. 1.
127Ibid.
128This observation echoes an argument by Burton Stein in “State Formation and Economy Reconsidered: Part One,” Modern Asian Studies 19, no. 3 (1985): 387–413. However, Shahrisabz does not neatly fit Stein’s dichotomy between “universalistic, absolutistic, fiscally- and extractively-oriented” rule and “localistic, relativistic, or collegeal, and redistributivist” rule (408).
129These scholars have similarly challenged the “exaggerated claims advanced upon [the] behalf [of European monarchs] by royal propagandists.” Oresko, Gibbs, and Scott, “Introduction,” 3.
