| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Audrey Burton. The Bukharans: A Dynastic, Diplomatic and Commercial History, 1550–1702. New York: St. Martin's. 1997. Pp. xx, 664. $59.95.

Audrey Burton's book is a very impressive achievement but also a major lost opportunity. The English-language literature on Central Asia has expanded manyfold since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Most of this literature has dealt with the present and future rather than the past of this region, which is all but unknown to the serious reading public and even to historians working in other fields. The history of the khanate of Bukhara is intertwined with those of its Ottoman, Iranian, and Indian neighbors in the period before its conquest by Russia in the 1860s. A scholarly study of this history addressed to a serious audience would be a most useful contribution. Unfortunately, the book under review will be of use only to specialists in the region and in the period it covers; others will find it virtually unreadable. 1

Burton has produced an extremely detailed political and diplomatic history and an exhaustive treatment of Bukhara's foreign trade, to which are appended thirty-one annotated pages of dynastic family trees and lists of rulers and forty-one pages of bibliography. Burton has trouble recognizing when to stop. Six of the eighteen pages of lists of rulers, for example, are devoted to Ottoman sultans, Mughal emperors, shahs of Iran, and tsars of Muscovy—information readily available in many other places—and the bibliography includes even such general reference works as the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. . . .

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