This is a facsimile reprint of the original book by George N Curzon, rebuilt using the latest technology. There are no poor, missing or blurred pages and all photographic images have been professionally restored. At Yokai Publishing we believe that by restoring this title to print it will live on for generations to come.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1960.

“This book provides a deep reading of Nikolai Karazin’s works and his relationship with Central Asia. Elena Andreeva shows how Karazin’s prolific creations have much to tell us about Russian imperialism, colonial and local society as well as Russians’ self-identity as colonizers and Europeans. The work offers an original contribution to the scholarship on Russian imperial history and that of Central Asia, and Russian literary history also. Karazin’s importance—at the time and now—is appropriately highlighted.” - Jeff Sahadeo, Associate Professor, Carleton University, Canada “Elena Andreeva’s book resurrects a vital if forgotten figure from the Russian past: Nikolai Karazin, Russia’s Kipling, a multifaceted participant in Russian imperial expansion, whose fiction, journalism, ethnography and visual representations may well have done more than any agent of the Russian state to represent and popularize Russia’s conquest of Central Asia to a newly literate Russian public beyond the educated elites. Archivally based and carefully argued, Andreeva’s study of Karazin reveals the absence of any singular logic to Russian imperial expansion. In her analysis Karazin emerges as a vernacular enthusiast of empire who was able to reconcile a skeptical attitude towards tsarist autocracy with an idealized view of Russia’s 'civilizing' mission in the East.” - Harsha Ram, Associate Professor, University of California, Berkeley, USA This book is dedicated to the literary and visual images of Central Asia in the works of the popular Russian artist Nikolai Karazin. It analyzes the ways Karazin’s discourse inflected, and was inflected by, the expansion of the Russian empire – and therefore sheds light on the place of art and culture in the Russian colonial enterprise. It is the first attempt to interpret Karazin’s images of Central Asia within Russian imperial networks and within the maze of the Russian national identity that informed them.

This book examines the Russian conquest of the ancient Central Asian khanates of Bukhara and Khiva in the 1860s and 1870s, and the relationship between Russia and the territories until their extinction as political entities in 1924. It shows how Russia's approach developed from one of non-intervention, with the primary aim of preventing British expansion from India into the region, to one of increasing intervention as trade and Russian settlement grew. It goes on to discuss the role of Bukhara and Khiva in the First World War and the Russian Revolution, and how the region was fundamentally changed following the Bolshevik conquest in 1919-20. The book is a re-issue of a highly regarded classic originally published in 1968 and out of print for some years. The new version includes a new introduction, some corrections of errors, and a survey of new work undertaken since first publication.