A comprehensive diplomatic and military history of the Russian conquest of Central Asia, spanning the whole of the nineteenth century.

Using newly-uncovered archival evidence, Jeff Eden sheds unprecedented light on the lives of slaves ensnared by the Central Asian slave trade.

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.

They were seeking religious freedom and the Second Coming of Christ in Central Asia. They found themselves in the care of a Muslim king. During the 1880s, Mennonites from Russia made a treacherous journey to the Silk Road kingdom of Khiva. Both Uzbek and Mennonite history seemed to set the stage for ongoing religious and ethnic discord. Yet their story became an example of friendship and cooperation between Muslims and Christians. Pilgrims on the Silk Road challenges conventional wisdom about the trek to Central Asia and the settlement of Ak Metchet. It shows how the story, long associated with failed End Times prophecies, is being a recast in light of new evidence. Pilgrims highlights the role of Ak Metchet as a refuge for those fleeing Soviet oppression, and the continuing influence of the episode more than twelve decades later.

This is the original manual for “small wars,” now known variously as guerrilla warfare, asymmetric combat, and low-intensity conflict. It was first published in 1896 as an analysis and how-to guide for the British Army as it fought to expand the boundaries of the British Empire. Its author, Major General Sir Charles Edward Callwell, collects and distills combat experience from a vast range of British, French, and Russian imperial campaigns and rebellions. Callwell then draws several universal small-war combat lessons that are still true today, including the need for “boldness and vigor” to keep irregular forces off-balance, the vital role of intelligence, the importance of seizing and holding important terrain (most often the high ground), and the final war-winning requirement to “seize what the enemy prizes most.” He also shows that technological superiority alone is not enough, and that logistics and supply can lock an army in place instead of freeing it. Some of the Afghanistan battlefields described in the book are still being fought over today, with much the same disparity in forces, over a century later – it is impossible to miss the lessons of history in this classic work.