In this talk, Adeeb Khalid will present an overview of the main themes of his recent book, Central Asia: A New History from the Imperial Conquests to the Present. Since the region was divided up between the Russian and the Chinese empires, Central Asia has been the crossroads of history. It has experienced every current of modern history, every achievement of modernity and its every disaster, every extreme of the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. The talk will explore the insights that are to be gained from imagining the region as divided between two imperial formations.
Adeeb Khalid is the Jane and Raphael Bernstein Professor of Asian Studies and History at Carleton College, where he has taught since 1993. His scholarly work is devoted to Central Asia in the modern period—from the late-18th century on, when the region was conquered by Russian and Chinese empires and was divided between them. He is the author most recently of Central Asia: A New History form the Imperial Conquests to the Present (Princeton University Press, 2021). His work has been translated into Russian, Uzbek, Turkish, Persian, Italian, French, and Korean.
This lecture is presented in conjunction with Anthropology 163Q, Societies of Central Asia.