Moscow: IV RAS, "Space-2000", 2014. 367 p.
The history of international relations of Central Asia and its relations with other regions and states - India, Persia, China, and European powers-were in the sphere of attention of Russian and foreign historians and were one of the research priorities. The main discourse was the opposition in the 19th and early 20th centuries to British (later German and partly Turkish) imperialism in Central Asia on the part of Russian historians and Russia's expansionist aspirations on the part of Western and Turkish authors. At the same time, when studying the relations between Turkey and Central Asia, researchers mainly used either only documents from Russian (Soviet) archives, or only documents from Turkish (and partially English) archives.
In this regard, A. D. Vasiliev's book is of great interest, since it is based on the study of both Turkish and Russian sources on the history of relations between the peoples of Central Asia and Turkey, using a comparative historical approach. Undoubtedly, the author's merit is the use of a significant array of previously published and unpublished Ottoman archival documents, their comparison with Russian archives and chronicles of Central Asian authors. This gives the work scientific significance and allows the author to achieve interesting results in comparison with those works that were previously published on this topic.
Preferring the description of political and cultural contacts, the author analyzes the existing historiography of Ottoman-Central Asian relations in chapter I. At the same time, this chapter itself is a complete scientific historiographical study. In it, the author highlights the main approaches and stages of understanding the historical experience of interaction between the Ottomans and local dynasties in the context of various historical challenges that gave rise to the relevance of such military-political alliances. A balanced analysis of each of the domestic or foreign works ...
Читать далее