ABSTRACT
The term ‘Central Asia’, for most people, conveys a primarily descriptive geographical image of a specific region on the globe. In contemporary usage this is confined to describing the five post-Soviet states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan. This, however, highlights an important theme in the context of the region’s role in world history that will be the focus of this chapter – the expansion and contraction of the limits of ‘Central Asia’. What has determined this dynamic of expansion and contraction over the centuries has been the very geographic centrality of the region on the Eurasian continent. The establishment of any geographic, political or cultural limits to ‘Central Asia’ at any given point in history has been due to its interactions with regions around it. Thus, it is necessary to present ‘Central Asia’ as primarily a cultural rather than a purely geographic concept. Importantly, the factor that has aided in geoculturally distinguishing that which lay within and without ‘Central Asia’ throughout history has been the surrounding civilizations’ agricultural basis. Central Asia in this paper is therefore understood as constituting the core of the Eurasian continent – not only the five postSoviet states noted above but also Xinjiang, Mongolia (the Mongolian Republic and Inner Mongolia), northern Iran and northern Afghanistan – that is largely coterminous with the area termed the ‘geographical pivot of history’ by Halford Mackinder.1 Although the interactions of this ‘geographical pivot of history’ with the surrounding civilizations can be traced across millennia, this chapter will focus upon the interactions of ‘Central Asia’ with that of the surrounding agricultural civilizations from 1700 to the present. This period is significant for the reason that from 1700 onward this Eurasian core contracted under pressure from the expansion of the surrounding civilizations, most notably Russia and China. This chapter, in addressing the interactions of Central Asia and the surrounding civilizations between 1700 and the present, will argue three major points:
1 Central Asia is central to an understanding of ‘world history’; 2 Central Asia was gradually ‘removed’ from world history by the expan-
sion of civilizations on its periphery; 3 The Soviet collapse has resulted in the re-emergence of Central Asia as a
region of contestation in world history and politics.
