Author:
Étienne de la Vaissière
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The publication of the book of Dilnoza Duturaeva is very good news for the ongoing elaboration of a longue durée history of trans-Asian trade. Many books have been written on earlier or later periods, but no one has dared to deal with the eleventh–twelfth centuries, which appear as a nadir in this history. Indeed the lack of sources is transforming the attempt in a Herculean task of collecting tiny bits of evidence, whose main characteristics are both dispersion and discontinuity. This book makes the most of these small pieces of texts or archaeological discoveries, Liao porcelains for instance. It opens new venues in research, especially in the relationship of the Qarakhanids with the Tibetan Tsongkha kingdom in Qinghai, or the diplomatic exchanges of the various Chinese dynasties with the West, Qarakhanids or Seljuks. But more importantly, it provides us with a chronology of East-West contacts – although mostly from a Chinese point of view due to the dearth of Qarakhanid written sources. And here, I would point that many if not most of the testimonies gathered by Dilnoza Duturaeva belong to a brief and powerful burst of contacts in the last quarter of the eleventh century. Before that, in the late Samanid and early Qarakhanid periods, there are very limited proofs of actual contacts, although the author most convincingly demonstrates that some links were kept alive. From this high point of the last quarter of the eleventh century, and although there was a decline in the first half of the twelfth century, trade would flow anew. This chronology is extremely interesting for the history of globalization, and the reasons presiding to its development. It is as if the mental map of the Asian world created during the previous centuries, especially during the Sogdian period of control of international trade in Central Asia, was still enshrined in the texts and mentalities of the administrators and traders, only ready to renew long-distance links beyond periods of low-level exchanges. The wire was still there, only to be reanimated by a new burst of current. Usually, the Mongol period was regarded as the period of renewal of East-West links. Dilnoza Duturaeva demonstrates that such was not the case and that trade restarted in a purely diplomatic and commercial setting in the end of the eleventh century well before and independently from the heavily military and political context of the Mongol conquest. In a way, it demonstrates the autonomy of economic history in Central Asia, quite different from the theory of embedment.

Étienne de la Vaissière

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