Genealogical History in the Persianate World
Jo-Ann Gross editor Prof Daniel Beben editor
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Publishing:24th Jul '25
£85.00
This title is due to be published on 24th July, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Demonstrates the significance of the largely unstudied genre of genealogical documents as sources for the political, religious, social, and cultural history of the Persianate world.
Scholarship on the Muslim world has recently begun to pay increased attention to non-literary genres of documentation as sources for historical research.
Genealogical writings are one form of such documentation that has demonstrated significant potential for addressing a wide range of research concerns, particularly for topics that receive little attention in historical chronicles and other state-centered narrative sources. However, while genealogical documentation has received some attention in scholarship on the Arab world, it remains mostly unstudied in scholarship on Persianate societies. The chapters in this book offer reflections on theoretical and methodological issues concerning the study of genealogical documentation, combined with case studies based primarily on previously unpublished, unstudied source materials. The topics explored span the full breadth of the Persianate world, from Anatolia to the Ferghana Valley in Central Asia to the Gujarat region of India, utilizing sources dating from the fourteenth to the twentieth century. The book will be of significant interest to scholars and students of Islamic history and the Persianate ecumene as well as readers in other fields interested in comparative research demonstrating the use of genealogical documentation as historical sources.
While ancestry and lineage were fundamental preoccupations of Persianate societies, generating a mass of documentation in many different genres, such sources have rarely been analyzed in a systematic way that places nasab at the center of discussion. This agenda-setting volume finally does so, combining fascinating case studies from Hunza, Badakhshan, Bukhara,Fergana, Balochistan, the Gulf, and Qandahar. * Nile Green, Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair in World History, UCLA *
Through insightful empirical studies spanning diverse milieus—from the towering heights of the Pamirs to the blue waters of the Persian Gulf, this volume highlights the rich potential of genealogical materials for advancing historical studies of the Persianate world and beyond. A must-read for scholars engaging with Persianate and Islamicate genealogical literature. * Kazuo Morimoto, Professor, University of Tokyo, Japan *
Jo-Ann Gross and Daniel Beben have made a major contribution to Persianate historiography by bringing together scholarship on the role genealogy has played in embedding the past in the present while claiming for it a timeless validity. The studies in this volume provide a comprehensive view across the Persianate world—from the Persian Gulf in the west to Central Asia in the north and northern India in the east—of how genealogy was wielded and manipulated to create social capital. * R.D. McChesney, author of An Afghan Prince in Victorian England: Race, Class and Gender in an Afghan-Anglo Imperial Encounter *
ISBN: 9780755649792
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
288 pages