Scott LEVI

This project will result in the first book to focus direct attention on the ways that early modern Central Asia actively engaged with the globalizing world. The book will also represent the first English-language history of the Khanate of Khoqand (1799-1876), an extraordinary dynamic state that emerged over the course of the eighteenth century in eastern Uzbekistan’s Ferghana Valley. The study will analyze ways that global political, economic, technological and environmental developments influenced life in early modern Central Asia and contributed to the rise, and fall, of Khoqand. It will also illustrate the ways that Central Asians influenced the policies of their much larger imperial neighbors on the Eurasian periphery. The project therefore aspires to rehabilitate the history of a region that has long been dismissed as peripheral and historically irrelevant in the early modern Eurasian context. The final product will be aimed at an interdisciplinary audience that includes scholars and students with interests in Central Asian, Russian, Middle-Eastern, Chinese and world history, as well as the study of comparative empire and the history of globalization

Dr. Scott Levi is Associate Professor of Central Asian History at Ohio State University. He earned his Ph.D in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2000, following which he held a visiting position in Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, and tenure-track positions at Eastern Illinois University and the University of Louisville. In 2008 he joined the Department of History at the Ohio State University. He has spent extended periods of time studying and researching in India, Pakistan and Uzbekistan, and has traveled widely throughout the region. He is a past president of the Central Eurasian Studies Society, he has served on the oversight committee for the Soros Foundation’s Central Asia Research and Teaching Initiative, and he continues to serve as a member of the International Faculty Advisory Committee for Nazarbayev University’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences in Astana, Kazakhstan. His research focuses on the social and economic history of early modern Central Asia.

LEVI, Scott Caravans : Indian Merchants on the Silk Road, Gurgon : Penguin Books Indi, 2015

LEVI, Scott Islamic Central Asia, an Anthology of Historical Sources ( as co-editor, with Ron Sela), Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.

LEVI, Scott “Commercial Structures” in D. Morgan and A. Reid, eds, The New Cambridge History of Islam, vol.3, The Eastern Islamic World, 11th -18th Centuries, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010,pp.561-81

LEVI, Scott The Indian Diaspora inCentral Asia and its Trade, 1550-1900, Leiden: E.J Brill, 2002

LEVI, Scott “India, Russia and the Eighteenth-Century Transformation of the Central Asian Caravan Trade, “Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient (42,4),1999,pp.519-48