Central Asia is a geography that we have allowed to dim over centuries due to our weakening interest, setting aside the reasons and the hows, a place whose internal developments we have rarely bothered with, and whose physical distance we have almost converted into a distance of the heart. The book’s authors, Edward Denison Ross and Francis Henry Skrine, are two orientalists. While Skrine, in terms of his political stance, is a ‘typical orientalist’ exactly as we might imagine, Ross is a remarkable linguist proficient in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Chinese, and Russian, as well as all Turkic languages. And it is precisely this quality of Ross that adds value to the work. Because the sources on the history of the Central Asian Turkic khanates from their beginnings to a recent date (the end of the nineteenth century) are largely in Russian, Chinese, Urdu, and Central Asian Turkic dialects (Uzbek, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, etc.).

While Russian lands were the target of Turkic and Mongol raids in previous centuries, Central Asia became the target of Russian occupation from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Consequently, Russian and Central Asian Turkic history are two histories intertwined with each other. On the other hand, when the Turks migrated westward from their ancestral homeland of Ötüken, east of the Altai Mountains (the Orkhun River basin in present-day Mongolia and its west), and made Central Asia—where they took root—their Turkestan, they soon encountered Islam (from the mid-first century AH onwards) and, by transforming their own essence, undertook the standard-bearing of Islam. Therefore, Islamic history has been intertwined with Central Asian Turkic history from the very beginning. Thus, reading and learning the history of Central Asia from solid and reliable sources gains even more importance and meaning.

We hope that a concise history of this geography, spanning millions of square kilometers and thousands of kilometers away where our roots reach, will nourish and intensify our interest in that region, and lend substance to that interest; whether our interest lies in the geography itself, the civilization and culture that formed upon it—whose traces are more or less visible—or the communities that have lived and continue to live there, we hope and desire this.