On the Edge : The Concept of Progress in Bukhara during the Rule of the Later Manghits

Abstract: This work is a study of the concept of progress in Bukhara between approximately 1860 and 1920. It is based on unpublished and published sources from this period. The study suggests that not only the technological and social developments that took place on a global scale between 1860 and 1920 affected the conceptualization of progress in Bukhara, but that globalized narratives on progress did so as well. Cosmographical concepts and explanations that previously were more common were notably absent in what during the 1910s became a discourse on progress, but the concept of progress still had an important eschatological dimension and was closely related to apocalypticism.Chapter One presents the context of the study. The second chapter discusses the theoretical framework and the analytical concepts. The next chapter continues by outlining the political, economic and cultural conditions in Bukhara during this period as well as providing a short historiographical discussion. The fourth chapter discusses the concept of geography and how it affected metaphorical constructions of time. Chapter Five is a study of how Bukharan travellers conceived of novelties. The following chapter discusses the direction of discontinuity and its eschatological implications. Chapter Seven studies how knowledge was temporalized and affected by a shift in the direction of discontinuity. Chapter Eight discusses the lexeme taraqqī, in which the concept of progress later was embedded, as well as various synchronic and diachronic orders. Chapter Nine discusses the eschatological and apocalyptic discourse in Bukhara during the 1910s. The last chapter contains general conclusions in the form of a discussion of the operational environment of progress in Bukhara between approximately 1860 and 1920.