Central Asia

The Silk Road is as iconic in world history as the Colossus of Rhodes or the Suez Canal. But what was it, exactly? It conjures up a hazy image of a caravan of camels laden with silk on a dusty desert track, reaching from China to Rome. The reality was...

The Age of the Silk Roads (c 200 BC- c 900 AD) shaped the course of the future. The foundation by the Han dynasty of an extensive network of interlinking trade routes, collectively known as the Silk Road, led to an explosion of cultural and commercial...

This is a history of Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia from the time of the first inhabitants of the region up to the break up of the Mongol Empire in 1260 AD. Inner Eurasia, as the author defines it, comprises most of the former Soviet Union and...

Tibetan Manuscripts and Early Printed Books, Volume II explores the major categories of traditional Tibetan books, introducing their specific features and the main approaches to their study. In five major sections, it surveys manuscript collections...

Praise for the author's A Brief Guide to the Greek Myths: 'Eminently sane, highly informative'PAUL CARTLEDGE, BBC History magazineIn 2022 it will be 2,500 years since the final defeat of the invasion of Greece by the Persian King Xerxes. This astonishing...

Michael Napier details the critical role of air power in the skies over Afghanistan, from the ten-year occupation by the USSR in the 1980s through to the US and NATO campaign from 2001 to 2021. US and British forces, strongly supported by air power,...

Based on more than a decade's writing, research, and travel, this book offers a rare glimpse into China's expanding economic, cultural, and political power in the Eurasian heartland. China's rise is changing the world. Much attention has been given...

The greatest conquest in historyGenghis Khan left an empire more than twice the size of Alexander's: his successors went on to conquer and govern an area stretching from Korea to the River Danube. How did a band of nomadic herdsmen achieve so much, so...

Representative of the Fachia, or Legalist, school of philosophy, the writings of Han Fei Tzu (280?-233 B.C.) confront the issues of preserving and strengthening the state. His lessons remain timely as scholars continue to examine the nature and use of...

'John Keay is the master storyteller and historian. This grand narrative of Himalaya is as epic as the mountains and peoples he describes' Dan Snow 'Adds the human element to the hard rock. And what a rich vein it is' Michael Palin History has not...

The War in Afghanistan (1979-1989) has been called ""the Soviet Union's Vietnam War,"" a conflict that pitted Soviet regulars against a relentless, elusive, and ultimately unbeatable Afghan guerrilla force (the mujahideen). The hit-and-run bloodletting...

Praise for the author's A Brief Guide to the Greek Myths: 'Eminently sane, highly informative'PAUL CARTLEDGE, BBC History magazineThe year 2022 marks 2,500 years since the final defeat of the invasion of Greece by the Persian King Xerxes. This...

This book is for all those who love Kim, that masterpiece of Indian life in which Kipling immortalized the Great Game. Fascinated since childhood by this strange tale of an orphan boy's recruitment into the Indian secret service, Peter Hopkirk here...

This book publishes the results of 220 botanical samples from the 1993-2002 Gordion excavations directed by Mary Voigt. Together with Naomi Miller's 2010 volume (Gordion Special Studies 5), this book completes the publication of botanical samples from...

'An Intimate War' tells the story of the last thirty-four years of conflict in Helmand Province, Afghanistan as seen through the eyes of the Helmandis. In the West, this period is often defined through different lenses -- the Soviet intervention, the...

The history of modern Afghanistan is an epic drama, a thriller, a tragedy, a surreal farce. Every forty years or so, over the last two centuries, some great global power has attempted to take control of Afghanistan, only to slink away wounded and...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781632869432Author John KeayFormat HardbackPage Count 432Imprint Bloomsbury PublishingPublisher Bloomsbury PublishingWeight(grams) 771gDimensions(mm) 224mm...

A vast region stretching roughly from the Volga River to Manchuria and the northern Chinese borderlands, Central Asia has been called the "pivot of history," a land where nomadic invaders and Silk Road traders changed the destinies of states that ringed...

Central Asia often evokes images of imperial power rivalry dating back to the 19th century. Yet as the region's international politics becomes more complex in the age of globalization, the need for new ways of looking at its many actors is more pressing...

From the author of Al-Qaeda, Jason Burke's The 9/11 Wars is an essential book for understanding the dangerous and unstable world of the twenty-first century. On September 11th 2001, in a series of coordinated suicide attacks, terrorists destroyed New...

A monumental illustrated survey of the architecture of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century ChinaThe Yuan dynasty endured for a century, leaving behind an architectural legacy without equal, from palaces, temples, and pagodas to pavilions, tombs, and...

Storm-333, the operation to seize Kabul and assassinate Afghan leader Hafizullah Amin, was at once a textbook success and the start of a terrible blunder. It heralded the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, an operation intended to be a short, largely...

The first full-scale account of a Persian king vilified by history Xerxes, Great King of the Persian Empire from 486-465 B.C., has gone down in history as an angry tyrant full of insane ambition. The stand of Leonidas and the 300 against his army at...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781804510131Author Andrey KorotkovFormat PaperbackPage Count 80Imprint Helion & CompanyPublisher Helion & Company

Perhaps nowhere else has literature been as conscious a collective endeavor as in China, and China's survival over three thousand years may owe more to its literary traditions than to its political history. This Very Short Introduction tells the story of...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780062869685Author Rachel KousserFormat HardbackPage Count 416Imprint CollinsPublisher HarperCollins Publishers IncWeight(grams) 612gDimensions(mm) 231mm *...

How the collapse of empires helps explain the efforts of China, Iran, Russia, and Turkey to challenge the international order Eurasia's major powers-China, Iran, Russia, and Turkey-increasingly intervene across their borders while seeking to pull their...

The epic plains and arid deserts of Central Asia have witnessed some of the greatest migrations, as well as many of the most transformative developments, in the history of civilization. Christoph Baumer's ambitious four-volume treatment of the region...

Since the time of the ancient Greeks we have been fascinated by accounts of the Amazons, an elusive tribe of hard-fighting, horse-riding female warriors. Equal to men in battle, legends claimed they cut off their right breasts to improve their archery...

According to ancient sources, Hannibal was only nine years old when his father dipped the small boy's hand in blood and made him swear eternal hatred of Rome. Whether the story is true or not, it is just one of hundreds of legends that have appeared over...

A major history of Central Asia and how it has been shaped by modern world eventsCentral Asia is often seen as a remote and inaccessible land on the peripheries of modern history. Encompassing Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan,...

Between the ninth and the fifteenth centuries, Central Asia was a major political, economic and cultural hub on the Eurasian continent. In the first half of the thirteenth century it was also the pre-eminent centre of power in the largest land-based...

Roman Ungern von Sternberg was a Baltic aristocrat, a violent, headstrong youth posted to the wilds of Siberia and Mongolia before the First World War. After the Bolshevik Revolution, the Baron - now in command of a lethally effective rabble of...

In 1839 forces of the British East India Company crossed the Indus to invade Afghanistan on the pretext of reinstating a former king Shah Soojah to his rightful throne. The reality was that this was another step in Britain's Great Game - Afghanistan...

Britain's military involvement in Afghanistan is a contentious subject, yet it is often forgotten that the current conflict is in fact the fourth in a string of such wars dating back more than 170 years. Aiming to protect British India from the expanding...

The Mongol Empire was the mightiest land empire the world has ever seen. At its height it was twice the size of its Roman equivalent. For a remarkable century and a half it commanded a population of 100 million people, while the rule of Chinggis...

The first complete history of Central Eurasia from ancient times to the present day, Empires of the Silk Road represents a fundamental rethinking of the origins, history, and significance of this major world region. Christopher Beckwith describes the...

** Includes a New Postcript 'The Chilcot Report-Early Thoughts on Military Matters'** From 2001 Britain supported the United States in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. 'Victory' in such conflicts is always hard to gauge and domestic political backing...

Designed for classroom use, The First Anglo-Afghan Wars gathers in one volume primary source materials related to the first two wars that Great Britain launched against native leaders of the Afghan region. From 1839 to 1842, and again from 1878 to 1880,...

Through their dramatic stories, Gopal shows that the Afghan war, so often regarded as a hopeless quagmire, could in fact have gone very differently. Top Taliban leaders actually tried to surrender within months of the US invasion, renouncing all...