Allworth, Edward, ed. Central Asia: 130 Years of Russian Rule. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994, 3rd edition. Classic summary of the Russian conquest; key chapters written by Hélène Carrère d’Encausse.
Bacon, Elizabeth. Central Asians Under Russian Rule: A Study in Culture Change. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980 (reissue of 1966 original). A bit dated, but a clear, concise and comprehensive cultural study by an anthropologist.
Becker, Seymour. Russia’s Protectorates in Central Asia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968. The only study that focuses on Bukhara and Khiva under imperial rule.
Brower, Daniel. Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian Empire. New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003. A brief and clear history that focuses on the Russian side of the story.
Brower, Daniel and Edward Lazzerini, eds. Russia’s Orient: imperial borderlands and peoples, 1700–1917. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Impressive collection of essays, suitable for undergraduate use. Chapters by Brower, Khalid, Gross, and Martin deal specifically with Central Asia.
Cracraft, James, ed. Major Problems in the History of Imperial Russia. Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1994. Gorchakov memo pp. 409–411
Demko, George. The Russian Colonization of Kazakhstan, 1896–1916. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1969. A very useful and detailed geographer’s study of population movement.
Edgar, Adrienne. Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. While most of this excellent book focuses on the 20th century, there is also a helpful introductory chapter on pre-Soviet Turkmen identity.
Kamp, Marianne. The New Woman in Uzbekistan: Islam, Modernity, and Unveiling under Communism. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2006. The first fifty pages cover the Imperial period, focusing on women.
Keller, Shoshana. To Moscow, Not Mecca: The Soviet Campaign Against Islam in Central Asia, 1917-1941. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2001. Chapter 1 covers the Imperial period in a general overview.
Keller, Shoshana. “Women, Gender and Women’s Education: Early Through Late Modern Central Asia,” Encyclopedia of Women in Islamic Cultures. Leiden: Brill, Vol. IV, 2006, pp. 291–296.
Khalid, Adeeb. The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Chapter Two focuses on the cultural effects of Imperial Russian rule.Martin, Virginia. Law and Custom in the Steppe: The Kazakhs of the Middle Horde and Russian Colonialism in the Nineteenth Century. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2001. Good legal study based on Russian and Kazakh archival sources.
Northrop, Douglas. Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. pp. 34–46 deal with the veil in the 19th century.
Pierce, Richard. Russian Central Asia 1867–1917, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1960. Still the single best survey of this period.
Sahadeo, Jeff. Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent, 1865 - 1923. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007. A study of colonial life in the administrative center of Russian Turkestan.
Vambery, Arminius. Travels in Central Asia. New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1865. A European travel account by a very knowledgeable observer.