City walls and public building

The great city walls of Bukhara, Samarqand, and Balkh were all rebuilt and expanded during those centuries. This was the last great wall-building era and still visible in satellite photographs today. Changing economic conditions, the ineffectualness of mud-brick and even stone walls against increasing powerful artillery and explosives rendered city walls redundant. Expanding populations or, as in the case of Balkh and Mazar-i Sharif, the abandonment of an urban center for one some miles away, left forlorn fragments of walls as memorials to earlier days of urban greatness.

Besides city walls, the Central Asian populations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries inherited the great madrasas, shopping centers, congregational mosques, caravansaries, and agricultural improvements (irrigation networks) created in earlier times. Given the economic climate it was all the urban populations (and their governments) could do to maintain these buildings in a usable state of repair. Photographs from the second half of the nineteenth century suggest this was a heavy and sometimes unmanageable burden to bear. The building of large new structures in the cities of Central Asia disappears for the most part after 1800. An exception that tends to prove the rule is early nineteenth-century Khiva where a number of sizeable public buildings were constructed at the very beginning of the nineteenth century.  But elsewhere in Bukhara, Samarqand, Tashkent, and Balkh the main cities of the region, the absence of any such building programs stands in marked contrast. Instead what we have today are records of what seems to have been the predominant form of what public building there was, that of small neighborhood mosques, a sign that the kind of economic resources which could be tapped in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were simply no longer available. Changing global economic and political conditions helps account for this in large part. The Industrial Revolution and the related move of rural populations in Europe and the Americas from rural areas into cities, the search for markets for newly- manufactured goods, the improvement and eventual superiority of military technology in those nations at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution, all helped diminish the importance of Central Asia as an economic force in the world.

The waning of Chingissid society

The consequences in Central Asia, whether directly caused or merely influenced by these global trends, were dramatic. The period from the beginning of the eighteenth to middle of the first half of the nineteenth century witnessed an end to governments that controlled large swaths of Central Asia. Northern Afghanistan is a classic example of what was happening. In place of a large khanate covering the entire area north of the Hindu Kush, petty amirates sprang up as independent entities in every large town (Maymanah, Balkh, Mazar-i Sharif, Tashqurghan, Qunduz, and Fayzabad) and resources that might have been devoted to improving the economic base and its essential structures (shopping centers, warehouses, accommodations for business travelers, irrigation systems, and the like), projects which earlier governments had invested in to promote the overall economy of their regions, were spent instead on maintaining militias and fighting costly wars with their next-door neighbors. Much the same phenomenon was going on north of the Amu Darya where the three emirates or khanates of Khiva, Bukhara , and Kokand were following similar paths.

In those three regions, important clan groupings whose history was traced back to the army formations of Chinggis Khan, rose to dominance: the Qunghrat (Kungrad) in Khiva, the Ming in Kokand, and the Manghit in Bukhara. The three competed with each other on their peripheries and these skirmishes occasionally led to major battlefield confrontations.  The patterns of life of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries continued through the eighteenth and early nineteenth, irrespective of the occasional political flare-ups. In towns and cities social pre-eminence often centered on shrines, the burial places of holy men, prominent among these being the shrines of Baha al-Din Naqshband and Imam Abu Bakr Sa‘d in the suburbs of Bukhara, ‘Ubayd Allah Ahrar in Samarqand, Khwajah ‘Abd Allah Ansari in Herat, Abu Nasr Parsa in Balkh, and ‘Ali b. Abi Talib in Mazar-i Sharif. Over time, the gravesites of these holy figures were developed as great centers of worship and pilgrimage with hostels, madrasas, mosques, and cemeteries to accommodate and service both local people and pilgrims. All these shrine centers were founded before the eighteenth century and continued to function right up to and into the Soviet period. Their economic base came to depend less on patronage from politicians who increasingly lacked such means, and more on the income-producing properties with which they were endowed as well as on the votive offerings of pilgrims. The managers of these shrines, often controlling a portion of the local economy, were naturally figures of considerable local influence and their advice and good opinion often had to be solicited by those holding political power.