The Golden Horde & the Rise of the Central Asian Khanates

Please join us for the last in our CESSI 2015 Lecture Series! Uli Schamiloglu, Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will present a lecture titled "The Golden Horde and the Rise of the Central Asian Khanates". The talk will take place Tuesday, July 28th at 4:00pm in 2190 Grainger Hall.

About the Speaker: Uli Schamiloglu received his B.A. from Columbia College in Middle East Languages and Cultures and his M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. from Columbia University in History. He is a professor in UW- Madison's Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia. Dr. Schamiloglu taught as a lecturer and assistant professor in the Department of Uralic & Altaic Studies (now the Department of Central Eurasian Studies) at Indiana University-Bloomington from 1983-89. He joined the department of Slavic Languages at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1989 and, beginning in 1996, was instrumental in the development of the new Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia. Dr. Schamiloglu has been chair of the Central Asian Studies Program since 2002 and director of the Center for Middle East Studies since 2006.

About the Lecture: In the 13th-14th centuries the Golden Horde state ruled over a vast territory stretching from Lake Zaysan in the east to the territories of Eastern Europe. With the collapse of the Golden Horde in the second half of the 14th century, we see a period of civil war followed by the rise of a series of smaller states. In the steppe regions of Central Eurasia this includes the state of the nomadic Uzbeks, the Nogay Horde, and the Kazakh khanate. This lecture will review the basis of the socio-political and economic life of the sedentary and nomadic regions of the Golden Horde territories and the reasons for its collapse. It will then turn to an examination of the rise of new states in Central Asia and how they emerged from the Golden Horde.