Four Types of Loyalty in Early Modern Central Asia

At the turn of the seventeenth century, a new dynastic party established authority across Central Asia. In Four Types of Loyalty in Early Modern Central Asia, Thomas Welsford offers the first detailed account of how and why this happened. By examining some of the ways in which various social groupings helped to facilitate the Tūqāy-Tīmūrids’ acquisition of power, Welsford consi...

At the turn of the seventeenth century, a new dynastic party established authority across Central Asia. In Four Types of Loyalty in Early Modern Central Asia, Thomas Welsford offers the first detailed account of how and why this happened. By examining some of the ways in which various social groupings helped to facilitate the Tūqāy-Tīmūrids’ acquisition of power, Welsford considers how such an instance of dynastic change might reflect the shifting loyalties, beliefs and preferences of an often overlooked wider subject population.

Thomas Welsford , D.Phil. (2008), is a VolkswagenStiftung Research Fellow at the Institute of Iranian Studies in Vienna and a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Together with Alexandre Papas and Thierry Zarcone he has edited Central Asian Pilgrims (Klaus Schwarz, 2011).