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"Arash Khazeni offers a history that pushes beyond boundaries of time, space, and method. We move from geological time to the nineteenth century, from Iran to New Mexico, and from cultural to environmental history. This book represents a seminal contribution to the history of commodities and the best of the future of Middle East Studies."
Alan Mikhail, author of The Animal in Ottoman Egypt
"Khazeni manages that rare feat of combining the methodological finesse of a relatively new historical framework--world history--with an entirely new set of source materials, Persian ‘jewel books,’ which supply entry into the world of cultural meanings attached to turquoises. The scholarship is impeccable; it sets a new standard for thinking about the Middle East as part of a larger Eurasian world."
Nile Green, editor of Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print
List of contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction: The Turquoise Ring of the Emperor Jahangir
1. The Colored Earth
2. Turquoise, Trade, and Empire in Early Modern Eurasia
3. The Turquoise of Islam
4. Stone from the East
5. The Other Side of the World
Epilogue: Indian Stone
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Arash Khazeni is Assistant Professor of History at Pomona College and author of Tribes and Empire on the Margins of Nineteenth-Century Iran.
Summary
Traces the journeys of a stone across the world. This book recounts the origins, trade, and circulation of a natural object in the context of the history of Islamic Eurasia and global encounters between empire and nature.
Additional text
"An important aspect of the author's approach is that it exposes a previously underutilized body of writing as its main source base: javahirnama . . . . Khazeni argues provocatively that these texts operated as natural histories in their own right, exerting significant influence over environmental, scientific, cultural, and political economic knowledge in the Persian-reading world, as well as prefiguring Western environmental and mineralogical thinking. This is the most captivating dimension of the monograph and one that should incite much future study for those looking to reorient and globalize our understanding of the history of the natural world . . . . It will be welcome reading for anyone looking to complicate their understanding of the early modern world of trade, Islamic World history, environmental history, the meanings of blue, and ornamentalism."
