A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

Bukhara, Khiva, and Khoqand 187
some of these phantom khans were Yadigarids, usually sponsored by the
Kongrat tribe; others were procured from among the inexhaustible pool
of other Juchids proliferating among the Kazakhs and sponsored by the
Manghits.Nominally, however, the Yadigarids ruled until 1804, when
the last khan of the line, Abulghazi III, was removed from the throne by
Iltüzer, an Uzbek beg of Kongrat affiliation and the grandson of a line
of chieftains who had begun to assert their own power as early as 1762;
in that year Temir Ghazi Khan appointed Mehmet Emin as inak or
prime minister; the next year the latter killed the khan and a number of
Manghit tribal chieftains who were his supporters, and ruled Khiva
while parading eleven more khans on the throne; some of these were
Yadigarids, others of different but always Genghisid ancestry.
With the Inakids a new and final chapter began in the history of the
khanate of Khiva.One innovation was the fact that as in Bukhara, for
the first time a non-Genghisid dynasty acquired not only effective but
also titular power; another was the tendency of the Inakids to place
more power in the hands of Sarts, members of the non-tribal urban or
other sedentary classes, with the implicit goal of shaking off the power
of the tribal aristocracy of whom they themselves were a product; yet
another was its very finality: the Inakids presided over a khanate that
would try to cope with the challenges of the nineteenth century, the foremost
of which was the onslaught of European colonialism represented
here by Russia, before collapsing in the upheavals brought about by the
Bolshevik Revolution.
khoqand
The valley of Fergana has been, as we have seen, a special part of
Central Asia since antiquity, not unlike Khwarazm in its individuality
and geopolitical situation.One could visualize the two as the wings of
an area whose central body was Transoxania proper or Sogdia, with
Khwarazm on the left and Fergana on the right as one faces north.The
two regions were delimited differently but equally distinctively:
Khwarazm by the surrounding deserts and the Aral Sea, Fergana by the
Tianshan and Pamir mountains.Both regions owed their fertility to irrigation
made possible by the two great rivers of Central Asia, the Amu
Darya with its ramified delta in the case of Khwarazm, the Syr Darya
with its mesh of tributaries in the case of Fergana.And both regions,
lying within the network of Silk Road arteries, had commercial and
political links with distant but important countries: to the east, China; to