A Brief Note On The Writing of History

I was browsing through an old copy of To The Finland Station by Edmund Wilson last night and a few lines from Louis Menand's foreword reached out at me, grabbed me by the neck and threw me on the floor. (Well, it wasn't that dramatic.)

Menand writes, "the more material you dredge up [while researching a subject], the more bits and pieces you recover, the more elusive the subject becomes." After three and a half years of research I don't think I'm capable of conveying how elusive pinning down an original chronicling of Central Asia, and the trade routes therein, has been. It's not a subject that's been well covered by American scholars; it's not like there are three or four good general histories of the region available, although there are lots of specialized academic tomes for those willing to dredge. Those that have covered Central Asia focus too much of their time on the 'Great Game' (although I confess Hopkirk's The Great Game is what initially captivated my imagination–by a Brit, no less) and too little on the men, women, peoples, forces and events that made Central Asia into a place where a 'Great Game' was conceivable.

Central Asian history began long before the 1820s and Moorcroft's grand quest to fill the Raj's calvary stables with the finest steed in Central Asia. Moorcroft's quest is as common a leitmotif in each history of the Great Game I've read as is the tragic recitation of Stoddart and Connolly's dual demise. In all the histories I have read about the Great Game that do mention Moorcroft and his mission not one mentions that in 104AD, fully seventeen hundred years before Moorcroft, a Han Chinese emperor sent an army over the Tien-Shan into the Ferghana to obtain, by force if necessary, the same horses that Moorcroft sought.

Sadly, I recall no mention how the area's fabled "heavenly horses," which the Chinese chroniclers claimed sweat blood (later scholars explain this as a condition due to skin parasites), have been coveted by more than one Central Asian empire. Now, to me, that's a damn fine anecdote: a story that enriches a historian's retelling of the region, an event that links the recent history of Central Asia to its distant past; in the process our story is made more relevant, urgent, but most importantly, interesting.

The next question Menand silently posed to me last night was related, in a sense, to just how interesting I should make this history. Now that I've begun this obsessive quest, where do I stop? Or, as Menand writes, "One instinct you need in doing historical research is knowing when to keep dredging stuff up; another is knowing when to quit."

The time to quit has arrived in a sense for many parts of the book.

But for a moment imagine my book is like the vast jigsaw puzzle of ethnicities found on a map of Central Asia. In that map is a large, but not over large, missing piece: Iran.

After I return from Iran the puzzle will be filled and I can then put an end to this dredging. But not quite yet, because sometimes the dredging is just too fun.