Emirate of Bukhara

The Emirate of Bukhara was the Uzbek absolute monarchy of Transoxiana, the land between the Amu Darya and Syr Darya, lasting from 1785 to 1920. When the old Janid khans of Bukhara faded, the Manghit clan of Uzbek chiefs took power without bothering to claim the old title of khan: they ruled as emirs from the Ark citadel, over the bazaars of Bukhara and Samarkand and the cotton fields of the Zarafshan valley. The emirate stood beside Khiva in the west and Kokand in the east as one of the last three Uzbek states, trading with Russia, taxing caravans, and keeping a splendid Islamic court of madrasas and poets while the world outside industrialised. Russian protection in the 1860s cost it Samarkand and its independence in all but name. After the revolutions of 1917 the last emir fled before the Red Army in 1920, a Bukharan People's Soviet Republic was proclaimed in the squares, and the emirate dissolved into Soviet Central Asia, its cities divided between Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.