While ancestry and lineage were fundamental preoccupations of Persianate societies, generating a mass of documentation in many different genres, such sources have rarely been analyzed in a systematic way that places nasab at the center of discussion. This agenda-setting volume finally does so, combining fascinating case studies from Hunza, Badakhshan, Bukhara,Fergana, Balochistan, the Gulf, and Qandahar.

Nile Green, Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair in World History, UCLA

Through insightful empirical studies spanning diverse milieus-from the towering heights of the Pamirs to the blue waters of the Persian Gulf, this volume highlights the rich potential of genealogical materials for advancing historical studies of the Persianate world and beyond. A must-read for scholars <and graduate students> engaging with Persianate and Islamicate genealogical literature.

Kazuo Morimoto, Professor, University of Tokyo, Japan

Jo-Ann Gross and Daniel Beben have made a major contribution to Persianate historiography by bringing together scholarship on the role genealogy has played in embedding the past in the present while claiming for it a timeless validity. The studies in this volume provide a comprehensive view across the Persianate world-from the Persian Gulf in the west to Central Asia in the north and northern India in the east-of how genealogy was wielded and manipulated to create social capital.

R.D. McChesney, author of An Afghan Prince in Victorian England: Race, Class and Gender in an Afghan-Anglo Imperial Encounter