Sky Blue Stone - (California World History Library) by Arash Khazeni (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

This book traces the journeys of a stone across the world. From its remote point of origin in the city of Nishapur in eastern Iran, turquoise was traded through India, Central Asia, and the Near East, becoming an object of imperial exchange between the Safavid, Mughal, and Ottoman empires. Along this trail unfolds the story of turquoise--a phosphate of aluminum and copper formed in rocks below the surface of the earth--and its discovery and export as a global commodity.

In the material culture and imperial regalia of early modern Islamic tributary empires moving from the steppe to the sown, turquoise was a sacred stone and a potent symbol of power projected in vivid color displays. From the empires of Islamic Eurasia, the turquoise trade reached Europe, where the stone was collected as an exotic object from the East. The Eurasian trade lasted into the nineteenth century, when the oldest mines in Iran collapsed and lost Aztec mines in the Americas reopened, unearthing more accessible sources of the stone to rival the Persian blue.

Sky Blue Stone 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.

From the Back Cover

"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

Review Quotes

"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." --Danielle Kinsey "Cultural and Social History" (4/12/2016 12:00:00 AM)

"The obvious and compelling strength of this book is Khazeni's ability to synthesize information from the remarkably numerous Persian language sources and later European commentaries . . . . on three major themes: the chemistry, mining, and sale of turquoise, the value and appreciation of the stone in Safavid Iran and the neighboring Ottoman and Mughal empires, and perhaps most important of all, the cultural significance of the stone and its color in Iranian culture."--Stephen Dale "International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies" (1/14/2016 12:00:00 AM)

"This is a small and elegant book that modestly hides the author's extraordinary linguistic and cultural knowledge, along with his reach across disciplines such as the histories of science, medicine, and architecture. The range of archival materials consulted is staggering. Another move toward "re-Orientation," Sky Blue Stone sets a high bar for anyone attempting a global study of a rare and elusive commodity whose producers, traders, and consumers were often content to ignore the West."--Kris Lane "American Historical Review" (6/1/2015 12:00:00 AM)

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.