Holy War in China: The Muslim Rebellion and State in Chinese Central Asia, 1864-1877

This is the first comprehensive and balanced history of a major Muslim rebellion in northwest China in the late nineteenth century, which led to the establishment of an independent Islamic state under Ya'qub Beg. That independence was lost in 1877, when the Qing army recaptured the region and incorporated it into the Chinese state, where it remains, somewhat uneasily, as the large Xinjiang-Uyghur Autonomous Region.

This is the first English-language history of the rebellion since 1878, and the only one to be based on a primary sources in Islamic languages as well as Chinese, complemented by British and Ottoman archival documents and secondary sources in Russian, English, Japanese, Chinese, French, German, and Turkish.