In the spring of 1873, as four Russian military columns crossed the Central Asian desert toward the Khanate of Khiva, something unexpected happened before any liberator arrived. The thirty thousand enslaved men and women of the Khwarazm oasis — Persian farmers stolen from their villages by Turkmen raiders, Russian fishermen seized from the Caspian frontier, craftsmen and field workers who had spent decades in bondage — organised themselves, broke their chains, and seized their freedom.Broken Chains is the story of that insurrection: how it was planned across years of canal-bank conversations and forbidden evening gatherings, how it erupted simultaneously across dozens of estates as the Russian advance shattered the slave system's coercive apparatus, and how it forced the conquering general to abandon his plans and legalise a revolution he had tried to prevent. Drawing on the extraordinary Āzādnāma — the Book of Freedom, compiled by a Khivan court scholar in the uprising's aftermath — alongside Russian military dispatches, Iranian diplomatic archives, and the eyewitness dispatches of American journalist Januarius MacGahan, Thomas Blackwood reconstructs one of history's most consequential and most forgotten acts of collective resistance.The enslaved community of Khiva did not receive their freedom. They made it impossible for anyone to deny it to them.

In the spring of 1873, as four Russian military columns crossed the Central Asian desert toward the Khanate of Khiva, something unexpected happened before any liberator arrived. The thirty thousand enslaved men and women of the Khwarazm oasis — Persian farmers stolen from their villages by Turkmen raiders, Russian fishermen seized from the Caspian frontier, craftsmen and field workers who had spent decades in bondage — organised themselves, broke their chains, and seized their freedom.Broken Chains is the story of that insurrection: how it was planned across years of canal-bank conversations and forbidden evening gatherings, how it erupted simultaneously across dozens of estates as the Russian advance shattered the slave system's coercive apparatus, and how it forced the conquering general to abandon his plans and legalise a revolution he had tried to prevent. Drawing on the extraordinary Āzādnāma — the Book of Freedom, compiled by a Khivan court scholar in the uprising's aftermath — alongside Russian military dispatches, Iranian diplomatic archives, and the eyewitness dispatches of American journalist Januarius MacGahan, Thomas Blackwood reconstructs one of history's most consequential and most forgotten acts of collective resistance.The enslaved community of Khiva did not receive their freedom. They made it impossible for anyone to deny it to them.