Gharm

Gharm was the principal centre of Qarategin, the mountain country also known as the Rasht valley. The Surkhob valley connected its settlements with the approaches toward Hissar, Darvaz and the Alai mountains. High ridges enclosed the inhabited country, concentrating routes and cultivation along the valleys. Local princes governed a territory that lay between the larger political centres of Central Asia, retaining a distinctive place in the mountain frontier.

By the early nineteenth century, Qarategin increasingly drew the attention of the khanate of Kokand. Its southern expansion was connected with ambitions beyond the Ferghana valley and with commercial interests reaching toward Xinjiang. Around 1834, Madali Khan used the arrival in Qarategin of a rival claimant, Ataliq Khan, as grounds for sending an army into the region. The campaign conquered Qarategin and drew Gharm's valley into Kokand's expanding sphere. Mountain routes that had supported local connections thus also carried the forces of a larger state. Gharm's position as a regional centre joined its surrounding communities to the shifting balance between mountain rulers and lowland khans on the eve of further nineteenth-century conquests.