Throughout Islamdom family dynasties of the ulama have shown remarkable longevity and resilience in the face of constantly shifting politics. Nowhere was this more true than Central Asia, where new Turkic conquests were frequent and the reach of central authority was decidedly limited. Nevertheless, the conquest of Transoxiana by Nadir Shah in 1740 and the subsequent entrenchment of the Manghit dynasty in Bukhara offered the opportunity for new families of scholars to secure material resources and prestige. Relying primarily on Persian- and Arabic-language biographical materials, this research traces the rise to prominence of several such families of ulama during this period of transition in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and follows the careers of their descendants and acolytes into the early twentieth century. The scholars reaping political windfall from this dramatic political upheaval bequeathed a remarkably stable social power dynamic to their heirs, who formed the core of a Persianate elite buttressing Central Asian society until the Bolshevik conquest.