Books can be the subjects of podcasts, podcasts can spawn books, but only rarely does a podcast itself rise to be a possible stand-in for a book. Paul Cooper’s recent two-part podcast “The Mongols: Terror of the Steppe” is one of these.
The “Fall of Civilizations” series, of which these are the latest entries, stands out for the length of its episodes—averaging about three hours (this latest double episode clocks in at almost seven)—as well the depth of the research, the quality of the writing and the production values, which include extensive use of voice actors in reading source material and the effective but subtle use of sound effects, which here range from birdsong to Mongolian throat singing, which manage to be atmospheric rather than distracting. Cooper, blessed with an excellent speaking voice, also delights in primary sources—selections from The Secret History of the Mongols, Chinese poetry, Islamic chroniclers and such Western travelers as Marco Polo and William of Rubruck—often voiced in the original language (including here Mongolian, Arabic and Chinese) with English voiceovers.

The episode starts with the mythological Alun Gua (“the Beauty”) and the parable of the five arrows (individually, arrow shafts can be broken, whereas a bundle of five together cannot, a lesson she wished her five sons to absorb). The story rapidly proceeds to the life of Chinggis (aka Genghis) Khan, with much drawn from The Secret History of the Mongols, his rise to power and conquest of his empire, through to the collapse of the Yuan dynasty, with a brief epilogue. It is a story that has been told before in multiple (often quite good) books; for those that already know the history, there will be little if anything that is new. However, for those that don’t, this podcast is excellent competition for these various books. It is, in either case, a story that Cooper tells very well; it is a very pleasurable and informative way to pass six going on seven hours.
There is much to be said for the format: unlike an audio book (but like radio theatre of old), this was written for oral transmission rather than just being a published text read aloud (however engagingly). Because it is highly scripted and produced, there is none of the (admittedly often pleasant) chit-chat that is a feature of other history podcasts: neither format is inherently better than the other, but this series is deliberately structured, as a book would be.
Podcasts are not books, of course. There are no footnotes, nor is there a podcast equivalent of going back a few pages to re-read a passage one might not have fully grasped. The format tends to favor narratives that proceed strictly chronologically.
Within these constraints, Cooper does extremely well: he is clear, detailed and engaging. He is not a historian of this particular region and period; specialists might find things to quibble about. (This being spoken rather than written, pronunciation matters; Cooper pronounces Song dynasty capital of Hangzhou as per the earlier, and not entirely accurate, romanization of Hangchow.)
Cooper is good on everything from description, vividly evoking places and times, to cause and effect (the Black Death and Little Ice Age both make an appearance) while touching on a wide variety of themes (from religion, governance and social structure and to military strategy, technology and economics). He’s careful about what we know and what is inference. He is not, however, above a little thought-provoking speculation: he proposes (channeling and indeed quoting the prolific Jack Weatherford) that the Western rise to domination that began in the early-modern period was due to the fact that Western Europe escaped the devastation that almost everyone else in Eurasia suffered at the hands of the Mongols, while taking advantage of the Asian technologies (from paper to gunpowder) that traveling westward more rapidly than they otherwise might have.
That “fall” in “Fall of Civilizations” is presumably a sort of framing device, for the narrative is more about the rise and domination of the Mongols (it is other civilizations, from the Song to the Abbasids, that do most of the falling). The Mongols’ fall is handled relatively briskly somewhere around the six-hour mark.
“The Mongols: Terror of the Steppe” is very much a “book” in all but name. It was perhaps inevitable that a 21st-century communications methodology would find an exit in a technology from the 15th: the series as a whole has given rise to a physical printed book of the same name. But it’s only 400 pages.
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