The Mongol Empire is almost always introduced in terms of size: the biggest land empire, unprecedented in extent. Despite the scale the Mongols operated on, they have only had scaled-down entries in book series from academic publishers that help to rank areas of history as more or less prestigious.
Now Routledge Worlds have given one thousand pages to The Mongol World from the 12th to the 14th century. Routledge Worlds is a series that grants space to subjects that have been shortchanged, such as The Sámi World and The Inuit World. The series promises “unprecedented breadth and depth of coverage” of an epoch. For the Mongol entry, this is probably true enough. Divided into three sections—“Conquests and State Formation”, “The Social History of the Mongol Empire”, and “The Mongol Empire in World History”—and twelve parts, the book offers a thorough treatment of politics and war as well as topics that widen out to encompass the “world” of its title.

Forty-six contributors range from established to emerging scholars. The pre-Chinggis (Genghis Khan) steppe and the early Mongol state are in the hands of Isenbike Togan, who wrote a classic book on the Chinggis political project, centred on an ideological shift from a “pluralist” to a “universalist” order. One of the editors, Michael Hope, has another vital book on political ideology post-Chinggis, seen in terms of an ongoing conflict between “patrimonial” royal rule and a “collegial” tradition of government that has been obscured in most sources. Lhamsuren Munkh-Erdene is also key on Mongol “ideas of people, state, and empire”. He argues that the Mongol Empire survived for centuries after the loss of the Yuan Dynasty in China, which has been the conventional end date of empire:
Only a Sinocentric view can justify the termination of the Mongol Empire in 1368. This only shows how fundamentally Sinocentric the conventional historical vision is. Only the elevation of what is now China as “orbis terrarum” or “state-space” and the reduction of Central Eurasia to “dark space,” “barbarian outer darkness,” or “non-state space” can sustain this vision.
A chapter on archaeology in Mongolia by Ulambayar Erdenebat, Jargalan Burentogtokh, and William Honeychurch is similarly a corrective:
An overview of scholarship on the Mongolian Empire reveals a puzzling irony. Extensive historical research exists on far-flung regions of the empire and the relationships between Mongol overlords and their imperial subjects, but less attention has been focused on the heartland of the Mongol Empire in present-day Mongolia… The paucity of direct information on local steppe communities during the time of the Mongol Empire and, in comparison, the voluminous sources of information derived from regions external to the steppe have resulted in a somewhat skewed appreciation of the Mongols and their indigenous political traditions.
It is a fair point that we pay more attention to the Mongols’ subjects. The large section of this book on “Mongols in the eyes of the conquered” seems at first glance to continue this deflection away from Mongols themselves and towards the settled populations that history is more comfortable with. Even so, this section gives equal time to less-heard perspectives beyond the major blocs of China, Iran, Russia, Europe: to Armenians, Uyghurs, and Koryo people. The title of the Tibetan chapter indicates a general trajectory: “From brutes to bodhisattvas”. Similarly, the section on religions has the welcome inclusion of Judaism from Na’ama O Arom.
The section on sciences has only two chapters, on Arabic medicine in China and on ‘Mapping and exploration’ by Hyunhee Park. Art history and material culture also feels a little tight in its three chapters, since art historians have been particularly innovative on the Mongol age. Sheila Blair writes fascinatingly on “The visual world of the Ilkhanids and Chaghadaids”. This is Blair on expansiveness—a suitable theme for The Mongol World:
A third feature that characterizes the arts of this period is the opening up of space. Architecturally, this is evident in the development of innovative systems of vaulting, notably the stunning muqarnas ceilings and the various forms of complex transverse vaults that allow for openings to let in light. In illustrations, painters raised the horizon and transformed the flat baseline into a series of receding planes that imply a recession of space on a flat sheet of paper. The increased ground allowed for figures to be grouped in circles. Windows that opened outward or protruding trees suggested the natural world beyond the scene depicted in a painting, as in the enthronements from the Great Mongol Shahnama.
The chapter on art in Mongol China calls all sorts of artistic borrowing “cultural appropriation”. Currently, this phrase means an exploitative, disrespectful adoption of elements from another culture. Its frequent use in this chapter leaves some doubt whether the Mongols are being accused of an exploitative engagement with Chinese art.
One real hole in the book is the subject of history-writing itself. Routledge’s Companion to Historiography says, “Rashid al-Din has been called, with some justice, ‘the first world historian’.”
Rashid al-Din of Mongol Iran features in at least five specific chapters in The Mongol World, but there is no focus on his project of world history-writing. Roxann Prazniak in her book Sudden Appearances argues for the Mongol 13th-century as an age of new historical thinking in world terms. In the present book, this idea is most evident in the chapter on Tibet, with “the earliest extant Tibetan example of an attempt at writing a global history.”
Then there is the Secret History of the Mongols, the central text for a Mongol perspective on the life and times of Chinggis Khan. Its historical contents, of course, are used throughout, but the text is not given its own spotlight either as a work of indigenous history-writing or as a work of literature. A new translation of the Secret History is due early next year from Penguin Classics, so it is a pity not to have materials for study here.
No single book can be a one-stop-shop for things Mongol. But Routledge Worlds should be proud of its thousand pages. The discipline of history has had a bias towards centres of settled civilization. These pages prove there isn’t less to say about the Mongol world.
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