First, I will qualify my entire review by stating that I listened to this book on Audible. Because of this, I was not aware that Weatherford did not use extensive citations to back up many of his claims, as other reviewers have pointed on here on GR.
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Jack Weatherford has written an outstanding history of the Mongols and their empire between 1206 and the late fourteenth century. Weatherford's volume is an excellent companion to David Morgan's The Mongols which was one of the first scholarly treatments that used new translations of The Secret History of the Mongols to describe the evolution of the empire and the life of Genghis Khan. Morgan is still far more reliable, far more succinct, and less centered on the personage of Genghis Khan. If you have the time, I would recommend reading both Weatherford and Morgan. Weatherford has written a revisionist history that starts from an initial question about how pastoral peoples have influenced the development of settled civilizations. From this he uses the Mongols and their empire as the best case study of how a small, nomadic collection of steppe tribes combined into a vicious military force and subsequently produced many of the social, political, legal, and technological qualities many people now associate with modernity.
What is Weatherford trying to revise? Well, first he wants to correct our perception of Genghis Khan as the butcher, the terrible, the monster, et al. and second he wants us to see the Mongol Empire as a socially progressive empire that made possible much of what we cherish in liberal democracies of the twenty-first century. Few scholars give credence to historical accounts of Genghis Khan as a murderous savage. In that sense, Weatherford sets up a sort of straw man from the beginning. Weatherford probably takes his thesis too far ont he second point as he tends to pile innovations on top of innovations and attribute those all back to the Mongols. For example, Weatherford argues that the Mongols toppled feudalism and aristocratic privilege in Europe. How, you might ask? Mongol armies invaded Hungary and Poland and slaughtered a large proportion of Europe's knighthood and then summarily executed the aristocrats and nobility that under the auspices of European codes of chivalry were exempt from torture, mutilation, or execution. I'm sure the Mongol incursion sent some shockwaves through European political and social systems, but I doubt their brief invasion collapsed these institutions. In fact, Weatherford later points to the Bubonic Plague as the judge, jury and executioner for feudalism (a much more plausible argument, but still too mono-casual). That being said, read this book with some skepticism but do not dismiss it entirely.
Weatherford divides the book into three parts. In the first, Weatherford details the life of Genghis Khan, based primarily on his interpretation of the Secret History, from his birth (c. 1166) through his unification of the Mongol steppe tribes into a coherent and powerful imperial force in 1206. Here readers will learn of the boy Temujin (the birth name of Genghis Khan) and his life of poverty, the perennial threat of violence and kidnapping on the steppe, and his period of captivity (the total time of imprisonment being uncertain). Weatherford tries to distinguish between the mythology of the Secret History and what probably happened during his early life—for example, the Secret History often attributes Genghis Khan's birth to divine and supernatural forces and often suggests that "The Eternal Blue Sky" guided and controlled many of his decisions. In these initial chapters Weatherford tries to understand the forces that shaped Genghis Khan's personality—the kidnapping of his wife Borte, his murder of an older brother, his period of captivity and deprivation, and the fateful relationship with Jamaka among other things. Weatherford also carefully details how Genghis Khan applied lessons from steppe hunting to the art of warfare. Chief among his strategies was the Horns maneuver that finds its modern equivalent in the double envelopment of pincer movement—essentially deploying two flanking columns to encircle an enemy or push quarry into a pocket that allows for a devastating attack. Genghis Khan also introduced siege tactics we might now associate with terrorism—launching decaying corpses into fortified cities, catapulting children again city walls—acts deception that included feigning retreat, dressing up fake envoys that would enter a city and betray its defenses and the basic elements of the indirect and direct styles of war. Genghis Khan's military tactics employed much of what Sun Tzu called "strategic configurations of power" or the ability for an army's tactics to be constantly fluid.
The second part of the book describes the Mongol empire at its zenith—especially after Kublai Khan wrested control of China from the Sun Dynasty and established the Yuan Dynasty that unified much of what now constitutes modern national China. Also included here are chapters on the Mongol incursions into Kievan Rus (the Russian principalities along the Volga River), the Mongol conquest of Arabia and Persia (with some emphasis on the siege and destruction of Baghdad), and the limited military campaigns along Poland and the Hungarian plains. The final portion of the book describes the global implications of the Mongol empire. By the late thirteenth century, Mongols controlled a vast area of land that stretched from modern Laos, Camobodia, and Vietnam to Iran, from Beijing to Kiev, and from Korea to the Baltic states. It became the largest contiguous land empire in world history and Weatherford argues that the Mongols used their control of trade routes (known as the Silk Road) across Eurasia to improve trade, establish a trans-continental postal system, and facilitate the transfer of important technology, science, medicine, and art to Western Europe that made possible the Renaissance.
Throughout the volume, Weatherford helps us understand why today the Mongols are so often cast as the opposite of civilized modernity. He primarily blames the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and twentieth-century Soviet Communism. Enlightenment writers and philosophers like Voltaire and Montesquieu, suggests Weatherford, cast the Mongols as barbarous savages and one-dimensional war mongers bent on acquiring gold, women, and blood. Voltaire, for example, used the Mongols and Genghis Khan as the epitome of corrupt governance and a metaphor to describe the iniquities of the French court during his time. During the nineteenth century many of the pseudo-sciences developed a "Mongolian" or "Mongoloid" racial type that explained why some white children were born retarded and why Asian civilizations (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indochinese) were backward, dirty, or underdeveloped compared to Western Europe and the United States. If a white woman gave birth to a mentally deficient child these doctors suggested that somewhere in the woman's bloodline an ancestor was raped by a Mongol heathen. Thus, the retarded child was not "white" but a pronounced side-effect of the woman having a trace of "Mongol" blood in her composition. On the other hand, Stalin ordered the suppression of the Secret History and the destruction of many Mongol artifacts when the Soviets occupied Siberia and Mongolia. For several decades, the Soviet Union continued Stalin's policy of censoring Mongol history, forced many scholars underground and killed others through various purges. The Soviet Union's campaigns in Mongolia not only explain why it has taken so long for works like Jack Weatherford's to come around, but also helps us understand why so much potential knowledge about the history of the Mongol Empire remains unknown.
There are many other great qualities to this book. Perhaps my favorite chapters concerned Yuan China under Kublai Khan. Weatherford describes an ideal state that witnessed the widespread literacy, flourishing humanities and arts, religious toleration, the separation of church and state, curtailment of the death penalty and torture as criminal punishment, the development of a writing system and alphabet, improvements in medicine, and the introduction of a civil service system based on merit rather than birth. Here is where Weatherford's argument about the Mongol empire prefiguring much of the modern world becomes most persuasive. He essentially traces out a plethora of developments in thirteenth-century Yuan China that, if abstracted from his specific historical case study, could apply to the twentieth-century United States, Great Britain or other liberal democracies.
I would give this volume five stars. But I think Weatherford, over his years of intensive research, has become too enamored with Genghis Khan. By profession, Weatherford is a cultural anthropologist and not a historian. Thus, his many years living within closed communities of steppe nomads has made him somewhat sympathetic toward the Mongol way of life. In the epilogue and afterword, Weatherford extols Genghis Khan's many virtues and lifts him up as the best example of a benevolent emperor (and the Mongol Empire as the best example of a benevolent empire) that contrasts markedly with the many sins of European Caesars, Napoleons, and Alexanders. Genghis Khan was certainly progressive for his own time and Weatherford should avoid too quickly comparing 13th/14th century progressive thought with that of the 20th/21st century—they are far too different. To be sure, Mongol conquest and occupation eventually gave way to practical advancements that probably ameliorated the lives of many falling within its orbit. Were not many of these benefits long delayed, though? Violence and coercion sustained imperial growth and its endurance, not benign cooperation. Few people living during the period would have understood how a trans-continental Mongol empire would benefit their lives or the lives of future generations.
This is a great book that I highly recommend to anyone interested in learning more about the Mongol Empire.
