I have no idea why exactly this one landed on my shelf. I was interested in the revaluation of the "barbarians" in James Scott's Against the Grain. I enjoyed Ian Morris's reflections on the importance of steppe conquerors on much of recorded history in Why the West Rules -- for Now. And of course, Deleuze and Guattarri's idea of the nomad war machine and its connection to capitalism is intriguing. So maybe I was just thinking vaguely that I really should learn a bit more about the Huns and the Tartars and the Mongols. Or maybe I was just spending down the enormous credit I have at the cat book store. At any rate, I do now know a little more about the most famous barbarian of them all -- Ghengis Khan. And it's actually fascinating to know more about him and the interesting moment in history he inhabited.
It's just too bad that I had to read this whole long-winded and poorly written book to find it out though.
Jack Weatherford begins his saga (and takes his title) with the idea that a wave of 17th century histories and dramas about The Great Khan might well have influenced John Locke or George Washington on the question of religious freedom. However, even as he tosses this out there, he himself doesn't believe it, and the book mercifully spends no time trying to establish that tenuous connection. Mostly, he just relates a long history of the life of Ghengis, beginning with his humble childhood, his unification of the Mongol tribes into a nation, his conquest of much of the Chinese and Islamic empires, his death in 1227, and the inevitable fractious division and decay of the Mongol empire under his heirs. It reads much more like a biography than a history book. There's no real attempt to grapple with the forces that led to Mongol unification and conquest at this particular time in history. Nor is there much real discussion of the innovative way The Great Khan ran his empire. Beyond the biographical, the only real argument of the book is that Ghengis Khan let the people he conquered keep their respective Gods. Somehow Weatherford thinks that this means he invented the idea of "religious freedom". It seems lost on him that this is the same idea of religious freedom that might appeal to any intelligent toll road operator -- believe whatever you want when you cross, but fuck you pay me.
So it was a pretty disappointing book. Nevertheless, along the way, I absorbed a little history I was completely unfamiliar with, and this is why I didn't drop the book after the first fifty flowery pages speculating on what Ghengis was feeling as he married his third wife. The main observation that will linger with me is how different a nomad empire is from a sedentary empire. Ghengis Khan was not a farmer. He wasn't interested in controlling territory or a large population from which he could extract labor. Instead, his wealth and power were connected with movement, with the circulation of people and goods. This really was a completely different type of empire, one that was even in some cases welcomed by the mass of 'vanquished' population as a significant reduction in the State's ability to extract surplus from them. This concept of a classic liberal empire, if you will, seems to me a much better way to connect the Mongols to modernity than any legalese about religious freedom.
If anybody comes across a really good history of the Mongols and Ghengis Khan, let me know. I would happily read much more about this period.
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