Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
This book will change how you see the world.
We live in a European world. Everything around us is Eurocentric. Even those who complain about the Eurocentric world use tools created by Europeans to complain about the Eurocentric nature of the world. I am currently writing this newsletter on Substack, a publishing tool headquartered in San Francisco, US. Most of the complaints about Eurocentrism I’ve read were published on Facebook and Twitter, two companies that are headquartered in the US.
If you ask even the oldest people today living in countries outside of Europe, there is none that can remember a time when major world decisions were not made in Europe. The top decision-making bodies are headquartered in Europe. The best universities are in Europe. The top professionals in nearly every field are in Europe. The majority of Nobel Prize winners are in Europe. Europe produces the highest number of books. Most companies that define our age, Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, Microsoft, etc, are all headquartered in Europe. Look at the last 500 years, nearly all the major events that shaped the world, for good or bad, happened in Europe or were shaped by Europeans.
But it wasn’t always this way. On the timescale of history, the rise of Europe is one of the recent phenomena. And would surprise the men of a previous era. It will especially surprise the Mongols. Jack Weatherford’s book “Genghis Khan And The Making Of The Modern World” explains this very well.
The Mongols invaded Europe in the 1220s and conquered some states; they didn’t find the wealth they expected and turned away. But wait, who are the Mongols?
They've been misunderstood, misrepresented, and loathed for years. However, the Mongols are one of the most important groups in history, and the one man who took them from a small tribal group to a global empire was none other than Genghis Khan. Actually, that’s not the correct name. “Ghengis Khan” is the European corruption of “Chinggis Khan”. His real name was Temujin. Temujin was a child of a marriage in which the husband abducted the wife. In their teenage years, Temujin and his brother conspired together to kill their half-brother. Thus, with the killing of his half-brother, Temujin’s life of scheming, fighting, and building a world empire began. In prophetic tones, his mother scolded him about killing his half-brother.
It seemed that everything was conspiring against Genghis Khan. His was a life of hardship. He had to fight to establish his identity. He had to fight to get a wife, he had to fight to keep her, and he had to fight to survive. Jack Weatherford wrote;
“Fate did not hand Genghis Khan his destiny; he made it for himself. It seemed highly unlikely that he would ever have enough horses to create a Spirit Banner, much less that he might follow it across the world. The boy who became Genghis Khan grew up in a world of excessive tribal violence, including murder, kidnapping, and enslavement. As the son of an outcast family left to die on the steppes, he probably encountered no more than a few hundred people in his entire childhood, and he received no formal education. From this harsh setting, he learned, in dreadful detail, the full range of human emotion: desire, ambition, and cruelty.” Genghis Khan and The Making of The Modern World, by Jack Weatherford
Genghis Khan began life as a son of an outcast family, but by the end of his life, he had established an empire of millions covering from the Pacific Ocean to the Persian Gulf. His empire was built on an army that fought in a ruthless manner, employing strict discipline, strong cohesion amongst members, and a massive obsession for victory. For the Mongols, victory was everything. As he expanded his empire, he introduced different cultures into each other. The Mongols transported goods from Europe to China, from China to India, and from India to Central Asia. It was the first global empire that understood and deployed the power trade, so it was no surprise that it was wealthy.
Two important things stand out in the Mongol Empire building.
First, The Mongols adopted whatever technique or technology they found to be superior in the territories they conquered. They copied and applied technologies shamelessly. This was a framework laid by Genghis Khan.
Second, the Mongols had the distinction amongst empires in history for not imposing their religion or lifestyle on others. This was most evident in the Mongol's conquest of China. Jack Weatherford says the Mongols became more Chinese than the Chinese. This was a common pattern in all the places they conquered. The Mongol Empire was an empire where Christianity was present, Islam was present, Hinduism was present, and every other religion.
“Whether in their policy of religious tolerance, devising a universal alphabet, maintaining relay stations, playing games, or printing almanacs, money, or astronomy charts, the rulers of the Mongol Empire displayed a persistent universalism. Because they had no system of their own to impose upon their subjects, they were willing to adopt and combine systems from everywhere. Without deep cultural preferences in these areas, the Mongols implemented pragmatic rather than ideological solutions. They searched for what worked best, and when they found it, they spread it to other countries. They did not have to worry whether their astronomy agreed with the precepts of the Bible, that their standards of writing followed the classical principles taught by the mandarins of China, or that Muslim imams disapproved of their printing and painting. The Mongols had the power, at least temporarily, to impose new international systems of technology, agriculture, and knowledge that superseded the predilections or prejudices of any single civilization, and in so doing, they broke the monopoly on thought exercised by local elites.
In conquering their empire, not only had the Mongols revolutionized warfare, they also created the nucleus of a universal culture and world system. This new global culture continued to grow long after the demise of the Mongol Empire, and through continued development over the coming centuries, it became the foundation for the modern world system with the original Mongol emphases on free commerce, open communication, shared knowledge, secular politics, religious coexistence, international law, and diplomatic immunity.” Genghis Khan and The Making Of The Modern World, by Jack Weatherford
At its peak, it was the largest contiguous land empire in all of history. As with all empires, it was brought down by internal squabbles, stupid policies, disease, and the simple fact that it stopped implementing the lessons that made it large. The Mongol empire effectively ended in the 1300s, but right up till the 19th Century, the remnants of the empire continued in India, Iraq, and China. It was the Mongols who unified China.
Different countries have invoked the memory of Mongols to inspire nationalism, and others have studied them to copy their strategies of victory. Even those who were never successfully conquered by the Mongols, the Japanese once tried to claim ownership of Genghis Khan in order to inspire nationalism. In Asia, the Mongols stand as a motivating example for different countries on their way to building their countries. Ironically, the land of the Mongols today, Mongolia, is a country with a GDP per capita of merely $4,566, far less than the Chinese, the Russians, and the Europeans. Genghis Khan will not be proud.
If you are like me, the information I knew about Genghis Khan had a lot to do with his ruthlessness and how he was buried after he died. It turns out all of this is a myth. Jack Weatherford explains that this was a product of the Europeanisation of history, an intentional effort by the present winners of history to cast those who came before them as barbarians. In a real sense, comparing the Mongols and Europeans of that era, Europeans were barbarians. It was until many years later when Europeans “stole” many of the ideas of the Mongols, that they became a world power.
Jack Weatherford does excellent work in this book. He was part of a team that worked towards rediscovering Mongol history and writing for the public.
Everyone needs to read about Genghis Khan because we all need a little dose of anything outside our Eurocentric view of the world. We need to understand one of the most important empires in history.