winterbadger | let's see if I can fit this all in here

I found Weatherford’s book both engaging and frustrating. Engaging because he clearly knows his subject well and loves it; frustrating because he tries too hard (in my opinion) to convince the reader of the importance of his subject and distracts the reader with overblown claims and contradictions.

He conveys wonderfully a sensibility of the story of the Mongols. His description fill the mind’s eye with rich images of landscape, freezing winters and baking summers, smells of incense, and flavors of food. He renders the visceral emotions of brutal or touching moments feelingly. He introduces the reader to different cultures and mores and does a good job of separating the popular myth and legend of Mongol imagery found in Western culture from the reality of the history of Mongol society and their conquest.

On the other hand, I found his writing a bit too florid for my taste, overdramatic at times. It lacked the sort of professional distance that suggests the writer is a presenter of information as opposed to being an adherent of a cause. In particular I found his overuse of superlatives and absolutes troublesome and distracting. Everything about the Mongols seemed to be “the first” or “the last” or “the greatest”—qualifications that were often overreaching and unjustified, enough so that I ended up questioning all of the others I came across. The Mongol empire created by Genghis Khan truly was singular and revolutionary; it doesn’t need some of Weatherford’s exaggerated claims for it to make it fascinating.

Weatherford is certainly correct in observing that the Mongols, by creating an empire that spanned the Central Asian divide between the South and East Asian world and the Mediterranean and European world, contributed to the spread of science, technology, and goods in a far more rapid manner than had taken place before. He seems, however, almost to claim that the Mongols invented many ideas, or took them and repurposed them in modern ways when in fact they had been used in those ways for some time.

He also makes claims for the spread of technologies by the Mongols that simply don’t hold up. He suggests that they spread the making of paper from China to Europe, when in fact paper came to Europe from the Islamic world, which had learned it from China hundreds of years before the Mongol invasions. (1) He suggests that the Mongols transmitted decimal numeration to China from the Middle East; while the Arabic system of numerals came to China in the Qing Dynasty (founded by the Manchus, relatives of the Mongols but several centuries after Genghis’s time), the Chinese has used a native system of decimal notation since the beginning of their recorded history. (2)

I’m also a bit concerned by the way he uses the world “international”. It doesn’t generally mean what he seems to think it means. The Mongols didn’t create an “international” society in the sense that it was a group or association of sovereign nations, exchanging trade and technology. They created a *Mongol* state, which ruled many people in different parts of the world. They didn’t break down the walls between civilizations so as to connect them; they took what was useful to *them* and, unintentionally, made it easier for technology and culture to spread among their subject peoples. It spread a little faster than it had before by virtue of the size of the Mongol state, but not because of any Mongol desire to foster international mingling.

I also have a problem with his claim that the Mongol state presaged the modern secular state. The Mongols had their own religion; they just didn’t require that their subject peoples subscribe to it. Genghis Khan did, however, claim divine approval of his reign and divine authority for his judgments. Under him, the Mongols were tolerant of others’ religions, but so were most Islamic states. It’s a big leap from the Mongols not imposing a state religion to saying the y were the precursors of modern secular government; I don’t recall John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, or James Madison citing the Mongols in their proposition of the separation of church and state.

So, all in all, I found it a good read, and a highly informative book, but one that could be improved by toning down the author’s effusiveness for his subject. Some may justify on the grounds that this is a general and popular history, but that actually makes me more concerned by these traits rather than less. If a general reader, untrained in critical thinking and unfamiliar with the history of its many subjects, comes across this volume, I am concerned that they will take all of its grandiloquence at face value and go away with a somewhat skewed version of history.

(1) Fuller, Nethery Bastell. “A Brief History of Paper” (St. Louis, MO: St. Louis Community College, published July 2002, retrieved from http://users.stlcc.edu/nfuller/paper/ on 20 November 2009.

(2) Joyce, David E. “Mathematics in China” (Worcester, MA: Clark University, published December 1994, updated September 1995, retrieved from http://aleph0.clarku.edu/~djoyce/mathhist/china.html on 20 November 2009.