Brill’s Inner Asian Library, v. 36. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2017. xi, 200 pp. (Tables, illustrations.) US$134.00, cloth. ISBN 978-90-04-34338-2.
This collection of essays, a Festschrift, honours Morris Rossabi’s achievements in Mongolian history. His witty and clear presence in the lecture hall, his fine sense of humour, fairness, personal charm, and disarming unpretentiousness make him a truly great educator who touches the lives of those attending his lectures or discussion panels. These qualities all come through in his writing. Morris Rossabi is not only the author of the definitive biography of Khubilai Khan (1988), but he has also placed Mongolian history into a larger global context (The Mongols and Global History, W.W. Norton, 2010). He has even left history behind, and ventured into contemporary analysis by describing the fierce transition of socialist Mongolia into a neoliberal society (Contemporary Mongolia, UC Press, 2005). The celebratory essays by his colleagues go beyond a recognition of Rossabi’s influence on their work, and emphasize a common theme: debunking deeply ingrained myths about the Mongols and their history.
Generally speaking, two kinds of writers popularized Mongolian history. Many traditional descriptions going back to the fourteenth century focused on the Mongols as barbarians bent on slaughtering, raping, and pillaging the masses. Beginning in the 1980s, however, revisionists emphasized Mongols’ contribution to trade and their relative lack of general religious discrimination. Unfortunately, some more sensationalist writers began to pick up on this theme and grossly exaggerated Chinggis Khan’s role as the creator of the Modern World and an apostle of democracy. The contributors to this volume, colleagues and in many cases friends of Rossabi, authoritatively correct many of these misleading and unbalanced views.
The book title How Mongolia Matters is based on Bettine Birge’s essay of the same name. Her convincing research on the impact of Mongolian penal codes, inheritance laws, and marriage laws does away with the myth that Mongols became Sinicized after their conquest of China. Quite to the contrary, Mongolian laws permanently changed Chinese laws until the collapse of the Qing empire in the twentieth century. Johan Elverskog’s essay “Sagang Sechen on the Tumu Incident” breaks from the standard Chinese narrative and describes the battle of Tumu in 1449 through the lens of a seventeenth-century Mongolian source to present a Mongolian perspective. James Millward’s philological analysis “What did the Qianlong Court Mean by huairou yuanren?” shows that Westerners misunderstood Qing’s policies as “pacifying” Inner Asia while they in fact embraced Mongolians and Tibetans by literally “cherishing people from afar” (huairou yuanren).
Christopher Atwood’s “Jochi and the Western Campaigns” reviews the sources of the Mongolian successor states in the Middle East that traditionally abrogated the right of Chinggis Khan’s oldest son Jochi to rule all the western territories. By using the writings of the Persian Il-Khanate of Persia and the Middle East, Atwood paints a much more nuanced picture of Jochi and the Golden Horde. Jochi played a greater role throughout the western sphere of the Mongolian empire than the traditional sources admitted but Jochi also cooperated with the other Mongolian leaders. David Morgan’s “Iran’s Mongol Experience” takes on the current popularizers who minimize Mongolian atrocities in the Middle East and re-affirms the enormous damage the Mongolian invasion caused. Michael Brose’s “Qipchak Networks of Power in Mongol China” explores how the non-Mongolian Qipchaks contributed to the Mongolian empire and at the same time maintained their identity for generations in the Yuan empire. Brose conclusively demonstrates how the relatively small number of Mongols incorporated non-Mongolian ethnicities to maintain one of the largest empires of the world. David Robinson’s “Celebrating War with the Mongols” deconstructs Ming histories, poems, and songs celebrating fictitious Ming victories over the Mongolians in the early fifteenth century. Pamela Kyle Crossley’s technical survey “Flank Contact,” of riding techniques in Eurasia from 500 AD to 1500 AD, provides an interesting comparison of saddles and riding techniques from the Romans to the Mamlucks. Yuki Konagaya’s “Modern Origins of Chinggis Khan Worship” argues that the glorification of Chinggis Khan did not originate with the fall of socialism in the 1990s but with the Japanese invasions of China in the 1930s.
Ambassador Enkhsaikhan Jargalsaikhan concludes the book with an appraisal of the current goal of a nuclear-free zone in Central Asia and the potential dangers of nuclear weapon tests and nuclear waste repositories near the Mongolian border. Ambassador Jargalsaikhan’s article reads more like a political manifesto for what Mongolia should do with its nuclear neighbours China and Russia than an analysis of Mongolia’s foreign policies; but this is to be expected, as the author is a diplomat and not a historian. In conclusion, these Festschrift authors pay homage to their teacher, colleague, and mentor, a scholar who has done so much to correct the gross distortions of sensationalist writers of Mongolian history.
Dirk Voss
St. Louis Community College, St. Louis, USA