Reuven Amitai and Michal Biran, editors. Nomads as Agents of Cultural Change

This edited volume, exploring the role of pastoral nomads as agents of cultural change in premodern Eurasian history, originated at a conference convened at Hebrew University in 2007. The eleven contributors are leading experts on Inner Asian history, including the co-editors Reuven Amitai and Michal Biran, and senior scholars Thomas T. Allsen, Anatoly M. Khazanov, Morris Rossabi, and David Morgan. In this elite company, Allsen stands out as the historian whose revisionist ideas catalyzed the conference and book. Since the late 1990s, Allsen—as Biran notes in the concise introduction—has argued that Mongol empire builders of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were not only military conquerors, but also agents of cultural exchange “whose norms and priorities” were “the filter and catalyst that determined which cultural elements would be transmitted” within their extensive empire (1–2). Most prominently, Allsen’s Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia (2001), investigates the Mongol role in exchanges between East and West Asia involving fields such as technology, agriculture, historiography, and cartography. In the book under review, the eleven authors seek to apply Allsen’s thesis to new contexts.

Ancient history · Archaeology · CONQUEST · Elite · Empire · Historiography · Political science · Politics · China's Ethnic Minorities and Relations · Classics · Eurasian Exchange Networks · History · Law · Linguistics and Cultural Studies