The Steppe And The Sea

Download or read book The Steppe and the Sea written by Thomas T. Allsen and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2019-06-07 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1221, in what we now call Turkmenistan, a captive held by Mongol soldiers confessed that she had swallowed her pearls in order to safeguard them. She was immediately executed and eviscerated. On finding several pearls, Chinggis Qan (Genghis Khan) ordered that they cut open every slain person on the battlefield. Pearls, valued for aesthetic, economic, religious, and political reasons, were the ultimate luxury good of the Middle Ages, and the Chingissid imperium, the largest contiguous land empire in history, was their unmatched collector, promoter, and conveyor. Thomas T. Allsen examines the importance of pearls, as luxury good and political investment, in the Mongolian empire—from its origin in 1206, through its unprecedented expansion, to its division and decline in 1370—in order to track the varied cultural and commercial interactions between the northern steppes and the southern seas. Focusing first on the acquisition, display, redistribution, and political significance of pearls, Allsen shows how the very act of forming such a vast nomadic empire required the massive accumulation, management, and movement of prestige goods, and how this process brought into being new regimes of consumption on a continental scale. He argues that overland and seaborne trade flourished simultaneously, forming a dynamic exchange system that moved commodities from east to west and north to south, including an enormous quantity of pearls. Tracking the circulation of pearls across time, he highlights the importance of different modes of exchange—booty-taking, tributary relations, market mechanisms, and reciprocal gift-giving. He also sheds light on the ways in which Mongols' marketing strategies made use of not only myth and folklore but also maritime communications networks created by Indian-Buddhist and Muslim merchants skilled in cross-cultural commerce. In Allsen's analysis, pearls illuminate Mongolian exceptionalism in steppe history, the interconnections between overland and seaborne trade, recurrent patterns in the employment of luxury goods in the political cultures of empires, and the consequences of such goods for local and regional economies.

Download or read book By Steppe, Desert, and Ocean written by Barry W. Cunliffe and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 541 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of the peoples of Eurasia, from the birth of farming to the expansion of the Mongols in the thirteenth century. An immense historical panorama set on a huge continental stage, this is also the story of how humans first started building the global system we know today.

Download or read book Warfare, State and Society on the Black Sea Steppe, 1500–1700 written by Brian Davies and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-04 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This crucial period in Russia's history has been neglected by historians, but Brian Davies' study provides an essential insight into the emergence of Russia as a great power.

Download or read book Masters of the Steppe: The Impact of the Scythians and Later Nomad Societies of Eurasia written by Svetlana Pankova and published by Archaeopress Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2021-01-21 with total page 802 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents 45 papers presented at a major international conference held at the British Museum during the 2017 BP exhibition 'Scythians: warriors of ancient Siberia'. Papers include new archaeological discoveries, results of scientific research and studies of museum collections, most presented in English for the first time.

Download or read book The Steppe Tradition in International Relations written by Iver B. Neumann and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-19 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Neumann and Wigen counter Euro-centrism in the study of international relations by providing a full account of political organisation in the Eurasian steppe from the fourth millennium BCE up until the present day. Drawing on a wide range of archaeological and historical secondary sources, alongside social theory, they discuss the pre-history, history and effect of what they name the 'steppe tradition'. Writing from an International Relations perspective, the authors give a full treatment of the steppe tradition's role in early European state formation, as well as explaining how politics in states like Turkey and Russia can be understood as hybridising the steppe tradition with an increasingly dominant European tradition. They show how the steppe tradition's ideas of political leadership, legitimacy and concepts of succession politics can help us to understand the policies and behaviour of such leaders as Putin in Russia and Erdogan in Turkey.

Download or read book Khubilai Khan's Lost Fleet written by James P. Delgado and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Timeline of Chinese, Japanese and Korean dynasties and periods -- Prologue : A divine wind -- Hakozaki -- Asian mariners -- Enter the Mongols -- Khubilai Khan -- The song -- Tsukushi -- The Bun'ei War -- The Mongols return -- Kamikaze -- Takashima -- Broken ships -- Distant seas, distant fields -- The legacy of Khubilai Khan's navy.

Download or read book The Hungry Steppe written by Sarah Cameron and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-15 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Hungry Steppe examines one of the most heinous crimes of the Stalinist regime, the Kazakh famine of 1930–33. More than 1.5 million people perished in this famine, a quarter of Kazakhstan's population, and the crisis transformed a territory the size of continental Europe. Yet the story of this famine has remained mostly hidden from view. Drawing upon state and Communist party documents, as well as oral history and memoir accounts in Russian and in Kazakh, Sarah Cameron reveals this brutal story and its devastating consequences for Kazakh society. Through the most violent of means the Kazakh famine created Soviet Kazakhstan, a stable territory with clearly delineated boundaries that was an integral part of the Soviet economic system; and it forged a new Kazakh national identity. But this state-driven modernization project was uneven. Ultimately, Cameron finds, neither Kazakhstan nor Kazakhs themselves were integrated into the Soviet system in precisely the ways that Moscow had originally hoped. The experience of the famine scarred the republic for the remainder of the Soviet era and shaped its transformation into an independent nation in 1991. Cameron uses her history of the Kazakh famine to overturn several assumptions about violence, modernization, and nation-making under Stalin, highlighting, in particular, the creation of a new Kazakh national identity, and how environmental factors shaped Soviet development. Ultimately, The Hungry Steppe depicts the Soviet regime and its disastrous policies in a new and unusual light.