u/Environmental-Ad1175

I’ve just finished this book and I find it to be an amazing look into the mindset of those in command and/or in-action of a faction of that history in Northern Ireland. I love narrative non-fiction style and i think PRKs book to be exemplary.

I would like to find similar.

Based on a Reddit recommendation I am currently reading ‘some people need killing’ about the Philippines ‘government’s war’ on drugs. Absolutely mental stuff!

What books from your country would you recommend for an outsider in understanding the pulse of ‘that time’ ?

What a book!

Towards the end of this book there is a quote from Francis Bacon who once identified three inventions that, in his view, had transformed the world:

Printing, Gunpower and the compass.

They changed literature, warfare and navigation so profoundly that Bacon believed no empire or religion had exerted a greater influence on human affairs.

While they originated in China, it was thanks to the mongols that they seeped in Europe having being absorbed into the administrative machine of the vast Mongolian empire. That speaks to the greatest of Genghis as a strategist. He identities their own weakness as thoroughly as he did the enemy and evolved accordingly.

I picked this up expecting a biography of Genghis Khan and an account of the Mongol conquests. You certainly get that, particularly in the first half, but that isn’t really the book l. Genghis dies at the half way point. Weatherford spends the second have on the historiography of the Mongolian empire and how they connected the world.

The book is a perfect blend of history and historiography. It gives you the complete story of how he rose to power. How he turned his back on heretical rights in favour of meritocracy in all things from politics to battle. How he broke tribes apart, mixed their members into new military units and promoted people on ability and loyalty rather than simply ancestry. A man of relatively humble birth could rise through the Mongol system if he proved capable.

There is an almost modern ruthlessness to the logic of it. Genghis was remarkably uninterested in pedigree. He ignored nothing of value and absorbed knowledge. Set up schools of learning for children of every social order and promised all if you can be of value you would find work

The author talks to how the Mongols had no great interest in proving that Mongols were superior to Persian, that one religion possessed the truth, or that Chinese engineering should be rejected because it was Chinese.

If somebody knew how to build a better siege engine, they used him. The Persian administrators understood taxation, they employed them. The Muslim astronomers possessed useful knowledge, they brought them into the system. The Chinese engineers had superior technology, they moved them across the empire.

One of the ideas in the book that really stayed with me is Weatherford’s description of the Mongols as helping to ‘break the monopoly of thought held by local elites’ such as the wealthy and priests. That is a much more profound consequence of the empire than simply moving silk and spices along trade routes.

For most people throughout history, knowledge had been intensely local. What you knew about medicine, religion, astronomy, mathematics or the natural world was largely determined by where you happened to be born and by the institutions controlling knowledge in that society.

The Mongol Empire smashed enormous holes through those intellectual boundaries.

Chinese, Persian, Arab, European and Central Asian knowledge suddenly circulated through a political and commercial network stretching across much of Eurasia.

The Mongols helped create one of history’s great periods of intellectual cross-pollination.And Europe was one of its beneficiaries.

There is another fascinating contrast in the book:, armoured knights versus the mongol military system. European warfare still placed enormous cultural value on the individual warrior: aristocratic lineage, personal bravery, armour and martial honour.

The Mongols cared about winning.

They used intelligence networks, scouts, coordinated manoeuvres, feigned retreats, psychological warfare, engineers and specialist troops. They happily learned from their enemies and incorporated superior technology into their own armies.

The knight was an elite warrior while the mongols were an elite system.

One thing I would say in criticism is Weatherford walks a dangerous line throughout the book.There has been a centuries-long tendency to portray Genghis Khan and the Mongols as little more than bloodthirsty barbarians who descended upon civilisation and destroyed everything in their path.

Weatherford is deliberately trying to correct that picture.

At times I think he corrects it a little too enthusiastically.

The Mongols were astonishingly destructive. Entire cities were devastated. Populations were massacred. Terror was deliberately cultivated as a military weapon. Whatever their later contributions to trade, religious tolerance and cultural exchange, those achievements shouldn’t sanitise the means by which their empire was created.

Weatherford occasionally seems so determined to rescue Genghis Khan from the caricature of the barbarian that he comes close to creating another caricature: Genghis the enlightened meritocrat, champion of religious freedom and father of globalisation.

The truth is surely more uncomfortable. A conqueror capable of horrifying violence and the creator of political innovations that were extraordinarily effective.

An empire could destroy societies while simultaneously connecting civilisations.

In fact, one of the darkest parts of the book demonstrates precisely that contradiction.

The same network that allowed merchants, technologies and ideas to move across Eurasia also allowed something else to move. The plague.

The Black Death travelled through the interconnected world that Eurasian commerce had helped create. And in the end this was the force that finally stopped and imploded the Mongolian empire.