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The
Politics of Genghis Khan:
Conclusions
I've been working
on a long, time-consuming piece about Genghis Khan.
Just to have something to post, here's a version of my conclusion.
More in a couple of weeks.
Geographically Eurasia can be divided
roughly into two worlds: the nomadic, mostly-pastoral world of Inner
Eurasia, and the sedentary, agricultural world of civilization. This
division is usually described as two different ways of exploiting the
land, which in turn are the result of differences in climate, but the
two worlds can also be distinguished by two different ways of controlling
territory and two different ways of waging war.
Militarily, the more-mobile nomads had
enormous advantages in scouting, concentration, and surprise,
and they did not have to defend cities and farmland in their rear. Furthermore, the steppe is inhospitable except to the nomads themselves.
Any army which would be able to take the battle to the nomad homeland
would have to be a nomad army, and as such it would always be capable of
switching sides and joining the invaders -- as many Chin units indeed did
during the Mongol conquest of North China. In addition, during the war
season the rate of mobilization of the sparse nomad populations was
extraordinarily high (as much as 30% of the total).
The nomad disadvantages were lack of
logistic support and weakness at siege warfare, and only when these
deficiencies had been overcome (by the assimilation of sedentary peoples
and their armies) could a nomad army mount the kind of serious threat to
the civilized world that Genghis did.
The sedentary world had a manpower
advantage, a logistic advantage, a defensive advantage because
of their fortifications, and a general advantage in high-quality and high-tech
weaponry and equipment. Often these were cancelled out, however, because
the less-mobile sedentary armies had to defend every point of a long
line of defense, whereas the nomad armies could suddenly concentrate
their forces on the weakest spot their scouts were able to find. In
addition, the castles by which sedentary princes controlled their
territories could be a force for disunity, since they allowed any local
prince to defy the central power as soon as he showed weakness.
As for control, in the sedentary world
peasants who could not escape (because they had no resources but their
land and the crop in the ground) were controlled and exploited from
castles and walled cities. Wealth was primarily in land, and secondarily
in the stores of grain protected by the castle and city walls. Power and
wealth were scarcely distinguished (at least in Europe), since the
landowner was usually the political lord also. In the sedentary world,
men were controlled by controlling the land they farmed, and
political control was the military control of the land from castles.
On the steppe, by contrast, with almost
no cities, stores of grain, infrastructure, or real property of any
kind, land could be controlled only by controlling men. Nomads and their
flocks could easily flee to a different master and then return with him
to retake the land they had left. This meant, on the one hand, that
control was hard to attain; but on the other, that once a tipping point
had been reached, resistance would evaporate. Since there were no
geographical barriers and no castles or fortifications, and since horsemen were many times more mobile
than peasants and footmen, a great Khan could suddenly become the
master of enormous chunks of the steppe. (This was particularly true
because the commoner Mongols had no particular loyalty to any leader, and
only wanted to support the winner. Great Khans who unified the steppe
made it possible for the nomads to exploit the much greater wealth of
the sedentary world, instead of fighting and dying in a n endless series
of little steppe wars.)
The economic products of the steppe,
per se, were of almost no importance to the civilized world. The steppe has been important to the
civilized world primarily because of its mastery of the tools of
violence and coercion, both as invaders and through their control of
long-distance trade routes. For two thousand years the
steppe was the uncontrolled zone to which the civilized state’s monopoly of
violence could not be extended -- but also a reservoir of potential coercive control
for civilized areas whose rulers had grown lax and ineffective. (This
can be expressed economically. Peasants were profitable to
control, since they were relatively cheaply controlled and produced a
considerable storable surplus; whereas nomads were money-losers, since
they were expensive to control and produced virtually no storable
surplus).
Gellner and Tilly, in their somewhat
different ways, have distinguished two distinct aspects of social life: production
(or capital, or wealth), and coercion (or violence, or control). Tilly
makes a further distinction between the accumulation (quantity) and the
concentration (centralization) of each of these. On Tilly's chart, Genghis’s
Mongols would have a unique and paradoxical position: the lowest accumulation
and concentration of capital
of any nation, combined with the highest concentration of coercion of
any nation.
The difference between the “logic of
production” and the “logic of coercion” is enormous. Production and
exchange involve cooperation, competition, bargaining over differences,
and dividing the profit. Coercion involves an all-or-nothing battle to the
death (Gouldner’s “total commitment rationality”). The coercion
specialist gambles everything (his life) for enormous benefits. At the
beginning there are many contenders, all indistinguishable from bandits
or extortionists. In the end, there is ideally one man left, and the
others are all either dead or subjugated: the one bandit still alive is
called "King". As ruler, the new King receives taxes from those whom he will
protect from future bandits -- this is Mill’s “king of the vultures”
theory of the state -- and in fact most states and dynasties were founded on murder.
“Tanistry”, the peculiar form of
succession on the steppe whereby all of the many potential heirs of the late khan
(sons, brothers, nephews, grandsons) form coalitions behind a few
contenders and then fight until only one remains, is the same thing as
state-formation in the sedentary world. The difference is that in the
civilized world, enduring institutions such as walled cities,
fortifications, standing armies,
granaries, and bureaucracies meant that there was something concrete to be
handed down to the heir, so that unless there were serious problems
(rebellion, famine, civil war, invasion) a peaceful succession could usually be
engineered. By contrast, on the steppe the Khan’s power is derived entirely from the
personal support of his generals and his troops, and there is nothing
really concrete for him to hand down. Thus, whoever succeeds the Khan has to
win that personal support all over again, and in effect, the state has to be founded
all over again starting from scratch. (In this analysis, succession
struggles in the civil world, which are not at all rare, are simply
reversions to the steppe pattern of founding the state anew with every
generation. Both Hegel’s
“struggle to the death”, and the bloody, patricidal foundation legends of
Jupiter and Saturn in Greece, or Kun and Kung Kung in China, are much
more historical and much less psychological than people realize.)
On the steppe, with its virtual absence
of infrastructure, the function of political organization was almost
entirely military, and the great Khans could maintain themselves only by
extracting wealth from the sedentary world and redistributing it to
their followers. Thus, when Temujin became Genghis Khan in 1206 A.D., he
had only a small window of opportunity within which he had to score some
successes against the Hsi-hsia, the Jurchen Chin in Northern China, or
the Khwarizmians in Turkestan. Hsi-hsia and the Chin both capitulated
fairly quickly, though both proved treacherous, and with the voluntary
enlistment of the Onggut and Uighurs Genghis Khan quickly came to
control the Silk Road. Had he been solidly defeated by his first
targets, the Chin, his khanship would simply have disintegrated, and the
names "Genghis" and "Mongol" would only be footnotes in history.
Genghis Khan created a new area of
order by using the nomads' military
advantages to
extend his rule (as prophesied in his monotheistic vision on Mount Burqan
Qaldun) over a greater area of Eurasia than anyone had ever done before. Where
previously a merchant from the Sung
Chinese capital in Kaifeng would theoretically have had to pass through four
intervening jurisdictions
before reaching Baghdad (something which was actually impossible), under the Mongol empire he would pass through
only one: the weak Chagatai dynasty in Central Asia, which was
theoretically an ally both of Mongol Persia and Mongol China. In
establishing this trade empire, Genghis was following the model of many
other peoples who founded trade empires (the Athenians, the Venetians, the Rus, and the Vikings), and like
them he lived by the murderous, all-or-nothing, order-imposing logic of coercion
or total-commitment rationality. (Of course, coercion specialists were
economically parasitical upon the specialists in production and
exchange. Long-distance traders who provided their own protection were
combined coercion and exchange in a single operation: cf. Tilly, Lane,
and Steensgaard.)
Genghis was a precursor of the
great European maritime trade empires of the modern age, which were
specifically motivated by the stories of Chinese wealth told by Marco
Polo and others. The descriptions by Lane, Steensgaard, and Tilly of the way
protection and coercion functioned during the foundation of the European
empires and the development of the European states also apply
to the Mongol Empire.
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I am emersonj at gmail dot com.
Original materials copyright John J
Emerson
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