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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Original materials copyright John J Emerson

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