The interaction between Eurasian pastoral nomads and the surrounding sedentary societies is a major theme in world history. This volume explores the mulitfarious nature of nomadic society and its relations with China, Russia and the Middle East from antiquity into the contemporary world with emphasis on the Mongol and Turkish peoples.

Studies the role played by nomads in the political, linguistic, socio-economic and cultural development of the sedentary world around them. Spans regions from Hungary to Africa, India and China, and periods from the first millennium BC to early modern times.

Introduces readers to the cross-cultural study of ancient and classical civilizations. The book is divided into two sections, the first examining the ongoing interaction between ancient agrarian and nomadic societies and the second focusing on regional patterns in the dissemination of ideas.

Throughout their entire history, the sedentary civilizations of China and Europe had to deal with nomads and barbarians. This unique volume explores their drastically different responses: China 'chose' containment while Europe 'chose' expansion. Migration played a crucial role in this interaction. Issuing from two population centers, the sedentary one in the West and the nomadic one in the East, two powerful population streams confronted each other in the Eurasian Steppe. This confrontation was a crucial factor in determining patterns of Eurasian history - it destroyed existing states, created new ones, and drastically changed the balance of power. Even today, while Russian populations in Asia contract, the population pressures in China and Central Asia continue to build and are likely to spill over across the border. This book shows how we are witnessing the beginning of a new cycle of the age-old contest.

Until the collapse of the socialist system in Mongolia in 1990, Mongolian social sciences was fundamentally schematised in accordance with the prevailing political ideology of socialism, considering the country's history in the theoretical framework of historical materialism, the theory of socio-economic formation, and the feudalism model. Here, however, the author adopts a fresh approach and criticises the theoretical adaptation of the feudalism concept to nomadic culture while treating the history of Mongolia in view of the structural and developmental particularities of nomadic society. The book shows the economic conditions and everyday life of mobile livestock keeping, tribal and political-administrative organisation and the social strata of nomadic society during the 13th-19th centuries, demonstrating that development of nomadic societies in Central Asia cannot and should not be evaluated in accordance with European norms.

Since the first millennium BCE, nomads of the Eurasian steppe have played a key role in world history and the development of adjacent sedentary regions, especially China, India, the Middle East, and Eastern and Central Europe. Although their more settled neighbors often saw them as an ongoing threat and imminent danger—“barbarians,” in fact—their impact on sedentary cultures was far more complex than the raiding, pillaging, and devastation with which they have long been associated in the popular imagination. The nomads were also facilitators and catalysts of social, demographic, economic, and cultural change, and nomadic culture had a significant influence on that of sedentary Eurasian civilizations, especially in cases when the nomads conquered and ruled over them. Not simply passive conveyors of ideas, beliefs, technologies, and physical artifacts, nomads were frequently active contributors to the process of cultural exchange and change. Their active choices and initiatives helped set the cultural and intellectual agenda of the lands they ruled and beyond. This volume brings together a distinguished group of scholars from different disciplines and cultural specializations to explore how nomads played the role of “agents of cultural change.” The beginning chapters examine this phenomenon in both east and west Asia in ancient and early medieval times, while the bulk of the book is devoted to the far flung Mongol empire of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This comparative approach, encompassing both a lengthy time span and a vast region, enables a clearer understanding of the key role that Eurasian pastoral nomads played in the history of the Old World. It conveys a sense of the complex and engaging cultural dynamic that existed between nomads and their agricultural and urban neighbors, and highlights the non-military impact of nomadic culture on Eurasian history. Nomads as Agents of Cultural Change illuminates and complicates nomadic roles as active promoters of cultural exchange within a vast and varied region. It makes available important original scholarship on the new turn in the study of the Mongol empire and on relations between the nomadic and sedentary worlds.