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.

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.

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.

The studies contained in this book focus on the impact of interrelations between nomadic and sedentary societies. The authors, anthropologists and historians, have examined a wide range of nomad-sedentary relations and have discussed the effects of these interrelationships. Their inquiry exposes many facets of the diversity and flexibility characteristic of nomadic economy, social organization and practices, as they explain how these determine, and result from, interaction with sedentary social environments. The topics include ancient Egypt, North-Africa in Roman antiquity, the Near East from late antiquity till modern times, East-Africa, Iran and Central Asia, as well as gypsy groups in Turkey and in the Black Sea area. This comparative perspective, and also observations concerning the fluidity of boundaries between both ways of life have encouraged the development of a deeper understanding for the systematic aspects of nomadic life. Historical case studies have detected nomad-sedentary relations in several fields, such as military organisations, administration and political institutions. Their analysis correlates historical incidence to circumstantial and recurrent conditions. The authors also point out that nomadic, and particularly Arab Bedouin legacy have given rise to discursive practices and mental attitudes. The assertions and assignments of nomad identities therefore tend to appear as self-regulating social realities, being rather disconnected from mobile pastoral existence, and thus contribute to the interrelatedness of both worlds. Among the authors: Hans-W. Fischer-Elfert, Kurt Franz, Stefan Heidemann, Wolfgang Holzwarth, Anatoly Khazanov, Stefan Leder, Emmanuel Marx, Michael Meeker, Saad Sowayan, Birgit Schabler, Gunther Schlee, Charlotte Schubert

This is the first paperback edition of Anatoly M. Khazanov's famous comparative study of pastoral nomadism. Hailed by reviewers as "majestic and magisterial", Nomads and the Outside World was first published in English in 1984. With the author's new introduction and updated bibliography, this classic is now available in an edition accessible to students.