Land-locked between its giant neighbors, Russia and China, Mongolia was the first Asian country to adopt communism and the first to abandon it. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, Mongolia turned to international financial agencies—including the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank—for help in compensating for the economic changes caused by disruptions in the communist world. Modern Mongolia is the best-informed and most thorough account to date of the political economy of Mongolia during the past decade. In it, Morris Rossabi explores the effects of the withdrawal of Soviet assistance, the role of international financial agencies in supporting a pure market economy, and the ways that new policies have led to greater political freedom but also to unemployment, poverty, increasingly inequitable distribution of income, and deterioration in the education, health, and well-being of Mongolian society. Rossabi demonstrates that the agencies providing grants and loans insisted on Mongolia's adherence to a set of policies that did not generally take into account the country's unique heritage and society. Though the sale of state assets, minimalist government, liberalization of trade and prices, a balanced budget, and austerity were supposed to yield marked economic growth, Mongolia—the world's fifth-largest per capita recipient of foreign aid—did not recover as expected. As he details this painful transition from a collective to a capitalist economy, Rossabi also analyzes the cultural effects of the sudden opening of Mongolia to democracy. He looks at the broader implications of Mongolia's international situation and considers its future, particularly in relation to China.

First published in 2004. The Mongols are one of the great peoples in the history of High Asia. Their name has been familiar over the whole of the old world for close on eight hundred years. Yet at the most generous estimate it would be anachronistic to speak of a Mongol state, in the modern sense of the word, as existing before the end of 1911. The imperial adventure under Genghis Khan and his successors left the Mongols exhausted and disunited politically, and in the seventeenth century they fell, piecemeal, under Manchu domination which continued for over two hundred years. This study looks at the Mongol society as it was during the comparatively static two centuries between the final submission to the Manchus in 1691 and the national revolution of 1911. The second part of the book describes the dynamic course of events since that revolution and more especially since the second, Soviet-inspired, revolution which began in 1921.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The startling true history of how one extraordinary man from a remote corner of the world created an empire that led the world into the modern age—by the author featured in Echoes of the Empire: Beyond Genghis Khan. The Mongol army led by Genghis Khan subjugated more lands and people in twenty-five years than the Romans did in four hundred. In nearly every country the Mongols conquered, they brought an unprecedented rise in cultural communication, expanded trade, and a blossoming of civilization. Vastly more progressive than his European or Asian counterparts, Genghis Khan abolished torture, granted universal religious freedom, and smashed feudal systems of aristocratic privilege. From the story of his rise through the tribal culture to the explosion of civilization that the Mongol Empire unleashed, this brilliant work of revisionist history is nothing less than the epic story of how the modern world was made.

"Dr. D. Bumaa, 20th-century historian at the National Museum of Mongolian History, then presents the exciting history of Mongolia's century-long struggle to establish independence, first from Manchu Chinese feudal overlords and then from Soviety Communists.".

This is the first history of Mongolia available in English which benefits from access to historic data that only became available following the collapse of the socialist regime in 1990. Accordingly, it highlights the role of international politics, especially the former Soviet Union, Russia, China and Japan, in the shaping of modern Mongolia’s history. The volume actually comprises three ‘books’. Book One, entitled 'The Steppe Warriors', offers a history of Mongolia up to the 1911 revolution; Book Two, entitled ‘Incarnations and Revolutionaries’ addresses political developments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (1920s); Book Three, entitled ‘A Puppet Republic’ provides an in-depth analysis of the 1920s and 30s, concluding with the 1939 Haslhyn Gol Incident, The Second World War, the Post-war Map of Asia and the Fate of Mongolia’s Independence.

Mongolia remains a beautiful barren land of spectacularly clothed horse-riders, nomadic romance and windswept landscape. But modern Mongolia is now caught between two giants: China and Russia; and known to be home to enormous mineral resources they are keen to exploit. China is expanding economically into the region, buying up mining interests and strengthening its control over Inner Mongolia. Michael Dillon, one of the foremost experts on the region, seeks to tell the modern history of this fascinating country. He investigates its history of repression, the slaughter of the country's Buddhists, its painful experiences under Soviet rule and dictatorship, and its history of corruption. But there is hope for its future, and it now has a functioning parliamentary democracy which is broadly representative of Mongolia's ethnic mix. How long that can last is another question. Short, sharp and authoritative, Mongolia will become the standard text on the region as it becomes begins to shape world affairs.