David Christian - A History of Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia, Volume II

General Editor:R.I. Moore

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This edition first published 2018

2018 David Christian

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Christian, David, 1946

A history of Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia / David Christian.

p. cm. (Blackwell History of the world)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents: v. 1. Inner Eurasia from prehistory to the Mongol Empire

ISBN 978-0-631-18321-1 (hbk : alk. paper). ISBN 978-0-631-20814-3 (pbk : alk. paper)

v. 2. Inner Eurasia from the Mongol Empire to Today, 1260-2000

ISBN 978-0-631-21038-2 (hbk : alk. paper). ISBN 978-0-631-21039-9 (pbk : alk. paper)

1. Former Soviet republicsHistory. 2. MongoliaHistory. 3. Sinkiang Uighur

Autonomous Region (China)History I. Title. II. Series.

DK40 .C49 1998

950dc21
983677

Cover image: Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo

Cover design by Wiley

There is nothing new in the attempt to grasp history as a whole. To understand how humanity began and how it has come to its present condition is one of the oldest and most universal of human needs, expressed in the religious and philosophical systems of every civilization. But only in the last few decades has it begun to appear both necessary and possible to meet that need by means of a rational and systematic appraisal of current historical knowledge. Until the middle of the nineteenth century history itself was generally treated as a subordinate branch of other fields of thought and learning of literature, rhetoric, law, philosophy, or religion. When historians began at that time to establish its independence as a field of scholarship in its own right, with its own subject matter and its own rules and methods, they made it in practice not the attempt to achieve a comprehensive account of the human past, but the history of western Europe and of the societies created by European expansion and colonization. In laying the scholarly foundations of their discipline they also reinforced the Enlightenment's belief in the advance of civilization (and, more recently, of western civilization), and made it in this form, with relatively minor regional variations, the basis of the teaching of history almost everywhere for most of the twentieth century. Research and teaching of the histories of other parts of the world developed mainly in the context of area studies like those of ancient Greece and Rome, rooted in philology, and conducted through the exposition of the canonical texts of their respective languages.

While those approaches prevailed world history as such remained largely the province of thinkers and writers principally interested in constructing theoretical or metaphysical systems. Only towards the end of the twentieth century did the community of academic historians begin to recognize it as a proper and even urgent field for the application of their particular knowledge and skills. The inadequacy of the traditional parameters of the discipline is now widely acknowledged, and the sense is growing that a world facing a common future of headlong and potentially catastrophic transformation needs its common history. The realization of such a history has been delayed, however, by simple ignorance on the one hand for the history of enormous stretches of space and time has until very recently been known not at all, or so patchily and superficially as not to be worth revisiting and on the other by the lack of a widely acceptable basis upon which to organize and discuss what is nevertheless the enormous and enormously diverse knowledge that we have.

The first of those obstacles is now being rapidly overcome. There is almost no part of the world or period of its history that is not the object of energetic and sophisticated investigation by archaeologists and historians. The expansion of the horizons of academic history since the 1980s has been dramatic. The quality and quantity of historical research and writing have risen exponentially in each decade, and the advances have been most spectacular in some of the areas previously most neglected. The academics have not failed to share the results of their labors. Reliable and accessible, often brilliant, accounts are now readily available of regions, periods, and topics that even 20 years ago were obscure to everyone but a handful of specialists. In particular, collaborative publication, in the form of volumes or sets of volumes in which teams of authors set forth, in more or less detail, their expert and up-to-date conclusions in the field of their research, has been a natural and necessary response to the growth of knowledge. Only in that way can non-specialists, at any level, be kept even approximately in touch with the constantly accelerating accumulation of information about the past.