Book Review: Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford

This is a great book about the most amazing conquerors in human history, who not only united a huge chunk of the earth’s landmass under one banner, but left behind a legacy of unified law and trade that impacted human history forever.

Before I read this book, I hadn’t really thought much about the Mongols, except as they had been depicted by their conquered enemies, as the barbarian hordes who ravaged and pillaged more civilized nations. I guess that’s kind of true, in a way. They didn’t have much in the way of technology. As nomadic people, they had no palaces, no cities, and no books or written language.

What they were really good at was war. Mongol boys and men were the best light cavalry in the world. They could shoot with amazing accuracy, and could do it while standing on the back of a running horse. They could travel a thousand miles at a stretch, without carrying their own food or water with them. They were amazing at navigating as well. They were to the unending grasslands of central Asia what the Fijians and Samoans were to the open sea.

You can tell Weatherford really admires the Mongols, and he goes to great lengths to describe how much more civilized they were than the sessile cultures they conqured. They disdained torture and bloodshed, for example, and would honor high ranking people by crushing them to death under their tents rather than by spilling blood. That doesn’t sound so nice until you realize that the Chinese (Sung) people liked to tattoo your crime on your forehead, and the Arabs were keen on severing necessary limbs at slight provocation, and of course the Europeans (who largely escaped the brunt of the Hun invasion because they were too backwards and poor to have anything worth stealing) would blame the Jews and then burn people to death after breaking them on the rack.

The detailed anthropology of this was my favorite part. I loved learning about the exotic cultural practices of the Mongols. For example, that they had a huge taboo about mentioning death, depicting death, or touching or spilling blood, which is why they didn’t go in for the Chinese practice of ancestor worship or the ever-popular Roman-style gladiatorial events. They considered skilled craftspeople to be valuable (they enslaved pretty much everyone) but as Genghis was a pretty liberated guy, he forbade his people from engaging in the traditional practice of kidnapping other men’s brides. (The other way was to work for your in-laws for a year or two to earn the bride, who was usually older than you. Boys would work for a bride at a quite-young age, sometimes like 8-10 I think.) He also forbade adultery, which was defined as sex with anyone outside your family group, which kind of boggles my mind.

The worst part of this book were al the names and lineages, which were hard to keep straight. Also, while I loved the maps, they were too few and didn’t have enough details for my taste. Nevertheless, this is a great book, very informative, and I highly recommend it.

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