Chapter 11 - Pastoral Peoples on a Global Stage

Looking Back and Looking Around: The Long History of Pastoral People

• Plants and animals both participated in the "revolution of domestication," which began approximately 11,500 years ago. People living in more favorable settings were able to combine farming and animal husbandry, and built powerful and spectacular civilizations with large populations on this economic basis.
• Horses, camels, goats, sheep, cattle, yaks, and reindeer were the principal animals that facilitated the development of pastoral or herding cultures, either individually or in combination. Such communities arose amid the vast grasslands of Inner Eurasia and Sub-Saharan Africa, the Arabian and Sahara deserts, the Northern Hemisphere's subarctic areas, and Tibet's high plateau.

The World of Pastoral Societies

• Pastoral societies had numerous fundamental characteristics that identified them from settled agricultural communities and civilizations, despite their many differences.
• Women in pastoral societies had a higher status, fewer constraints, and a stronger role in public life than women in agricultural societies. Women were active in productive labor and had home responsibilities for food and children everywhere.
• We even observed ladies carrying quivers and bows, and the women can ride horses for as long as the males since they have shorter stirrups, know how to handle horses, and keep an eye on everything.
• Even though pastoralists were an alternative to the agricultural way of life that they despised, they were usually always strongly related to and reliant on their agricultural neighbors.
• Pastoralists connected with their agricultural neighbors not only economically and militarily, but also culturally, as they "got familiar with and tried on all the world's and worldwide religions for size."
• Pastoralists' mastery of areas unsuitable for agriculture was undoubtedly their most essential contribution to the greater human saga. They brought a version of the food-producing revolution and a significant human presence to the arid grasslands and desert regions of Afro-Eurasia through the inventive usage of their animals.

Form Temuji to Chingg’s Khan: The Rise of the Mongol Empire

• In explaining "what happened in history," world historians are prone to focusing on large-scale and long-term processes of change, but in understanding the rise of the Mongol Empire, most scholars have been forced to look closely at the role of a single individual Temujin, later known as Chinggis Khan (universal ruler).
• Everyone was surprised by Temujin's rise to prominence amid Mongolia's intricate tribal politics. It took place amid shifting alliances and betrayals, a run of military successes, his adversaries' indecisiveness, a reputation as a leader generous to friends but merciless to enemies, and the enlistment of vanquished tribes' soldiers in his troops.
• The first major attack on the settled agricultural communities south of Mongolia in 1209 put in motion a half-century of the Mongol world war, a series of military campaigns, huge bloodshed, and empire-building unlike anything seen before in world history.

China and the Mongols

• China, which had long been the major target for pastoral steppe dwellers seeking agrarian wealth, proved to be the most difficult and long-lasting of the Mongol conquests, spanning seventy years from 1209 to 1279.
• What were the Mongols to do with China now that they had it? One option, which the Great Khan Ogodei allegedly pondered in the 1230s, was to eliminate everyone in northern China and convert the territory into pastureland for Mongol herds.
• The Mongols adopted Chinese administrative and tax practices, as well as their mail system. They named themselves the Yuan, after a Chinese dynasty, implying a new beginning in Chinese history.
• Regardless of all these concessions, Mongol authority remained harsh, exploitative, foreign, and despised. Some Mongol authorities or their Muslim mediators treated the Chinese "like slaves," according to Marco Polo, who was in China at the period.

Persia and the Mongols

• Islamic Persia was the Mongols' second great civilization to be invaded. The Mongol capture there was considerably more rapid than the lengthy conquest in China.

• Prior to the Mongols, the most recent incursion had included Turkic peoples, but they were Muslims who had recently converted, were few in number, and solely wanted to be accepted inside the Islamic world. The Mongols, on the other hand, were considered unbelievers by Muslims, and their unexpected success came as a shock to those who had become accustomed to history being viewed as the steady spread of Islamic power.

• When Hulegu's successors' Mongol kingdom fell apart in the 1330s due to a lack of a suitable heir, the Mongols were not expelled from Persia as they had been from China. They and their Turkic friends just vanished, absorbed into Persian culture.