A History of Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia. Volume II: Inner Eurasia from the Mongol Empire to Today, 1260–2000 by Christian David (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 575 to include. It has enabled him to write a definitive account of the origins of the extraordinary filmmaker Dziga Vertov, which also makes a major contribution to our understanding of Russian and Soviet cinema, history and culture more broadly. UCL SSEES Rachel Morley Christian, David. A History of Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia. Volume II: Inner Eurasia from the Mongol Empire to Today, 1260–2000. The Blackwell History of the World. Wiley Blackwell, Hoboken, NJ and Chichester, 2018. xxxv + 619 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Tables. Figures. Notes. Chronology. Index. $49.95: £34.99 (paperback). Since the first volume of David Christian’s wide-ranging history of Inner Eurasia (From Prehistory to the Mongol Empire) was published in 1998, Blackwell’s publishing house has succumbed to the embrace of the Wiley conglomerate, and the historiography of Inner Eurasia has been completely transformed by greater access to archives, fieldwork and archaeological sites, and new generations of post-Soviet scholars writing in English, Russian and Central Asian languages. It is greatly to Christian’s credit that he has, by and large, managed to stay abreast of these changes during the twenty years of the book’s gestation, though there are one or two areas where he relies too heavily on what are now thoroughly outdated Sovietological works. If the focus of the book is squarely on Russia, at least from the sixteenth century onwards when Muscovy became the major Inner Eurasian political power, it is enormously refreshing to see what are some quite familiar political and economic narratives reframed within a Eurasian rather than a European context. Viewed in this way, Muscovy, the Russian Empire and the USSR emerge not as a backward and benighted European fringe, but as the polity which was able most successfully to mobilize Inner Eurasia’s scanty agrarian resources to create a new centre of power in the post-Mongol period. The central metaphor used throughout Christian’s work is that of the smychka, or ‘yoking together’ of the resources produced by sedentary agrarian societies with the military potential of nomadic pastoralists. As he puts it: ‘to hold a smychka together, you needed a strong yoke and a skilful driver. If the first two components of the smychka were steppe armies and agrarian wealth, the third was elite discipline. Without the yoke and the whip, the two beasts headed off in different directions and plowing [sic] ceased’ (p. 16). Christian returns to these themes consistently throughout, and they have considerable explanatory power for the broad sweep of Eurasian history. Before 1500 those elites were often nomadic, reflecting the inbuilt military advantage SEER, 98, 3, JULY 2020 576 which their way of life gave them over sedentary societies in the pre-gunpowder age (pp. 12–13): the Golden Horde was one of the most successful and longlasting examples of the smychka, dominating and extracting resources from the principalities of Rus to maintain its military power on the steppe. From the early sixteenth century however, sedentary states gained a growing advantage as they succeeded in mobilizing greater agrarian resources (pp. 76–78): Muscovy gradually rose to dominance in Western Eurasia, as China did in the East. The defeat and destruction of the Junghar confederation by the Qing dynasty in the 1750s was first time a sedentary state had managed to project its power deeply and permanently into nomadic territory, securing China’s Inner Asian frontier. It would be another hundred years before Russia did the same in Western Central Asia, but the mobilizational power of the state also grew dramatically in this period, allowing it to use Eurasian resources to become a European great power. While elite coherence and mobilizational capacity broke down in Russia in 1917 and 1991, and in China between 1911 and 1949, it would subsequently be renewed — in China’s case to remarkable effect. Christian’sbookisespeciallystrongontheecologicalsetting—theparticular environmental constraints that produced pastoral nomadism and the peculiar forms of state-building and resource mobilization found across Inner Eurasia. Extremes of temperature, poor soil quality, short growing seasons and sparse populations made it imperative that the state control and mobilize as high a proportion as possible of the scanty resources available. It is this, rather than any...