INDIA ARABIA

KO RE A

KHANATE OF THE GOLDEN HORDE (KIPCHAK)KHANATE OF THE GREAT KHAN CHAGATAI KHANATE ILKHANATE (PERSIA)NanjingLuoyang

DunhuangKashgarSamarkand

Bukhara Baghdad Tyre

Antioch

ConstantinopleBeijing

S ilk Rosad

Silk Road

s

1294

by nomads, any systematic development of productive forces was limited, as was the quantity of surplus produced. In order to generate new surpluses, nomads had to therefore integrate – by conquest or consent – more and more productive units from which they could extract tribute.²⁷

Consequently, the nomadic mode of production had a tripartite mech-anism for the reproduction of social life. First, there was the necessity of locating grazing land for animals in the herd. Constrained by the ‘spotty and archipelagic’²⁸ distribution of cultivable land in the steppe, migrations tended to be semi-annual between high pastures in the summer and lower steppes in the winter, imbuing nomadism with a continuous and far-reaching mobility.

This mobility, and the social structure it entailed, endowed nomadic life with militaristic traits: war and conquest developed from being necessities in the (re)productive process to forming a part of the polity and identity of the communi-ty’s members.²⁹ Second, there was the necessity of raiding sedentary communities for grains, manufactures and luxury goods.³⁰ Here the mobility, discipline and hardiness of the nomadic mounted archer proved an irresistible military force which contributed to innovations both technical and strategic.³¹ Third, in their interactions with sedentary societies, nomads also made use of their mobility to develop extensive trade relations with widely disparate sedentary communi-ties. This in turn facilitated the communication and transfer of technologies and information over long distances, as further examined below.³² Nomadic empire building was consequently invariably conducted along caravan routes that facil-itated the appropriation of surpluses through the mechanisms of trade and tribute.³³ Economic ‘openness’ in the conquered lands was therefore crucial to the reproduction of nomadic empires. These lands acted as logistical mechanisms for the supply of food, strategic resources, luxury goods, tributes and taxes.³⁴

Such a mode of production tended towards a proto-state or ‘headless’³⁵ state form which could manage these three elements – coordinating migrations around new pastures, leading conquering missions, and mediating between a multiplicity of nomadic and sedentary societies. The mobility of migrations also meant that the nomadic relationship to land was not one of ownership, and the limited nature of extensive pastoral farming meant that the accumu-lation of surpluses was restricted by climactic unreliability.³⁶ Thus, nomadism was adverse to the centralisation of power and resources – an essential basis for any private ownership of land and form of sovereign authority – and was instead marked by horizontal and disaggregated social relationships between society members.³⁷ This was complemented by an ideology of inclusiveness and quasi-equality, where social relations between members of the community were articulated in terms of companionship and comradeship.³⁸

In particular, this horizontality and flexibility of nomadic groups facilitated collective collaboration in raiding better protected sedentary communities.

Because intratribal or supratribal organisations were so heavily predicated on

warfare,³⁹ unification tended to occur through the appointment of a supreme chief, or khan, who would represent the ‘higher unity’ of these horizontal struc-tures.⁴⁰ Hence, political authority tended to be concentrated according to the personal qualities of the most skilled warrior in the position of chief, who was best suited to leading the ‘joint ventures’ of migration and raiding.⁴¹

With intersocietal interactions between uneven polities at the heart of social reproduction, the nomadic mode of production begot combined development.

This was most clearly expressed in the transformation of both nomadic and seden-tary societies through their interactions. Because nomadism required the material products of sedentary societies, many sedentary cultures became a ‘source’ and

‘model’ for ‘comparison, borrowing, imitation, or rejection’.⁴² Moreover, combi-nation worked reciprocally: nomadic technologies, cultures and traditions were also imitated by sedentary societies.⁴³ The qualities of mobility and war-readiness made nomads especially attuned to extorting surpluses from sedentary societies through raids, and under certain conditions conquest.⁴⁴ This external nomadic

‘whip’ necessitated a response from sedentary societies toward more ordered politics and better equipped military organisations, something that was only possible with greater accumulation and centralisation of resources. As a result, sedentary societies required the creation of surpluses, and their appropriation, and so social stratification and the concentration of political powers were needed in personified arbitrary authorities or states. In these ways, sedentary societies tended to unwittingly replicate political features of nomadic societies.⁴⁵

At the same time, interactions with sedentary states led to the consoli-dation of larger and stronger administrative and military institutions among nomads, in order to better conduct wars and raids, or to control trade routes.

Such expansions precipitated the emergence of centralised standing armies and the Supreme Khan’s personal bodyguards, often to unprecedented scales.⁴⁶ Such a growth of centralised military functions was maintained primarily through the semi-institutionalisation of the raid, through tribute and eventually by the direct taxation of sedentary subjects.⁴⁷ And as the importance of tribute and taxation to the modalities of ruling class reproduction grew, nomadic empires tended to incorporate bureaucrats from conquered sedentary territories in order to administer these functions of surplus extraction.⁴⁸ Finally, nomadic ideology was rearticulated in order to legitimise this shift in social relations ‘from horizontal to vertical and from semi-egalitarian to hierarchical’.⁴⁹

In short, the uneven relations between nomadic and sedentary societies tended towards the complexification of nomadic political structures as a result of the confrontation and consequent amalgamation,⁵⁰ synthesis⁵¹ or ‘caging’⁵² of these multiple and varied social forms.⁵³ And it was through such processes of combined development that nomadism could tend towards semi-tributary modes of production – either through processes of nomadic empire building (Mongol, Ottoman), or through the nomadic pressures on sedentary states to

consolidate, as exemplified by the Mughal, Chinese, Byzantine and Muscovite empires. When we see nomadism as developing combined social formations, it is therefore possible to move away from an essentialised understanding of nomadism as ‘static’, ‘simple’ or ‘primitive’ to an understanding that recognises the often unprecedented levels of sophistication in the organisation of state and society achieved by polities such as the Mongolian Empire, along with their impact on other more ‘advanced’ sedentary societies.

Moreover, these combined characteristics help to clarify the central contra-diction in the nomadic mode of production between tendencies towards a hierarchical, stratified sedentarisation, on the one hand, against the horizontal flexibility of nomadism, on the other. Because this contradiction was so deeply imbued with intersocietal determinations, it tended to be expressed first and foremost geopolitically.⁵⁴ The ebb and flow of nomadisation and sedetarisation, created by intranomadic and nomad–sedentary internecine conflicts over access to land or spoils of raids, meant that communities were constantly uprooted and moved to more secure areas for grazing and/or agriculture.⁵⁵

Waves of nomadic empire building therefore tended to create chain reac-tions of displacement, migration and resettlement that transmitted the peoples and traditions of nomadism throughout Inner Asia to its hinterlands. Such was the reach of Inner Asian nomadic empires that their legacy could be found to the north in the Muscovy Empire, to the south in the Mughal Empire, to the West in the Saffavid and Seljuk Empires, and to the East in the Yuan and Manchu Dynasties.⁵⁶ In short, the contradictions at the heart of nomadic form of uneven and combined development meant that nomadic empire building could be simultaneously generative and destructive. The varied developmental experiences implied in this contradiction are explored below.