History is always written from the sedentary point of view and in the name of a unitary State apparatus, at least a possible one, even when the topic is nomads.
What is lacking is a Nomadology, the opposite of a history.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, 19801
Introduction
The study of nomadic societies has typically been framed by a dichotomy between the state and nonstate, and a complementary stadial or evolutionist model of development. Positing a unidirectional historical movement from nomadic to sedentary societies, from tribal communities to modern states, this model has informed a broader historicist prioritisation of state over nonstate agents. In this evolutionist model, nomadic societies have functioned as the equivalent to ‘primitive communities’ in classical social theory – a comparative ideal-type against which modern forms of state and society can be defined.2 Similarly, models of the ‘segmentary tribe’ that were developed as part of a wider ideology of 19th-century colonialism have often been superimposed onto the study of Eurasian nomads.3 In the colonial period, the dominant image of the nomad was that of a ‘simple people, fierce and free’, living an
‘exotic’ life of ‘barbaric lawlessness’.4 In later historiography, nomadic empires were presented as ‘arrested’5 and ‘static’6 social forms that acted as ‘brakes’7 on development, and were therefore susceptible to ‘degeneration’.8 These images have subsequently been juxtaposed against the dynamism, civilisation, ratio-nality, and social stratification that supposedly characterises the modern state.
With these rigid distinctions between ‘civilised’ and ‘barbaric’, the study of nomadism has shared (and continues to share) significant similarities with other forms of Orientalism and Eurocentrism. As such, it is worth
remembering that the ideological construction of the ‘primitive nomad’ tallied with a history of violent subordination, annihilation and sedentarisation of nomadic communities. Through modern state formation and colonialism, nomads were subdued and subsumed into the codified and territorialised ambit of the modern state – a process that continues to this day.9 For example, the supposed ‘failure’ of Native American nomads to enclose and replenish their land led many Europeans to conclude that their colonisation of the New World was legitimate (see Chapter 5).10 Subsequently, the remnants of nomadic life in North America were systematically eradicated through state-led sedetarisation in the 19th century.11 Similarly, the modernisation of the Ottoman state in the 19th century was accompanied by a policy of forced settlement of nomads, along with a legitimating ideology of ‘Ottoman Orientalism’ which painted nomads under its jurisdiction as ‘savages’ who required ‘civilising’.12 In the same period, the Russian Empire forced its nomadic population to settle as part of its attempts to modernise the creaking Tsarist state. This too was complemented by an ideological construction of the nomad as ‘uncivilised’.13
The legacy of this subjection has reverberated through the social sciences, which have subsequently been relatively dismissive of the role played by nomadic people in the shaping of modern states and societies, both histori-cally and contemporaneously.14 As Iver Neuman and Einar Wigen argue, the very assumption of nomadic ‘backwardness’ precluded the possibility of more
‘advanced’ sedentary states being positively influenced by nomads. Conse-quently ‘even the most sophisticated contributions to the literature on state building do not touch base with the Eurasian steppe’.15 In short, the historiog-raphy of nomads is marked by a persistent and, we argue, problematic erasure of nomads from the history of capitalist modernity.
This chapter aims to demonstrate that this exclusion is no longer sustain-able, and that an appreciation of the influence of the nomadic Mongol Empire is central to any analysis of how the modern capitalist world came into being. In this respect, we follow the lead of a number of scholars who have highlighted the pervasive influence on world history of nomadic communities operating on the Eurasian steppe, from the formation of Asian empires to the commercial prefiguration of the modern world system.16 We acknowledge and take up some of these arguments, but with two important modifications.
First, accounts that have emphasised the influence of nomadic empires in the making of Asian history17 have not extended their geographical scope to address how this history impacted the origins of capitalism in Europe.
Second, those authors who do focus on their influences on Europe18 have typically concentrated on quantitative increases in trade and transfers of knowledge and artefacts that took place in the Medieval period.19 However, what they have yet to capture is how such commerce-induced transfers
impacted on the qualitative transformation from feudal to capitalist social relations. In contrast to both tendencies, we argue that the expansion of the Mongolian Empire was a crucial ‘vector’ of uneven and combined develop-ment which contributed to the making of capitalist modernity over the longue durée.
Considering the task at hand, it is worth noting two ways in which we consider uneven and combined development especially useful in redeeming the agency of the Mongolian Empire. First, uneven and combined develop-ment calls for a radically anti-stadial model of developdevelop-ment and a nonlinear conception of history. This provides an important corrective to evolutionist assumptions that underpin the study of nomadic societies, for any ideal-typical understanding of nomadism would in every instance have to be reconcep-tualised in a way that incorporates the sorts of ‘combination’ that arise from intersocietal relations. To paraphrase Peter Jackson, there are no ‘pure’ nomadic polities, but only ‘hybrids’.20 The subversion of the evolutionist approach also undermines the assumption that, on the historicist hierarchy of sedentary versus nomadic societies or state versus nonstate, nomadic communities lack historical agency.
So second, the idea of uneven and combined development does away with intersocietal relations conceived in realist terms as externally related but occa-sionally colliding states, and instead allows us to grasp more itinerant and nonstate forms of territoriality as an active part of international relations, state formations and world history more broadly. An awareness of this itinerant terri-toriality is precisely why uneven and combined development can offer a way of theorising the significance of nomadism in general, and the Mongolian Empire in particular, for world history. In doing so, uneven and combined development also provides theoretically and empirically generative ways of reintroducing the importance of nomadism into historical narratives of the origins of capitalism.
We take up this task in the sections that follow. In the first section, we examine the impact of the Mongolian Empire on the socio-economic and polit-ical development of Europe, demonstrating how it facilitated cross-cultural flows of commerce, trade, technologies, ideas and more, while also spurring significant technological innovations. The second section goes on to examine the unintended destructive yet regenerative consequences of the Mongol Empire’s ‘unification of the world by disease’ – an often overlooked and under-theorised form of intersocietal interaction. The spread of the Black Death to Europe engendered significant institutional and socio-economic developments and a transformation of the balance of class forces, which directly led to the transition from feudalism to capitalism in the English countryside. The conclu-sion then teases out the historical analysis’s broader implications for the study of world history and historical sociology more generally.