SEMINAR -
Rethinking Mongol History

Fellow, SCAS.
Dedman Family Distinguished Professor, Professor of Religious Studies, and, by courtesy, Professor of History, Southern Methodist University

ABSTRACT:
Over the last forty years our understanding of the Mongol empire has changed dramatically. Rather than being understood solely as a force of chaos and destruction it is now recognized that the pax mongolica – stretching from Korea to Hungary – created an unprecedented world of exchange that laid the groundwork for the early modern world. More recently, however, scholars have begun to question this positive re-evaluation not least since it simply reifies the narrative of peak neoliberalism maintained by American power. And while this new scholarly turn no doubt has merit it still fetishes the empire; namely, we need to recognize that the Mongols did not appear out of nowhere nor did they simply disappear once the empire came to an end. As a result, to rethink Mongol history we need to shift the historiographical framing of Mongol history both temporally and spatially to provide a truly comprehensive and synthetic history of the Mongols and their role in shaping Eurasian history for more than a thousand years.