Empires of the Steppes: The Nomadic Tribes Who Shaped Civilisation
historytoday.com
historytoday.com
There's a bunch of other interesting things in the book too. Like describing the long history of the Turkic cultures military structure of two "left" and "right" generals handling literally the east and west flanks of the empire; the rituals of power succession that survive in echoes today involving horses, untouchable "charismatic" families, the sacredness of the rulers blood (and implication that if they are to be killed it must be bloodless), and how the legitimacy of the ruler depends on their visitation of ritual sites often situated along river basins or oases;
Also the Uyghurs apparently had their own empire that terrorized the everloving hell out of ancient China to the point where China paid them tribute to cease their raids, and was even forced to appoint one of them as royalty.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Turks-History-Carter-Vaughn-Findley/d...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muqaddimah
Before the advent of industrialisation, when hunanity was still in the mathusian trap, the observation probably was true.
https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-wrath-of-...
The second red flag is that I searched for "kings and generals" on the r/askhistorians subreddit. I found only a few reviews of it and they weren't great. r/askhistorians tends to be quite critical of popular or simplified history, a little too much for my taste, so I don't mean to give their reviews too much weight. But from what I could see, it was Not Good.
Mind you, these are red flags. It doesn't mean all of the videos made by Kings and Generals are bad or completely false. But it's enough for me to not even bother watching them at all until something convinces me otherwise.
Also recommend the work of Simon Berger, who pushes more for the empire of the steppes not being simply "nomadic tribes" but a proper nomadic state: https://www.academia.edu/106272853/Nomadic_State_in_the_Sede...
For those who speak French there is also this very in-depth series of videos on that topic (steppes), which also goes over the work of Simon Berger and some very early historians encounter with the steppes cultures: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKZgJ2XooL3ARUPRafV2y3972...
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/17286667
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2027949/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NCDPQhSz_E
It's a surprisingly good tale if you can find the book or DVD about the place, he learnt how to ride on the go and met quite a few people on the way.
https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Barbarian-Empires-of-the-Step...
It is chock full of information and Harl has a very engaging style of presentation. You can tell you are being taught by someone who has both a deep knowledge and love of history.
I would recommend listening to these lectures if you enjoy history.
Looking forward to reading the book as well.
In this fashion they were not unlike malaria and tsetse fly.
Eventually, settled societies concentrated sufficient amount of military and industrial power in one hands that nomads could no longer compete and fell apart, and these steppes were finally populated by villages and towns.
Some of the smarter nomad communities figured out how to avoid that fate and settled down by themself.
It's very much a PoV thing that plays a great deal upon what world view a commenter has been conditioned to hold.
The tragedy is that their society will be raiding; will be taking people and selling as slaves; and, obviously, will get smashed with impunity as soon as an opportunity presents.
> since most of my ancestors were peasants I believe my PoV is reasonable.
Uh, that is... quite a leap there. Not sure that one follows from the other.
As a percentage of the population, or in absolute numbers?
In 'recent' history, Viking/Norse-Gael Dublin was one of the major slave trading centres of Europe from the 9th to the 12th Century.
Do we classify the Vikings, here settled in the one city and raising crops for three hundred years, as nomads? Is their state the state of Ireland, the place that they are taking many slaves from?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Ireland#Viking_peri...
True up to a point, but the agriculturalists are able to support far more human flourishing on the same land - hence why they won the fight. And AIUI for much of the time when both existed and were in conflict, the pastoralists were essentially parasitic on the agriculturalists (in that they were taking more by raiding than they would ever have gained through hunting).
> And it is states -- which are without exception agricultural socieities -- that are responsible for the vast majority of human slavery in history.
Formal, documented slavery perhaps - but that's because those are the only societies with formal, documented anything. How much choice do people in those societies have of what kind of work to do, much less not to work? How much choice do women have of who to marry, much less not to marry (and how much choice of how they're treated within that marriage)? Of course you can choose not to follow the customs of your tribe, but at that point how much protection is there for your property or even your life?
If you conflate these two options, though, it does not make sense to discuss anything with you.
>> hence why they won the fight.
More likely, they won because there were always far more of them, and Eurasian trade shifted from the "silk road" to the oceans.
>> those are the only societies with formal, documented anything
You can't be serious.
But you can also approach these issues with say, a couple centuries of large-scale agricultural development projects like China has done in Inner Mongolia. If you build massive irrigation networks and invest heavily in other technologies, you can develop the area for sedentary agriculture at the expense of the grasslands.
I question whether the agricultural lifestyle is a better lifestyle for humanity than pastoralism in some kind of utilitarian or consequentialist sense, provided the conquest of and parasitism upon agricultural peoples could be factored out. Pastoralists had generally taller stature and better dentition than agriculturalists until the industrial revolution. Pastoralists maintained smaller populations, and avoided the negative externalities of settled agriculture, e.g. soil exhaustion under intensive irrigation, pests and disease from close-quarters living.
And I don't see how you can ever factor out conquests and taking peasants as slaves.
Also: do we need to put things in space, and to have computers? Are our lives fuller from that?
If we are not doing that we are not sentient species but a kind of animal that happens to speak and use some rudimentary tools.
Also those "non-sentinent animals with rudimentary tools" did have quite some culture, and technology. Not in today's sense of course: no personalized advertisements with goebbelsian tricks to trick people into wasting even more resources and destroying our environment even more. They only made rudimentary tools like composite bows, tools for horse riding and taking care of animals, etc.
I'm also sad to hear that people before 1960 were just a kind of animals in your opinion, and if that is the measure, many people around the world still are.
Many people today are trying to return to animal state, like you are contemplating it.
An illegal immigrant crossing the sea for better living is more human than a developed country suburban dweller trying to learn carbon neutral living.
How do you know we were always going forward in the right direction? How do you know sometimes we don't need to go back? DDT? CFC gases? There lots of examples even from the recent times.
Why do you think people in the pastoral civilizations didn't exercise their curiosity? Just because they didn't built things you fancy? Didn't they create things, like art, just for the sake of beauty? Isn't that a kind of exercising curiosity, Didn't they develop and learn methods to live in harsh environments, to use the plants as medicine, etc. Isn't that kind of learning valuable, because it does not lead (as quickly) to creation machines doing fancy flashing stuff? they were living, and progressing in a different pace in possibly different directions.
Your attitude is not simply colonialist, but also lack respect for many forms of knowledge, only for these are not on the modern technocratic urbanite's tool-belt makes it especially narrow-minded.
Art is great. Let's always be trying to discover newer forms of art.
It turns out their way of progressing did not bear friut and peasant societies were much faster. That's life.
Why are you only obsessed with new things? Why cannot the legacy be cultivated?
It turns out that pastoral life did bear its fruits, you simply dismiss those. For one, the most important fruit: those people are still around. No that is life, not "progress for the sake of progress".
Legacy absolutely should be cultivated and remembered. But never at the cost of rejecting further motion.
Pastoral life was great why it was going on (even remembering all the raids and slavery stuff), but then it could not go on anymore since peasants learned how to build walls and posts and forts. And had a good reason to do so.
It remains to be seen if this results in a better lifestyle for humanity
There have been nomadic pastoralists living alongside partially and fully sedentary agriculturalists in Central Asia for thousands of years. The parts of the continent that are inhabited solely by nomads are those areas that are largely unsuitable for sedentary life and were adapted into environments suitable for pastoralists instead.
The idea of nomad communities that subsist solely on raiding poor sedentary farmers is one that gets a lot of play in historical documents (conveniently written almost exclusively by people living in sedentary communities), but it's not a narrative that's well supported as the historical norm by the archaeology in most areas. Instead, much of what we see is produced by complex economic systems involving mutually beneficial trade between these groups. You might have heard these kinds of systems called "silk roads", for example.
The nation of Turkey is a strong historically recent and well documented example of that, with Turkic tribes displacing Kurds, Armenians, and Greeks, not coexisting with them (long term). In short periods, of course there were some cases of peaceful coexistence, but power politics always finds a way to capitalize on ethnic divisions through violence.
Bulgaria and Hungary are much earlier era examples (still visible in genetic testing) . The displaced Slavic and Germanic tribes refugee crisis brought upon various Roman crises in multiple waves, ultimately driving the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.
This is false. The Turkic and Mongolic peoples of the steppe have a well-developed epic tradition that goes back centuries. And that epic tradition celebrates raids on sedentary communities for plunder and as a display of bravery and political leadership.
You also shouldn't take stories as necessarily accurate portrayals of daily life. Killing dragons and other monsters wasn't a viable route to power due to their rarity, but it's a popular legitimizing myth that shows up all over the place in early medieval European literature. Similarly, while early modern Spain did have "explorers" charting strange new lands and ahem, "romancing" women like their early modern literature (often inspired by that same literature), it was not a typical career for most Spaniards.
Raiding happened, but it was not the sole or even necessarily a primary means of economic subsistence depending on where and when.
Because peasants were good at hiding and plain out avoided living where they would be an easy raiding target. Which is my point exactly.
Nonsense. Huge swaths of eurasian landmass is uninhabitable because of harsh climate ( siberia, gobi, etc ) or the distance from water sources. Even today, most of eurasia is empty.
> In this fashion they were not unlike malaria and tsetse fly.
Dumbest thing I've read in a long time. These 'malaria and tsetse fly' improved the lives of settlers by enabling trade. Modern history was made by these nomads. Everything from the italian renaissance to the discovery of the new world was a result of trade by these 'malaria and tsetse flies'.
> Eventually, settled societies concentrated sufficient amount of military and industrial power in one hands that nomads could no longer compete and fell apart, and these steppes were finally populated by villages and towns.
Wrong again. It wasn't settled societies that did this. The nomads conquered settled societies and militarized and developed them. From the mongols in much of eurasia, the vikings in europe, the turks in the middle east, etc.
> Some of the smarter nomad communities figured out how to avoid that fate and settled down by themself.
Avoid what fate? The nomad communities conquered and ruled.
This gets repeated over and over but looks false.
Why is the city of Ryazan on five centuries older than the city of Voronezh just 200 km to the south? One is in cold swampy forests and the other one is temperate grasslands. And you see this pattern everywhere where barely arable places such as Vjatka are populated for a long time but Krasnodar only recently populated.
So this is plain old racism, right?
People who live alongside nomads for millenia and exchange raids / conquests are not racists.
The former should never be lecturing the latter.
The next thing you will probably say, USA isn't island?
"Racism" in popular usage includes ethnic and religious hatreds ("racism against Muslims" etc.). I agree this usage is sloppy. Would "virulent bigotry" be more precise?
Suppose for argument's sake your claim that nomads "would gladly enslave your ancestors and congratulate it [sic]" were historically supportable -- let me lay out for you why your "malaria/tsetse fly" comparison is still plain old unilluminating bigotry. In short: a) you can generalize tsetse flies and malaria organisms but not human members a group; b) you can relate to the latter, but not the former, on human terms.
Were there periods of positive coexistence between nomads and settlers, and were there cases of successful peace agreements between the two during conflicts? Were there members of nomadic ruling elites who championed or protected sedentary subjects from their peers? Were some nomadic people themselves slaves, religious ascetics, children, etc. who would not "gladly enslave" anyone? Did some nomads even transition to sedentary life? Do they have human descendants alive now? The answer in each of these cases is a well-attested "yes". Do any of these cases apply to malaria or the tsetse fly? No.
By comparing a human group to parasites or vermin, you can generalize them and dismiss any possibility of relating to them on human terms. If some group would gladly enslave me, I'd have no problem condemning it or resorting to force. But unless I mainly wanted to enjoy treating them as inferiors I wouldn't liken them to diseases or insects like you are doing.
Nomads did make these lands uninhabitable due to danger of death, not unlike malaria; and these lands did undergo the relevant nomad displacement/swamp draining before they could be settled by peasants. The comparison is apt, and if you have moral issues with the metaphor, compare that to moral issues with raiding and slavery.
Settled cultivators basically made huge swaths of Eurasian land uninhabitable to nomadic pastoralists because your grazing lands were settled (often completely unsustainably) until they ceased to exist.
"Not unlike [insert pathogen or reviled insect here]" (in quotes b/c I can't seriously compare humans to such things without revulsion; just an instructive parallel).
The "Great" Wall of China, interestingly, walls in vast areas of steppe and former Xiongnu grazing land.
Eurasian nomad wealth was overwhelmingly the "spoils" of trade, not raiding – and countless nomad-settled conflicts were cases of settled polities cutting off their noses to spite their faces by closing off trade with nomadic neighbors. Eventually, Eurasian trade patterns shifted from overland (the "silk road") to maritime routes, and the interior of the continent fell into a terminal recession. Until then (e.g. the Jungars) nomads continued to play an outsized role.
Some of the smarter nomad communities are still nomads. And 99% of developed/developing world population (including those with nomad ancestors) resemble pre-modern sedentary populations just as little as they do pre-modern nomad populations in their modes of life.
Sure - it was a Hobbesian war of all against all, until the settled cultivators made a better world.
> countless nomad-settled conflicts were cases of settled polities cutting off their noses to spite their faces by closing off trade with nomadic neighbors.
If the nomads make war on you unless you "trade" with them then that's blackmail, not voluntary trade.
More to the point, supposing C has a robust pattern of responding to a trade overtures from nomadic A by violence towards A's representatives, and of justifying the response using an intransigently chauvinist characterization of A (the ahistorical "good peasants vs. bad nomads" construct alive and well in certain comments in this thread) – without imposing anachronistic comparisons or standards, is there a better way to understand A's retaliation than essentializing them as "parasites"?
Was the content of what's considered politically legitimate or just war similar to what it is today? No. Did they have notions of legitimate-or-not based on the standards of the time (and that evolved dramatically as times changed)? Yes, absolutely.
> And didn't you just say it was a Hobbesian war of all against all anyway?
In the early days yes. If A and C are both imposing their will on B and each other by violence and neither has established more legitimatcy than that, there's not much more to say in moral judgement; all's fair in love and war, and to the victor go the spoils.
Like, I'm fully on board with saying that the first kings and tax collectors were of a piece with, and no better than, the bandits of that era. But that doesn't mean they were worse either (on the whole; no doubt you can find examples of spectacularly nasty agrarian rulers, but there were spectacularly nasty nomadic pastoralists too), and the difference is that eventually the kings and tax collectors did evolve into systems of governance with accountability that could support labour saving technologies and medical care and all the other things we enjoy.
> More to the point, supposing C has a robust pattern of responding to a trade overtures from nomadic A by violence towards A's representatives, and of justifying the response using an intransigently chauvinist characterization of A (the ahistorical "good peasants vs. bad nomads" construct alive and well in certain comments in this thread) – without imposing anachronistic comparisons or non-relevant standards, is there a better way to understand A's retaliation than essentializing them as "parasites"?
Hmmm... I'm gonna go with no. "Retaliation" is a huge stretch: if your trade and your trade representatives are consistently unwelcome in someone else's territory, that entitles you to stop going there, not to kill and plunder. If whose territory it is is disputed, by all means fight it out, but that doesn't make you some noble free trade advocate.
> "Retaliation" is a huge stretch: if your trade and your trade representatives are consistently unwelcome in someone else's territory
To clarify, trade missions conducted according to established protocols of the time and in the context of precedents of mutual trade, and retaliation in keeping with loosely-shared notions of legitimate-or-not, so much so that chroniclers of sedentary urban peoples could invoke their own concepts of legitimacy in recording them. These details are well attested in the historical record.
> eventually the kings and tax collectors did evolve into systems of governance with accountability that could support ... all the ... things we enjoy.
Sedentary agrarian societies evolved. Nomadic societies evolved. (Seafaring societies evolved. Urban mercantile societies evolved.) They all interacted with each other and some branches of each adopted some ways of the others. Our modern world with its particular triumphs and failures, freedoms and limitations, emerged from that interaction and is radically different from all of these pre-modern societies. Certain enduring elements of governance with accountability (or at least the conditions for them) were, by many accounts, a major contribution of nomadic states. It's incredibly complex and there is room to disagree -- as we do -- ideally without dehumanizing human beings as diseases or insects.
You're probably thinking of the later Crimean Tatar raids that were indeed a very big nuisance North and West of the Black Sea, that area only got pacified for good once it came under Russian control (that's why cities like Kherson and Odessa have been founded by Tsarist Russia in late 18th century).
> In this fashion they were not unlike malaria and tsetse fly.
Nomadic raids on settled communities turn out to involve a population loss of about 1-3%. A medieval war will probably cost 10-20% of the population caught in the fighting grounds (and do remember that warfare is endemic in Medieval Europe). Malaria killed about 20-30% of the attempted settlers.
If you live under the defense of forest, you can still settle there and lose 1-3% of population every decade or so because you're good at hiding. If you are trying to live in the steppe, you will be over-raided and scattered.