Genghis Khan, trade warrior (2021) | Hacker News Reader

Genghis Khan, trade warrior (2021)

richmondfed.org

53 pointsWildestDreams_21 comments

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Here’s more detail on the Khan’s innovations in fiat currency and legal tender law:

https://fee.org/articles/marco-polo-on-money/

Marco Polo concludes:

> in this way, nearly all the valuables in the country come into the Khan’s possession.

Weird how the Fed didn’t mention that part.

Marco Polo’s account of the Khanate helped me to understand better how our own money system works. Not too different in its essentials from a giant Chuck E Cheese or Disneyland where you buy special tokens on entry.

> Weird how the Fed didn’t mention that part.

TFA does mention the restrictions for "gold or silver or gems or pearls"

However today we don't think of gems and gold as the primary "valuables" the same way monarchs and merchants of Marco Polo's era did, so it doesn't need the same emphasis.

That idea--that people were focusing on the wrong metrics--is the very reason Adam Smith chose "The Wealth of Nations" as a title.

Yeah, why do you think Sam Altman wants to make WorldCoin?

> "There is no way you could rule over that many people solely by force with such a relatively small army. It's just not possible."

This completely undersells Genghis Khan’s use of terror. Everyone knew what happened if you resisted the Mongols. Khwarazm and Baghdad were illustrations of their willingness for wholesale slaughter. And the massacres were designed to inspire terror with horrific cruelty broadcast widely.

“The Wrath of Khans” by Dan Carlin is an excellent four-episode series (Hardcore History 43–47) highlighting the brutal effectiveness of Mongol tactics:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dan-carlin-hardcore-hi...

https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-wrath-of-...

Genghis Khan was a bit like Pablo Escobar.

"Plata o plomo" (silver = trade, or, lead = death)

In the end, "War is a racket"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket

The concept of "War is a racket" could be applied to any externalities of the world, in the economy there are a lot of organizations and people who are benefiting from others' suffering. Beyond the ethical and/or moral factor it is what it is. There could be cases where controlling those factors goes against public interest (again, without putting an ethical/moral side).

I think that when you add moral aspects your enemy takes advantages. That is war, the continuation of politics.

Also, the recommendations put in your link [1] hasn't been widely proven.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket#Recommendation...

If you rule by military force, it's the military that rules, not you. You have no reason to assume that the military will remain loyal to you and especially to your successors. Sooner or later, local warlords will decide that they are the real Mongols nobody dares to resist, and then the empire will fragment. If you want to keep the empire unified, you need a civilian government and civilian institutions to keep the military under control.

There wasn't the same division of civil and military government in the mongol system, or even civilian institutions as we'd understand them today. The mongol empire ran in large part on "loyalty networks", where subordinates would be personally loyal to their patron specifically, not any office they held [1]. Powerful people wouldn't assume loyalty, they'd be constantly engaged in building and maintaining the loyalty of their subordinates in order to maintain their own power. If this sounds like it'd lead to dynamic systems of government full of infighting, indeed it did. That was part of the enduring success of Central Asian polities and broadly similar to e.g. Europe.

[1] Small caveat on this in that royal families held something akin to the mandate of heaven by virtue of their heredity. This mandate did not necessarily follow lineal descent and regularly transferred to siblings, family, or even close vassals that outshone than the original line.

>[1] Small caveat on this in that royal families held something akin to the mandate of heaven by virtue of their heredity.

They pretended that they did have such a divine right:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_right_of_kings

Events like the French Revolution proved them wrong:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution

> Events like the French Revolution proved them wrong:

To be fair nobody took it that seriously before either. Cities, regions, nobles etc. were constantly trying to challenge the king and his/her authority and protect/expand their rights and privileges.

It’s just that before the French Revolution they usually just wanted to extract additional privileges from the monarch or limit his powers (or in the worst case replace). The same thing happened in the French Regime before it got slightly out of hand..

e.g. even Louis XIV constantly had to fight the courts to force through his new laws (and was almost deposed in quasi-revolution(similar to the English civil war just without the religious element) at the beginning of his reign)

>To be fair nobody took it that seriously before either. Cities, regions, nobles etc. were constantly trying to challenge the king and his/her authority and protect/expand their rights and privileges.

Okay. Also, similarly, the Magna Carta in England.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta

Then you just end up with fragmented bureaucracies, with local politicians doing the same thing instead of local warlords.

To be fair, the Mongol empire did end up disintegrating in a few generations. Kublai Khan was the de jure ruler of a united empire, but in practice the western periphery of the empire was drifting away.

> If you want to keep the empire unified, you need a civilian government and civilian institutions to keep the military under control.

But then you run into another classic political science problem: how do civilian institutions keep the military under control? Why can't the military simply shoot the civilians and institute a junta?

The usual answer is legitimacy. The military can't seize power, if it's not loyal to its commanders. If people serve in the military due to personal loyalty and the promise of glory and loot, the military is a threat to the society. But institutions can create other purposes to serve, and then military commanders only have power if their actions are consistent with those purposes.

But there wasn’t any clear boundary between the civil and military power. If we must discuss it in these terms “the military” had seized the power from the very beginning of the empire and never let it go.

>> "There is no way you could rule over that many people solely by force with such a relatively small army. It's just not possible."

>This completely undersells Genghis Khan’s use of terror. Everyone knew what happened if you resisted the Mongols. Khwarazm and Baghdad were illustrations of their willingness for wholesale slaughter. And the massacres were designed to inspire terror with horrific cruelty broadcast widely.

Right. This article explains it:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_Empire

Specifically, the sections about their war techniques, which were clever, and often fooled or overpowered their enemies, although they did lose battles sometimes, too.

P.S. Downvoter dude, er, brat, is prolly too lazy, hasty or clueless, to even scan the article (for the Mongols' techniques) that I linked, before their nervously twitching trigger finger touches that downvote icon.

Seen this behaviour many times on HN (Hasty and Nervous). :)

> farmers were subject to capricious taxation and the transformation of their farms into grazing and hunting grounds. Yet some of Khubilai's policies, such as the provision of social insurance against crop failures and natural disasters, suggest a real concern for the welfare of his subjects.

Still sounds capricious to me, but at least the Mongols understood you can’t get blood from a turnip.

Reminds me of this comic: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/neoliberal

Especially the connection with:

> "Mongol men were not supposed to be concerned with the accumulation of wealth. They were not supposed to be concerned with anything beyond warfare, religion, and hunting animals," says Weatherford. "Women handled money and wealth and the accumulation of goods. And therefore, the women were involved with the trading system of merchants."

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