ABSTRACT
By now, Chinggis Khan and his descendants’ image as destroyers of civilization and culture has been rehabilitated by scholarship that paints a more nuanced picture of the Mongol Empire. The Mongols are still seen as extractive conquerors who did not care to understand how their sedentary subjects lived. While their conquests were indeed devastating in many areas, the Mongols united much of Asia, restored and expanded trade routes that had been previously disrupted, and linked new markets such as India to the lower Volga through Central Asia. Janet Abu-Lughod’s systems theory and argument that Mongol control over the Chinese and Middle Eastern economic circuits linked Eurasia and Africa is still beneficial. The pastoral nomads of Mongolia always depended on sedentary and agriculturalist neighbors for certain goods.
