The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China, 221 BC to AD 1757ISBN: 978-1-55786-324-9
Paperback
348 pages
July 1992, Wiley-Blackwell
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Around 800 BC, the Eurasian steppe underwent a profound cultural
transformation that was to shape world history for the next 2,500
years: the nomadic herdsmen of Inner Asia invented cavalry which,
with the use of the compound bow, gave them the means to terrorize
first their neighbors and ultimately, under Chingis Khan and his
descendants, the whole of Asia and Europe. Why and how they did so
and to what effect are the themes of this history of the nomadic
tribes of Inner Asia - the Mongols, Turks, Uighurs and others,
collectively dubbed the Barbarians by the Chinese and the
Europeans.
This two-thousand year history of the nomadic tribes is drawn from a wide range of sources and told with unprecedented clarity and pace. The author shows that to describe the tribes as barbaric is seriously to underestimate their complexity and underlying social stability. He argues that their relationship with the Chinese was as much symbiotic as parasitic and that they understood their dependence on a strong and settled Chinese state. He makes sense of the apparently random rise and fall of these mysterious, obscure and fascinating nomad confederacies.