Zolotoordynskoe Obozrenie (Dec 2016)
New Collective Monograph: The Golden Horde in World History (Kazan: Sh.Marjani Institute of History of AS RT, 2016. 968 p. + 28 p. of col. ins.)
Abstract
During the Golden Horde’s dominion, the regions and populations of central Eurasia were integrated for the first time and became politically unified. Like most empires, the Golden Horde was intrinsically cross-cultural. It accommodated diverse religious communities which not only co-habited but also worked and traded together, leading to an unprecedented intensification of the exchanges, especially in the Volga valley, its core area. The Golden Horde had a major impact on the expansion of trade in the 1250s–1350s and its economic and political regime highly contributed to the globalization of the Old World. Historians have revealed that after the Chinggisid conquests, a phenomenal trade boom transformed the human and cultural landscape in Eurasia. The so-called “Fur Road” interconnected with the “Silk Road” at the Lower Volga Basin. Here two major routes were passable: the eastern one through Central Asia towards north India and China, and the western one through the Crimean peninsula towards the Mediterranean world and the Middle East. The Golden Horde served as the stage for this dramatic change. Jöchid khans and begs played a leading role in the new inter-regional order. It was not due to hazard that during this flourishing time, cities and villages burgeoned in the Volga Valley, in the Crimea, as well as in the steppe land corridor from Siberia to Hungary. As nomadic elites converted to Islam, the khan’s court became a major hub of the Islamic world. Wandering scholars and craftsmen from Anatolia, Central Asia, Egypt and Syria were welcomed in the ulus of Jöchi. The Golden Horde’s regime had deep consequences on the political, economic and cultural map of modern Eurasia. Scholars have shown the unique way in which Islam unified and socially integrated peoples, by shaping community life and collective memory and by combining shamanist practices and local Sufism. The origin stories of the Tatars, and other Central Eurasian communities, extend back to the period when the khans Berke and Uzbek converted to Islam. Many Muslim peoples now living in the Russian Federation see it as a formative period in their history. Indeed, Islamization is one of the Golden Horde’s most important legacies. The Golden Horde is part of the common heritage of mankind. It allowed a new sophisticated culture to grow in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, at the hinge of the nomadic and sedentary worlds. The western academic sphere has started only recently to recognize the significance of this phenomenon while, in Russian-speaking academia, scholars have long ago understood the uniqueness of its legacy. It has raised the interest not only of historians but also of archaeologists, art historians and numismatists from the Russian Federation, and especially from Tatarstan. Thanks to their works, to the important questions they raise, and to the results of their researches, the Golden Horde studies is now a field on its own rights. Western academia needs to get better acquainted with this rich scholarship. On the one hand, the historical period of the Golden Horde should integrate history course books in US, in UK, in France and in Europe in general. World history needs to be taught through a non-European lens to get a deeper perspective on our collective past without which we cannot decipher today’s globalized world. On another hand, it is also crucial that the current scholarship on the Golden Horde takes into account new historiographical debates and concepts developed by global historians. A ‘world’ is a category of global history, recently identified by historians as a meaningful notion that goes beyond the narrower notion of empire. Indeed, empires and kingdoms did not exist in isolation, but were dependent of bigger worlds. The challenge of the new global history is to identify these worlds and to understand their mechanisms. The Golden Horde survived the fragmentation of the Mongol Empire; it grew and deeply influenced its surrounding world. This world included the successors states of the Mongol empire in China, Afghanistan, India, Persia and Anatolia as well as Byzantium, Russia, Europe and the Middle East. The density of the connections from the Mediterranean Sea to the Caspian Sea and as far as China illustrates how deeply the ulus of Jöchi was enmeshed with the wider world. Therefore, the history of the Golden Horde should not be disconnected from this world-shaping phenomenon. Nationalist historiographies are inclined to distort history, to create and disseminate self-serving clichés. The first task of historians is to avoid inaccurate terminology such as “the Tatar Yoke”, in order to encourage inquiries into more important questions: how to deal with the notion of a collective history when it crosses the borders of modern nations? What then are the role and the legacy of the Golden Horde in world history? The Golden Horde in World History gives some answers to these important questions. It achieves a twofold aim: to bring to a larger academic audience a cutting-edge research that remains barely known outside the circle of specialists and to integrate this research into the broader perspective of world history. It combines diverse approaches and questions not only to offer an exhaustive picture of the state of the field, but also to herald the most profitable directions of research and the most fruitful advances made. This comprehensive new synthesis is the result of the collaboration of leading scholars coming from major academic institutions: Sh.Marjani Institute of History of Tatarstan Academy of Sciences, Institute of Russian History of Russian Academy of Sciences and Oxford University. I wish to address my deepest thanks to those who turned a bold editorial project into this impressively compelling collective book: Rafael Khakimov, Ilnur Mirgaleev, Roman Hautala, Vadim Trepavlov. Thanks to the fantastic energy of our colleagues from the Sh.Marjani Institute of History of Tatarstan Academy of Sciences and its M.A.Usmanov Centre for the Golden Horde studies, Kazan proved to be and remains a wonderful venue for historians, archaeologists and numismatists working on the Golden Horde and ready to confront their views. The understanding of the Golden Horde world, at the crossroad of Asia, Europe and the Middle East, requires such a dialogue between researchers who have different expertise. International collective publications are crucial to expanding and furthering complex fields of research, and writing history is a collective undertaking that can benefit immensely from institutional collaboration – all the more so when it crosses borders. This international book will be the first to offer the readership the research outcome of the best experts in the field of the Golden Horde studies and to make the avant-garde concepts of the new global history accessible.
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