Technology and Culture

According to Jack Weatherford, an anthropologist at Macalester College, the prevailing Western understanding of the Mongolian conqueror Genghis Khan as barbaric and bloodthirsty is an ethnocentric and racist view that dates at least from the Enlightenment. The ubiquity of this identification in modern popular culture allowed the creators of the cinema serial Flash Gordon of the 1930s to name the evil empire "Mongo" and characterize its emperor as "Ming the Merciless." As Bruce Mazlish has argued cogently in Civilization and its Contents (2004, p. 48), the increasingly Eurocentric view of Western writers, beginning in the nineteenth century, led to Asiatic peoples being given "the visage of an inferior race, condemned to be half-civilized—and to be ruled by a superior, European Civilization."

Weatherford attempts to turn this image on its head, viewing Genghis Khan as a thirteenth-century leader whose promotion of universal values foreshadowed the cultural globalization of our time. His rehabilitation of Genghis Khan includes an emphasis on the Khan's humane civil administration and his acceptance of multiculturalism in a transcontinental empire. These are contrasted with the legalized brutality, anti-Semitism, and unbending monotheism of the little kingdoms of late-medieval western Europe. In short, this book opens a perspective on world history that will come as a complete surprise to those whose understanding of Genghis Khan is rooted in Flash Gordon–like caricatures of "Oriental despots."

For the readers of Technology and Culture, the most important element of this story is undoubtedly that Genghis Khan and his immediate successors created and sustained an empire that for about a century allowed, indeed promoted, the diffusion of technologies, mostly from the east to the west. While the Mongols themselves were not the originators of innovative technologies, Weatherford argues that they had a great interest in utilizing them for economic development, thereby increasing the wealth of their empire. [End Page 830] He describes them as "unrivaled cultural carriers . . . [who] exercised a determined drive to move products and commodities around and to combine them in ways that produced entirely novel products and unprecedented invention" (p. xxiii). Drawing on Francis Bacon's early-seventeenth-century observation that printing, gunpowder, and the compass "changed the appearance and state of the whole world" (p. 236), Weatherford asserts that these innovations spread through the intercourse of the Mongols with Europe, and that they were in large part responsible for initiating the Renaissance. Considering all of these connections, it is understandable why he subtitled this book "the making of the modern world." Historians have been well aware that many of the important technologies of the modern world originated in east and south Asia, but the mechanisms and contexts of their diffusion tend to be glossed over. This book gives us a substantial story to ponder, and I recommend it to all readers of T&C.

It is worthwhile to note that Weatherford, for all his admiration of Genghis Khan and the Mongolian people, does not sugarcoat the epic story of how the army of a nation of about a million people conquered most of the Eurasian landmass in about four decades. The reader encounters the torture, assassination, and mass murder that are all too familiar from other cultures and other times. The Mongol armies had a routine after capturing a city or city-state of dispatching all of the opposing army and ruling aristocracy. To boot, the armies often destroyed entire cities and the irrigation systems of surrounding agricultural regions. They also rounded up all of the skilled workers, including educators, and sent them to Mongolia or wherever they were needed by the growing empire. Weatherford's assertion that these acts had the beneficial result of abolishing autocracies and establishing societies governed by consensus seems to be an apology for a brutal leveling of society. In any case, the change was not permanent: authoritarian rule returned in a few decades.

It does appear that the Mongols, a nomadic people who did not produce any goods of great...