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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 December 2019
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed the development of a Mongol identity. The Mongol conquests in the thirteenth century had laid the foundations but had not truly forged such an identity. These earlier events provided, in modern parlance, the cultural memory that eventually served to unify them. However, the Mongol Empire actually revealed the fractiousness of the Mongols and their inability to promote the unity that might gradually have fostered a Mongol identity. As Joseph Fletcher argued, the creation of a supra-tribal identity for nomadic herders has proven to be extremely difficult. The so-called Mongol Empire attested to this predicament, as within two generations it evolved into four separate Khanates, which occasionally waged war against each other. For example, individual Khanates frequently sided with non-Mongols against fellow Mongols. In addition, the military, the quintessential Mongol institution, was not, as the Empire expanded, composed simply of Mongols. Turks, Persians, and even Chinese served in and sometimes led the Mongol armies, contributing to the blurring of Mongol identity.
1 Fletcher, Joseph, ‘The Mongols: Ecological and Social Perspectives’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 46/1 (1986) 15–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The literature on national and cultural identity is voluminous. A few useful works include Gellner, Ernest, Nations and Nationalism (Cambridge 1983)Google Scholar;Hobshawm, Eric, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 (Cambridge 1990)Google Scholar; and Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities (London 1983)Google Scholar.
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4 Good summaries of the origins of such policies are found in Ying-shih, Yu, Trade and Expansion in Han China (Berkeley 1967) 9–21Google Scholar and Rossabi, Morris, ‘Introduction’ in: Rossabi, ed., China among Equals (Berkeley 1983) 1–13Google Scholar.
5 On the ineffectiveness of these walls, see Waldron, Arthur, The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth (Cambridge 1990) 164Google Scholar.
6 Two recent works that deal, in part, with Manchu identity are Rawski, Evelyn Sakakida, The Last Emperors: A Social History of Qing Imperial Institutions (Berkeley 1998) andCrossRefGoogle ScholarCrossley, Pamela Kyle, A Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology (Berkeley 1999)Google Scholar.
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21 The Secret History has been translated into English by Francis Cleaves, Igor de Rachewiltz, and others.
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