Great changes have taken place in the approach of historians to the topic since the publication of East of Byzantium (1980). Instead of centre-periphery or top-down models they now see the relations between Byzantium and the east in terms of connectivity, networks and horizontal ties. This is connected with the spread of late antiquity as a concept and includes a great expansion in Syriac studies. Late antiquity now embraces the emergence of Islam and looks towards Eurasia; another challenge is posed by the rise of global history. But these developments, with the new focus on the fall of the western empire, raise major problems of identity for Byzantium itself, and indeed for western Europe.

Attempts to re-write recent world history as a long series of struggles against European imperialism are inherently self-defeating, for the effect is exactly what it is purportedly trying to avoid. By making struggle against Europe the sine qua non of the past two hundred years of overall human experience, such an approach privileges Europe, and so is by definition Eurocentric. Furthermore, it would be wrong to assume that only European imperial pasts are present in the contemporary international system. Other imperial systems have also left their marks on historical polities that are kept up by today’s polities. In this chapter, we discuss ho what we have elsewhere baptised the steppe tradition is still alive in parts of Central Asia. It has also left a solid legacy in Turkey, as well as remnants in Russia. The difference between these polities and European ones are often observed. The debt they owe to the Eurasian imperial steppe tradition takes us one step closer to accounting for these differences.

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

This chapter examines the Eurasian Transformation as a catalyst for the rise of the Asian and Western empires that together reshaped Asia during the early modern period. Specifically, I aim to understand how the Eurasian Transformation made it possible for ‘barbarians’ to establish primacy over pre-existing international systems in South and East Asia, despite their limited numbers and stigmatised status. I begin by offering a synoptic overview of Eurasia at c. 1500. I next introduce the Eurasian Transformation, a unique conjunction of military, economic, cultural and administrative macro-processes that together made new forms of empire-building possible from this time on. I conclude by considering the Eurasian Transformation’s diverse impacts on Eurasia’s sedentary power centres, and on the liminal ‘barbarian’ actors populating Eurasia’s land and sea frontiers.

This chapter introduces the book’s central focus and argument and discusses the themes in relationship to which it is structured. Recent work on connectivity in Eurasia has focused upon the role played by international projects of development, notably China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Building on ethnographic work with informal traders active across Afghanistan, the book emphasises the importance of informal networks of trade and commerce to Eurasian connectivity. The longdistance trading networks it describes and analysed are historically layered, structured in diverse ways, and comprised of politically astute actors able to navigate the complex geopolitical worlds across which they work. Trust is important to the activities of such networks, but so too is the ability to withstand moments of mistrust.

The Introduction to our volume starts by delineating changing attitudes towards the word “empire” in Western scholarship from the 20th to the 21st century. It then explains our concept of an empire as an entity with strongly pronounced aspirations to attain universal rule and with clear hegemonic position in its macro-region. We continue with a brief outline of the three waves of the empires’ formation in five Eurasian macro-regions (Near East, South Asia, Europe, East Asia, and the Inner Asian steppe belt). The second half of the Introduction deals with the factors that influenced spatial dimensions of Eurasian empires — from ideological and religious commitment to attaining universal rule to a variety of ecological, military, economic, and administrative considerations that prevented the empires’ leaders from realizing this goal. The multiplicity of these factors suffices to caution against any attempt to create a neat uniform scheme that would explain the empires’ expansion and contraction.

This study seeks to explain how the Mongol imperial space was created and administrated by the Mongols and conceived by the Mongols and their subjects mainly in Yuan China and Ilkhanid Iran. It stresses the interplay between the Mongols’ universal vision, their construction of a “Chinggisid space,” and the revival of “glocal” (i.e., local with global characteristic) spatial concepts in Mongol-ruled China and Iran. It starts by reviewing Mongol expansion, analyzing the reasons for its unprecedented success and the impact of its halt, and concludes in assessing the impact of the Mongol Empire on the shaping of the post-Mongol imperial space across Eurasia.

Chapter 1, “Eurasia after the Fall,” provides a synthetic analysis of the Mongol legacy in eastern Eurasia during the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. It focuses on two related issues: (a) the Mongolian diaspora of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and (b) fourteenth-century evocations of the Mongols in the rhetoric of rulership.