Warhorse and Post-Nomadic Empire in Asia, c. 1000–1800

Abstract

Until the nineteenth century the warhorse played a central role in the political organization of the great empires that bordered on the pastoral heartlands of Central Eurasia. Actually, the survival of the often (semi-)nomadic rulers of these frontier-empires hinged on the continued production, trade and use of Central Eurasian warhorses. This forestalled the full sedentarization of these rulers and conditioned the emergence of a post-nomadic political culture and organization in which Central Eurasian institutions like ordo, nökör and yurt continued to provide a forceful paradigm to mobilize, organize and enumerate cavalry armies. But as the specific ecological circumstances created different conditions for the breeding and trade of warhorses, they also gave rise to different interpretations of the nomadic paradigm. This is demonstrated in the case of the Mughal rulers in India and the Manchu-Qing rulers in China, who both shared a common Central Eurasian heritage and ruled the richest sedentary economies of their time. Ã The first part of this essay was presented at the conference 'The International Horse Economy in Iran, India and China', held on 19-20 October 2006 and organized by the Institute of Iranian Studies of the Austrian Academy of Sciences at Vienna. I am grateful for the generous feedback of John Masson Smith, Jr at this conference as well as for the critical comments offered by William Clarence-Smith, Ken Pomeranz and three anonymous referees. The essay builds, however, on more than a decade of thinking about nomads, which gained tremendously from ongoing discussions with Jan Heesterman.

Conquer, extract, and perhaps govern

“…This attitude generated the famous moments in which nomad victors considered converting conquered farmland into pasture (which of course would have left the peasants to starve or move). 40 This was partly logistical, since they were well aware that a landscape of grain fields or rice paddies could not sustain their horses. It was also a normal initial response for a steppe tribe that had not yet imagined becoming an expansive empire.…”

How Did the West Usurp the Rest? Origins of the Great Divergence over theLongue Durée

“…100 Though not formally nomadic, the conquering founders of the Mughal Empire "boasted a strong nomadic background" while seeking to maintain and reinvent "their nomadic outlook and organization." 101 A number of scholars have therefore referred to the Mughal polity as a "post-nomadic" empire 102 that grafted nomadic organizational and social forms onto an agrarian sedentary society. Hence, while the Mughal Empire has often been conceived as a variant of the tributary mode of production, 103 it was nonetheless over-determined by the nomadic-sedentary interactions that originally produced the empire resulting in the amalgamation of agrarian sedentary and pastoral nomadic relations-a particular instantiation of a premodern form of uneven and combined development.…”

Migration and innovation in early modern Islamic societies. The case for firearms

“…Gun technologies travelled westward, embodied by Chinese engineers during the conquest of the Middle East and Eastern Europe (Manz, 2015, p. 11). Some researchers claimed that firearm technologies were used in the thirteenth century North Africa and Middle East, before reaching Europe (Allouche, 1945, p. 82; Al‐Hassan, 2003), but this has been largely dismissed (Cook, 1994, p. 63; Colin et al., 1986, p. 1055; Hall, 1999, xvii; Gommans & Kolf, 2001, p. 33).…”