Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
The Mongol Conquests in World History . By Timothy May . London : Reaktion Books-Globalities , 2012. 319 pp. $45.00 (cloth).
Book Reviews--Inner Asia
The study of the Mongol empire has made enormous strides in the past two decades, but so far there has been no attempt at an overall scholarly synthesis. Timothy May's work aims to fill this void by presenting an updated summary of the "state of research" of the Mongol empire at the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century. The book's major strength is its perspective: it looks at the Mongol empire from a holistic perspective and makes a strong case for the early globalization that characterized "the Chinggis Exchange," as May termed the web of connections that crisscrossed Eurasia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, many of which were initiated or facilitated by the policies of Chinggis Khan and his heirs.
The book is divided into two main parts, preceded by an introduction, which reviews the book's raison d'etre, the main sources for the study of Mongol history (including an intriguing reference to an expected English translation of the Yuanshi), and the danger of exaggerating the importance of the Mongols. The first part, "The Mongol Conquests as Catalyst" succinctly reviews the formation of the empire and its united phase (chapter 1), the four khanates that emerged after the...