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Along the Silk Roads in Mongol Eurasia: Generals, Merchants, Intellectuals, by Michal Biran (Ed.), Jonathan Brack (Ed.), Francesca Fiaschetti (Ed.); 360 pages; $29.95 (University of California Press, 2020)
During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Chinggis Khan and his heirs established the largest contiguous empire in the history of the world, extending from Korea to Hungary and from Iraq, Tibet, and Burma to Siberia. Ruling over roughly two thirds of the Old World, the Mongol Empire enabled people, ideas, and objects to traverse immense geographical and cultural boundaries. Along the Silk Roads in Mongol Eurasia reveals the individual stories of three key groups of people—military commanders, merchants, and intellectuals—from across Eurasia. These annotated biographies bring to the fore a compelling picture of the Mongol Empire from a wide range of historical sources in multiple languages, providing important insights into a period unique for its rapid and far-reaching transformations.
Read together or separately, they offer the perfect starting point for any discussion of the Mongol Empire’s impact on China, the Muslim world, and the West and illustrate the scale, diversity, and creativity of the cross-cultural exchange along the continental and maritime Silk Roads.
Michal Biran teaches Inner Asian, Chinese, and Islamic history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Jonathan Brack teaches Middle East Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
Francesca Fiaschetti teaches Inner and East Asian History at the University of Vienna.
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Subjective Lives and Economic Transformations in Mongolia, by Rebecca M. Empson; 178 pages; £20 (UCL Press, 2020)
Almost 10 years ago the mineral-rich country of Mongolia experienced very rapid economic growth, fuelled by China’s need for coal and copper. New subjects, buildings, and businesses flourished, and future dreams were imagined and hoped for. This period of growth is, however, now over. Mongolia is instead facing high levels of public and private debt, conflicts over land and sovereignty, and a changed political climate that threatens its fragile democratic institutions.
Subjective Lives and Economic Transformations in Mongolia details this complex story through the intimate lives of five women. Building on long-term friendships, which span over 20 years, Rebecca documents their personal journeys in an ever-shifting landscape. She reveals how these women use experiences of living a ‘life in the gap’ to survive the hard reality between desired outcomes and their actual daily lives. In doing so, she offers a completely different picture from that presented by economists and statisticians of what it is like to live in this fluctuating extractive economy.
Rebecca M. Empson is Professor of Anthropology at UCL. Alongside teaching in the Department of Anthropology, her research has focused on personhood, ownership, memory and material culture (Harnessing Fortune, 2011), and forms of temporary possession in the global economy (Cultural Anthropology, 2019).
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Politics and Literature in Mongolia (1921-1948), by Simon Wickhamsmith; 360 pages; €115 (Amsterdam University Press, 2020)
This study investigates the relationship between literature and politics during Mongolia's early revolutionary period. Between the 1921 socialist revolution and the first Writers' Congress, held in April 1948, the literary community constituted a key resource in the formation and implementation of policy. At the same time, debates within the party, discontent among the population, and questions of religion and tradition led to personal and ideological conflict among the intelligentsia and, in many cases, to trials and executions. Using primary texts, many of them translated into English for the first time, Simon Wickhamsmith shows the role played by the literary arts - poetry, fiction and drama - in the complex development of the "new society," helping to bring Mongolia's nomadic herding population into the utopia of equality, industrial progress and social well-being promised by the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party.
Simon Wickhamsmith is a scholar and translator of modern Mongolian literature. He teaches in the Writing Program and the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at Rutgers University.
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Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border, by Sören Urbansky; 392 pages; $39.95 (Princeton University Press, 2020)
The Sino-Russian border, once the world’s longest land border, has received scant attention in histories about the margins of empires. Beyond the Steppe Frontier rectifies this by exploring the demarcation’s remarkable transformation—from a vaguely marked frontier in the seventeenth century to its twentieth-century incarnation as a tightly patrolled barrier girded by watchtowers, barbed wire, and border guards. Through the perspectives of locals, including railroad employees, herdsmen, and smugglers from both sides, Sören Urbansky explores the daily life of communities and their entanglements with transnational and global flows of people, commodities, and ideas. Urbansky challenges top-down interpretations by stressing the significance of the local population in supporting, and undermining, border making.
Sören Urbansky is a research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC. He is the author of Kolonialer Wettstreit: Russland, China, Japan und die Ostchinesische Eisenbahn.
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The State, Popular Mobilisation and Gold Mining in Mongolia, by Dulam Bumochir; 180 pages; FREE (UCL Press, 2020)
Mongolia's mining sector, with its environmental and social costs, has been the subject of prolonged and heated debate. This debate has often cast the country as either a victim of the 'resource curse' or guilty of 'resource nationalism'.
In this book, Dulam Bumochir aims to avoid the pitfalls of this debate by adopting an alternative theoretical approach. He focuses on the indigenous representations of nature, environment, economy, state and sovereignty that have triggered nationalist and statist responses to the mining boom. In doing so, he explores the ways in which these responses have shaped the apparently 'neoliberal' policies of twenty-first century Mongolia, and the economy that has emerged from them, in the face of competing mining companies, protest movements, international donor organisations, economic downturn, and local and central government policies.
Applying rich ethnography to a nuanced and complex picture, Bumochir's analysis is essential reading for students and researchers studying the environmental and mining, especially in Central and North East Asia and the post-Soviet regions, and also for readers interested in the relationship between neoliberalism, nationalism, environmentalism and the state.
Dulam Bumochir completed his PhD in Philology at the Mongolian Academy of Sciences in 2000, and in Social Anthropology at Cambridge University in 2006. He has been conducting research on a wide range of topics, exploring folk and shamanic practices, rituals and chants, and tracing the historical construction of the Mongolian concepts of shamanism and shamanic religion. In work on Qinghai, in north-western China, he looked at ethnic politics and the power of respect in the social production of identity, politics and the state.
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Shaping Urban Futures in Mongolia: Ulaanbaatar, Dynamic Ownership and Economic Flux, by Rebekah Plueckhahn; 190 pages; FREE (UCL Press, 2020)
What can the generative processes of dynamic ownership reveal about how the urban is experienced, understood and made in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia? Shaping Urban Futures in Mongolia provides an ethnography of actions, strategies and techniques that form part of how residents precede and underwrite the owning of real estate property – including apartments and land – in a rapidly changing city. In doing so, it charts the types of visions of the future and perceptions of the urban form that are emerging within Ulaanbaatar following a period of investment, urban growth and subsequent economic fluctuation in Mongolia’s extractive economy since the late 2000s.
Following the way that people discuss the ethics of urban change, emerging urban political subjectivities and the seeking of ‘quality’, Plueckhahn explores how conceptualisations of growth, multiplication, and the portioning of wholes influence residents’ interactions with Ulaanbaatar’s urban landscape. Shaping Urban Futures in Mongolia combines a study of changing postsocialist forms of ownership with a study of the lived experience of recent investment-fuelled urban growth within the Asia region. Examining ownership in Mongolia’s capital reveals how residents attempt to understand and make visible the hidden intricacies of this changing landscape.
Rebekah Plueckhahn is Research Associate in the Anthropology Department at UCL. Trained in anthropology, as well as ethnomusicology and history, Rebekah has conducted research in Mongolia since 2008, researching subjectivity, ethics, economy, capitalism, urbanism, performance, ownership, music and postsocialist cultural practice. Her latest research interests include the making of urban forms in Mongolia, the ways urbanism intersects with financialisation and the ways that understanding the urban in Mongolia can contribute to urban theory more generally. Rebekah obtained her PhD from the Australian National University. Her past awards include the 2014 Article Prize from the Australian Anthropological Society (AAS).
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Young Mongols: Forging Democracy in the Wild, Wild East, by Aubre Menarndt; Pre-order link (Penguin, 2020)
In 1990, Mongolia’s youth-led revolution threw off the Soviet yoke, ushering in multiparty democracy. Thirty years later, the country’s youth are still leading Mongolia’s democratic development.
This powerful, inclusive book introduces readers to modern Mongolia through the stories of young leaders fighting to make their country a better, more democratic place. Its intersectional perspective explores the complexity of Mongolia today: the urban planning and pollution issues that plague the capital city of Ulaanbaatar; the struggles of women, the LGBTQIA population, people with disabilities, and ethnic minorities to claim their equitable places in society; the challenge of providing education in the world’s least densely-populated country to prepare the workforce of tomorrow; and how to fairly divide the spoils of the country’s vast mineral resource wealth.
This rising generation of Mongolians is already wielding real power and shaping their country's future. Their work will determine whether the country is able to overcome its development and democratization challenges, its relationship to the world, and who the winners (and losers) will be in Mongolian society.
Aubrey Menarndt lived in Mongolia as a Luce Scholar from 2015 to 2016. She’s worked on democracy and governance issues in Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, Central America, and the United States.
Aubrey is an expert on political transitions, elections, and democracy. She’s been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Al Jazeera, Politico, the South China Morning Post, and more.
Aubrey earned an MPhil in Politics from the University of Oxford and a Bachelor’s degree from Smith College. She is a Critical Language Scholar (Russian) and a Truman National Security Project Fellow. Young Mongols is her first book.
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