Looking for anything on the concept of "plains empires"

August 31, 2020 8:40 AM

I remember reading somewhere an idea that the Mongols were not unique and were instead continuing a tradition of "Plains Empires" that were found both in the Americas and Asia. Is this a legitimate historical view and if so, where can I find anything written on it?

The argument basically turned the idea of the Mongols on their head, that instead of being an anomaly, Europe (especially Western Europe) was anomalous because it wasn't regularly menaced by a raiding empire from the nearby steppes or plains. Googling leads me to either discussions about how like or unlike the Comanche were to the Mongols, but I'm looking for a broader article/book that examines the idea of a plains empire (both supporting or opposing is fine). Or was this just a one-off idea that I ran into in a random blog post that I've forgotten about? (I can't remember if the things that I read talked about Africa, which might provide counter-arguments against this idea.)

posted by Hactar to Society & Culture (8 answers total)

The general idea in Eurasia is certainly valid, in the sense that there were a lot of peoples from the Russian steppes to Mongolia who had empires and would play a big influence in neighboring kingdoms. You can look up names like the Xiongnu, Seljuk Turks, Timur, Scythians or countless others. The Mongols were far from the only threat to Chinese dynasties in that area--they even started by vanquishing two rival confederations IIRC.

I don't want to overstate what I know about the current historical consensus. But I've read people like Braudel frame this general trend of nomadic peoples putting pressure on settled empires, and then the pressure reversing with gunpowder and gunpowder forts so the Chinese and Russians established control these areas, as an important arc of history.

I can't really speak to the Americas or Africa at all, which would have bearing on the uniqueness of western Europe for being relatively protected. I'm skeptical it was that unique globally--maybe someone will school me in this thread, but I'm having trouble picturing South American civilizations like the Incas dealing with this sort of problem.

Unfortunately no book suggestions that are exactly on point. Genghis Khan: The Making of the Modern World covers the Mongols and The Gunpowder Age is fascinating and will show how innovative some of the non-Mongol plains people could be but isn't primarily about this point.
posted by mark k at 9:14 AM on August 31, 2020 [1 favorite]

Maybe you've already come across this book in your research, but there's The Comanche Empire by Pekka Hämäläinen which proposes the idea of a powerful Comanche empire and explores it in great detail. I haven't read much of it because it's a pretty difficult academic read, but from what I know it's a pretty highly regarded book.
posted by mekily at 9:27 AM on August 31, 2020

Gibbon certainly spent a lot of words on the impact of regular raids on Rome by nomadic peoples, but of course a big chunk of these were coming from what's now western Europe.

I have actually run into the reverse argument, that "Plains Empires" (as opposed to e.g. plains cultures, which are historically numerous) were only possible where domesticated animals were used for transportation, and therefore required fairly unique circumstances. I'll see if I can dig it up, but it may have been in one of James Brooks's monographs.
posted by aspersioncast at 9:39 AM on August 31, 2020 [1 favorite]

A bit tangential to your question, but you may find it interesting: There is a popular Russian "alternative" history/conspiracy theory known as New Chronology that, among other things, posits that most pre-modern history was driven by the "Russian Horde" which encompassed all Eurasian steppe people:

Central to Fomenko's new chronology is his claim of the existence of a vast Slav-Turk empire, which he called the "Russian Horde", which he says played the dominant role in Eurasian history before the 17th century. The various peoples identified in ancient and medieval history, from the Scythians, Huns, Goths and Bulgars, through the Polyane, Duleby, Drevliane and Pechenegs, to in more recent times, the Cossacks, Ukrainians, and Belarusians, are nothing but elements of the single Russian Horde.

New Chronology also claims that mainstream history contains an extra 1000 years and that Jesus was born around 1100 AD. Garry Kasparov is a famous subscriber!
posted by no regrets, coyote at 9:41 AM on August 31, 2020 [1 favorite]

In the context of Eurasia, the Mongols were definitely not unique; Kenneth Harl has a good lecture series looking the history of history of steppe-based powers in Eurasia, including the Xiongnu, the Huns (maybe related to the Xiongnu), the Seljuk Turks, Timur, etc. He focuses on the shared aspects of how they constructed power and affected the settled states.

In Africa, there were Sahelian kingdoms which sometimes expanded south into more agrarian areas - Desert Frontier is a good book some of these developments in the early modern period. But, notably, these kingdoms relied on domesticated animals (horses, cattle, camels), as did those in Eurasia.

I don't know of any pre-colonial examples from the Americas, but the Americas also lacked any animals that could be ridden before 1492. Llamas are useful and alpacas are adorable (and have lovely hair), but neither are strong enough to bear people and so no llama-based cavalry (as scary as that would be).
posted by jb at 11:48 AM on August 31, 2020 [2 favorites]

For the Americas after 1492, the story changes, of course, but there are also so many other issues - including the utter devastation of all populations by new disease and colonial genocide - that I don't think they are easily compared.

The argument basically turned the idea of the Mongols on their head, that instead of being an anomaly, Europe (especially Western Europe) was anomalous because it wasn't regularly menaced by a raiding empire from the nearby steppes or plains.

Western Europe - like every place on the planet - is unique. But as someone who studied the history of Western Europe with an emphasis on the influence of landscape on political/economic development, I'm really ... skeptical that this is key to development there.

Western Europe had its own menaces. Sure, the Huns (and Magyars, etc.) didn't make it much past central Europe, but it's not like there weren't other non-steppe based invasions from non-centralised areas - you know, like Goths & Vandals invading the western Roman Empire, then Anglosaxons and Scots invading Great Britain, only to have the Vikings come rampaging through a couple hundred years later (Vikings = Huns in Boats). If we tend not to talk about western Europe being a "civilization attacked by barbarians" (apologies for the loaded language, but that is how the ancients would have described it - please feel free to supply me with better terms), it's because they WERE the semi-nomadic raiders attacking richer, more densely populated regions in the Mediterranean and the near East (Exhibit A: the Crusades - which makes me think that Exhibit B is Colonialism). But, certainly before about 1500, most of north & western Europe was a bit of a backwater, and was less economically productive and less powerful or influential than the more developed and richer areas of the Mediterranean and Asia.
posted by jb at 12:07 PM on August 31, 2020

With regard to Eurasia, the book Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present by Christopher Beckwith gives a pretty comprehensive history of the Eurasian steppe and neighboring regions. It is a fairly dense academic work, rather than targeted for popular consumption, but I enjoyed it despite not being an expert. A major thesis of the book is that there is a long cultural continuity of Central Eurasian history, which both shaped and was shaped by interactions with neighboring cultural regions including Europe, the eastern Mediterranean, India, and China. According the Beckwith, the Mongolian empire is definitely part of a larger history of steppe peoples including the ones mentioned by mark k above. They had large, sophisticated societies that have generally been poorly-studied and poorly-understood, due in part to the fact that they adopted writing relatively late and left relatively few archaeological remains, but Beckwith compiles a lot of more recent scholarship that sheds light on this large and historically important cultural region.

I don't know sources that might compare and contrast plains empires from other parts of the world though.
posted by biogeo at 2:10 PM on August 31, 2020 [1 favorite]

I am assuming empire means you are interested in some sort of movement and conquest. I am not sure if this is the equivalent, but the Cahokia civilization centered near modern St Louis is something that might interest you.
posted by aetg at 4:11 AM on September 1, 2020