The essays in this ambitious volume, the fruit of a research group on “The Interaction of Nomadic Conquerors with Sedentary People in China and the Middle East,” are a welcome addition to the work on nomads and sedentary peoples. They cover a huge swath of chronological and geographic territory, from the second millennium BCE in northeastern Asia to contemporary Russia, China, and Central Asia, but they focus on the Mongols and Turkic-speaking nomadic groups during the tenth to fifteenth centuries CE.
The volume is divided into four sections. Part I, “Early Contacts,” comprises three essays. First, Gideon Shelach takes a true comparative approach to understanding a commonly shared “steppe identity” (p. 37) among peoples in northeast China. Shelach taps early and late Xiajiadian archeological data to argue that socioeconomic choice was a determinative factor in the rise of pastoralism in the area. Yuri Pines next presents a much-needed corrective to...