Down With Genghis Khan! People United Against Attila the Hun!

by Cliopatria

Sitting in the audience at certain AHA panels is a good way to come up idle thoughts and conjectures about scholarly history.

So I was thinking while daydreaming through a number of presentations on slavery and colonialism about something an undergraduate professor of mine used to say to those of us who were in the anti-apartheid movement at my campus. Largely just to tweak us, he'd ask when he could expect our protests against the Arab conquest of North Africa and the Mongol invasions of Asia and Eastern Europe.

The older I get, the more I think this jibe poses a genuinely interesting question.

I don't think it's mere hypocrisy that most of us tend to adopt a moral posture with varying degrees of explicitness around histories that are strongly connected to the post-1500 expansion of Western Europe. There are serious analytical reasons to regard the modern era as something non-comparable to what came before it, in moral as well as economic, political and cultural terms. There are serious reasons to see big moral as well as substantive differences between something like Atlantic slavery after 1600 and slavery in African societies before that time.

But at the same time, I'm not always clear that the common moral complaints against European colonialism, especially the ones made more or less in passing, through strong adjectives or implicit postures, have that degree of specificity. I heard a number of speakers, for example, admonish their listeners to recall the loss of life or the physical suffering that resulted from imperialism. That makes sense as a complaint from the recent past against the distant past in general, but I'm not sure it distinguishes the behavior of the Spanish in the New World from the behavior of the Mongols in Samarkand.

Moreover, in the last two decades, historians have done a markedly good job of showing how some of the roots of global modernity lie in structures of early modern and late medieval global exchange. In fact, we've come to understand the role of the Mongols in particular as preparatory or contributory, though as much through the accidental dissemination of bubonic plague as by the direct creation of persistent political or economic practices. If you follow the recent arguments of some theorists of global history like Andre Gunder Frank, you might even come to see the rise of the West as nothing more than a short-term perturbation of a 5,000 year old world-system.

I'm ok with a general sense that the present is morally superior to much of the past, but I increasingly feel that there is an odd rhetorical boundary implied by many conventional statements of this superiority, as if before 1500, it no longer clearly applies. As I said, this isn't much more than an idle thought that comes from the rhetorical trimmings that surround many historical arguments. When you get down to the substantive heart of such arguments, they're often much more careful and precise.

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acfo dnco - 5/27/2007

Some basic historical facts about Genghis Khan:

Genghis Khan ,(Chinggis Khan), is one of history’s greatest leaders.During his lifetime, he conquered more territory than any other conqueror and established the largest contiguous empire in world history.Today his legacy continues in Asia,Mongols today celebrate him as the founding father of Mongolia....read more

Jonathan Dresner - 1/11/2007

Maybe it's particular to biblical violence, but that's actually been an ongoing issue with regard to Christian and Enlightenment views of Judaism, not to mention atheistic arguments against religion in general.

Yes, if you consider sources to be sacred, or even just special, then the atrocities they entail remains relevant (even if misunderstood).

Nathanael D. Robinson - 1/11/2007

This is an excellent point. Conduct by armies and governments in the more recent past receive more attention, and thus, generate more indignation. However, the opprobium of legacies of imperialism, genocide and slavery seem relevant only in the modern context.

The Battle of Jericho, for instance, looks like an attrocity in a genocidal war, if modern standards are applied. Yet, archeology seems to show that the conflicts that brought the fall of Jericho and Ai long predated the appearance of Israelite culture in Canaan, which, moreover, was native rather than an invasion. The story of conquest was folded into the story of the origins of a civilization. Why? Should we be indignant for (what is in essence) associating with the victors?

Slavery would be another area that, in my opinion, could not be comparable. Certainly, the institutions of slavery cannot be compared (such as the power afforded to the slaves of the Wolof monarchs). Much has been made (apologetically) about slavery in Africa as a native institution from which Arabs and Europeans were willing to profit. But removing the slave from the context of his or her enslavement led to severe disadavantages. 1500, in the sense of the West's contact with the world, would seem to be an important date.

Jonathan Dresner - 1/10/2007

In Asian history, the dividing line is more like 1600. Why? Because that's when the last pre-modern regimes were founded (Qing, 1630s; Tokugawa 1600-1605), the ones whose culture and lifestyles are familiar enough, but different enought, to define the premodern for most people.

Dale B. Light - 1/10/2007

You make an excellent point. I would note that not only pre-1500 phenomena largely escape the blanket condemnation attached to western colonialism. So, too, do post-colonial regimes. The standard, for many political commentators and some serious historians, seems to be that western colonialism was a distinct phenomenon that carries a greater burden of sin than anything that went before or has happened since. Witness the pathetic attempts to excuse contemporary atrocities in Africa as the "legacy of colonialism."

David M Fahey - 1/10/2007

As somebody who teaches world history, I notice a tendency about scholars to interpret chronologically distant military conquests as occasions for the spread of technology, religion, and the like and not as times of brutal destruction of cultures (for instance, the Roman conquest of much of Britain or, for that matter, the creation of any sizeable polity).

Oscar Chamberlain - 1/9/2007

1500 CE (or AD, or what you will) has been carved into the professional historical consciousness.

It is not that arbitrary a line for from the perspective of United States history. The beginning of the European colonizing of America really is about the best place to begin our history. Also, the discovery of new lands had such an impact on European thought that even those who prefer to trace our lineage back to the rise of the West must acknowledge the profundity of the impact on western thought long before 1776.

Whether it should be the line at which we begin moral judgment is more problematic. There is considerable logic in seeing European colonization in the context of other great conquests/migrations (most moving generally from East to West). By that logic the actions of, say, the Spanish and the British don't look particularly more immoral than the Mongols. They are different in their "sins," and it would be hard to say who was better or worse.

But in our popular heritage and culture, our feeling of kinship with the past really begins with Columbus. As best as I can tell, this sense of things goes back to the founding of the United States.

With kinship comes a sense of responsibility. Our revised vision of Columbus and of colonization inherited the kinship felt by our celebratory ancestors. That makes it harder to dispassionately place our forebearers in the same category as the Mongols: fearsome and influential, but outside our ken and kinship, and so outside of our judgment.