How Did Genghis Khan Change the World?

Genghis Khan reshaped the world with brutal force and brilliant organisation. He began life in exile and rose to be a powerful nomadic warrior who united the disparate Mongol tribes to create the largest contiguous empire in history. Dan is joined by economic historian Duncan Weldon to explain how his empire revolutionised global trade via the Silk Road and changed the tactics of global warfare for centuries to come. They discuss how he unified vast territories with a common legal code, developed a pioneering communication system, connected East and West and laid the groundwork for the eventual industrial revolution. Duncan's new book is called 'Blood and Treasure: The Economics of Conflict from the Vikings to Ukraine.' Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on. You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 0:00Dan Snow?

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• 0:32Speaker 01

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• 1:51Speaker 03

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• 2:28Dan Snow?

  Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Head. It was later said that his mother was impregnated by a ray of light. Those are the kind of stories you often get when people look back and start mythologising the birth, the background, of astonishing leaders, people who seem to be the children of destiny. A slightly more believable story about his birth said that he was born clutching a blood clot in his hand.

• 3:00Dan Snow?

  The whole tribe immediately knew that indicated the child would grow up to be a warrior.

• 3:07Dan Snow?

  And he certainly did. In the 1150s, we think, a Mongol chieftain had a baby boy called Tamujin. He grew up on the great grasslands, the Mongol steppe, riding almost before he could walk. His father was just one of many chieftains of the Mongol tribes. They were pastoralists who followed their herds as the animals feasted on the grasslands of the steppe. And those tribes, they bickered and they fought and they traded and cooperated and intermarried and then fell out again in a seemingly endless cycle.

• 3:42Dan Snow?

  Tamujin would not get to enjoy his status as a chieftain's son for long. When he was eight, his father died and his family was thrown out of the tribe. They were reduced to abject poverty and they lived hunting rodents out in the steppe. Tamujin at that point actually kills his older half-brother to establish his dominance of their little family unit. We don't know exactly what came next, but he seemed to have the skill, the charisma, the wisdom, to start attracting followers. And eventually, he grew powerful enough to lead a tribe of his own, like his father before him. That process of gathering more followers to himself continued.

• 4:23Dan Snow?

  Over the decades, he absorbed other tribes, he conquered them, he persuaded them to join, until by the early 13th century, he declared himself Genghis Khan.

• 4:34Dan Snow?

  Ruler of the united Mongol tribes. That in itself was a historic achievement. What came next marks him down as one of the most significant human beings who's ever lived. He went on one of history's greatest imperial journeys. He conquered his neighbours in northern China. He captured what is now the city of Beijing. His forces moved into Central Asia and toppled empires there. Foolishly, incredibly foolishly, one empire covering much of what is now the Stans and Iran disrespected his ambassadors, killed his ambassadors, and Genghis Khan launched

• 5:19Dan Snow?

  the most astonishing lightning campaign to capture that powerful state. By the end of his life, his troops had reached Georgia and what is now Ukraine. It was one of the largest and most rapid imperial acquisitions in history. He was a warrior. He famously said, "A man's greatest joy is crushing his enemies." In fact, he went into a bit more detail there, but it's probably not worth sharing on this family podcast. But he also said, "Conquering the world on horseback is easy. It's when you get off and try and govern it. Well, that's when things get hard." In this podcast, I am going to talk to the very brilliant Duncan Weldon. He's an economic historian, he's been on the podcast before, and we're going to ask not only how he amassed that empire, but how he went on to govern it and how in doing

• 6:04Dan Snow?

  so, he changed the world pretty dramatically. How did the Mongol Empire work in practice? Duncan tells me it was not unlike The Sopranos. It was a giant extortion racket in which people were largely left alone as long as they paid up when they were asked to do so. Failure to pay, as you can imagine, led to, well, unimaginable violence. Duncan is particularly up to speed on this subject, because he's just written a book called Blood and Treasure, all about war and economics. It's a fabulous read, so make sure you go and check it out. But before you do so, let's find out how Genghis Khan and his Mongols changed the world. Enjoy.

• 7:02Dan Snow?

  Duncan, great to have you back on the podcast.

• 7:04Speaker 04

  Thank you for having me.

• 7:06Dan Snow?

  Let's do the geography first. I'm so interested in the Eurasian steppe. Partly because we talk about European empires, that era has gone, but Russia is still a massive European empire extending into Asia because of this steppe. It's like a, it's like a superhighway, isn't it? For us in this little old island, this little old archipelago, it can be difficult to understand the scale of it. Tell me about it.

• 7:25Speaker 04

  Okay, so Eurasian steppe is, you know, one of the big geographic features of Eurasia of the world, you know, it stretches all of the way from sort of Hungary in Eastern Europe, all the way across to the borders of China. It goes from the very top of Russia all the way down to the modern Middle East. And it's this primarily large expanse of grassland. And, you know, as you say, it's been regarded in different ways over the last few thousand years. Sometimes it's appeared to be almost the edge of the world, this sort of desert of grass. And other times, though, it seemed more like an ocean, maybe dangerous to cross, but definitely worth doing it. And, you know, with potential great

• 8:08Speaker 04

  rewards if you have the skill to do it. But it's a giant expanse of grassland that takes up, well, most of Eurasia.

• 8:16Dan Snow?

  And how does that environment determine the kind of settlement that you can have there? Is the soil very fertile? Because you talk about grassland, does that mean it's fertile soil? Can you intensely farm it and have cities there and settle communities?

• 8:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, it's grassland, but it's not particularly fertile for growing crops. You know, in general, where the population centers have been in Eurasia over the long, long course of history, look quite similar to where they are now. So there's a lot of population at the very western end of Eurasia, Europe. There's a lot of population at the very eastern end, sort of around China. You had very different soils there. You had agricultural revolutions. You had the mass cultivation of rice in China, of grains in Europe, which allowed for, you know, very productive agriculture, for quite high levels of population. Whereas for most of the Eurasian steppe...

• 9:11Speaker 04

  The geography, the climate, the soil, it doesn't allow for that sort of intense cultivation of agriculture. So you don't get the same sort of sedentary agricultural populations. Instead, for most of history, the people that have lived on the steppe have been nomadic. They've moved around over the course of the year, following where the grass is. They've lived off animals, off hunting, off grazing, a very, very different style of agriculture. Fewer people and people who are on the move rather than in the same place.

• 9:44Dan Snow?

  And so you move with your herds, right? You just, where you eat the grass and then you move the whole shebang onwards?

• 9:51Speaker 04

  Yes, you move the whole shebang onwards. And you know, that sort of agriculture means you get very, very different states developing. So you know, where you've got permanent agriculture, growing stuff in the ground, your livestock isn't moving with you, you get hamlets and those hamlets become villagers. And maybe some of those villages eventually become towns and maybe some of those towns eventually become cities. You don't get that on the steppe where people are moving around. And if your area is filled with villagers, you know, eventually some villagers will take over other villagers. That's how you start to see what we think of as traditional states developing. Again, you don't get that on

• 10:32Speaker 04

  the steppe. This climate leads to a very different system of agriculture. That very different system of agriculture leads to very different societies.

• 10:43Dan Snow?

  As you're talking, I was thinking of Bronze Age, Iron Age, Greece and coalescing around cities. And then you get philosophers poking their nose into natural science and that kind of stuff that we're familiar with, that we called civilisation.

• 10:55Speaker 04

  Less of that on the steppe, less of that on the steppe.

• 10:57Dan Snow?

  And does that mean if you're settled, you develop heavy armour, tools, you fight in serried ranks of infantrymen? Is this too sort of naive to say that on the steppe you, you just become very, very good horsemen? So you've got this, not just different way of life, different way of making war as well?

• 11:13Speaker 04

  Oh, absolutely. So on the steppe, you know, the horse is absolutely central to life on the steppe. People start to ride at a very, very early age and they're in the saddle for many hours of most days of their lives. They become excellent horsemen and horsewomen. But it's not just that they're very good riders. It's also that there are a lot of horses on the steppe. When we get on to talking about Genghis Khan, you know, at one point, the Mongol Empire controlled maybe half of the world's horses. So yes, the horse is central to life on the steppe. And yes, they fight in a very different way. So armies on the steppe have, in Genghis Khan's day and for a long time before that, have been primarily composed of mounted horse archers. You know, the armies of Genghis Khan

• 11:57Speaker 04

  don't look that different to the armies of Attila the Hun, which came out of the steppe and terrorised the late Roman Empire 750 or so years before.

• 12:07Dan Snow?

  Duncan, we're going to get into that because it's just one of the most amazing stories in history. You've mentioned Genghis Khan. Let's go there. He is born, what, in sort of the mid 12th century, about 1162, we think?

• 12:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, at some point in the mid 12th century. And, you know, there's some debate, but yes, the 1150s at some point.

• 12:24Dan Snow?

  And he's the son of a respected figure chieftain almost, but he has a pretty tough upbringing. Tell us why.

• 12:30Speaker 04

  He does. There's sort of good points and bad points to the birth of Genghis Khan. You know, the good point is, he's the son of a respected tribal chieftain. The bad point is, his father has fallen out of favour and he's sort of thrown out of the tribe almost. And, you know, young Genghis Khan almost vanishes from recorded history. We don't quite know what he was doing. He may have served as a mercenary for Chinese armies, but he eventually returns to the steppe after his adolescence as an experienced warrior. He may only have been in his, you know, teens, but rises to power very, very quickly.

• 13:08Dan Snow?

  And he conquers a neighboring tribe or two and then a mixture of diplomatic alliances and conquest, he unites all these disparate groups. Is that normal that these groups of nomadic herders will occasionally coalesce as one, then break apart again? Is this a sort of natural life cycle of this part of the step?

• 13:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, it does happen. You get confederations building up and then breaking down. But what Genghis Khan achieves is something a lot more than that. Genghis Khan goes on to build what is at that point the largest empire the world has ever seen, still one of the largest empires the world has ever seen hundreds of years later. He clearly had a gift for war and for empire building, but his real exceptional gift was for organisation, because building large confederations on the step is just hard. It's much harder than it is in China or Europe. Genghis Khan is able to break down traditional social organisation

• 14:07Speaker 04

  on the step, which is traditionally based on kinship groups, and build something that in modern terms looks a bit like a meritocracy. It's if you join up into my confederation, you will be given the chance to rise, you will be given a fair share of the spoils. And that's sort of the nomadic confederation empire he goes about building.

• 14:28Dan Snow?

  We're going to get on to his leadership, Scott. For those of you who want to skip business school and get it all here, just buckle up for the next 10 minutes, you're going to love this. But let's do the chronology quickly. He doesn't just unite the tribes, he then invades northern China and conquers much of Chinese China. And then extraordinarily, he goes and invades the great empires of Central Asia until by his death, his empire what stretches from modern Korea right the way through, and well, indeed, his sons and grandsons will extend that, but almost to the borders of the Middle East by his death?

• 14:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, by his death. And then his successors go on to invade the Persian Empire into the Middle East and push as far as into Hungary in Europe. You know, it's empire on a phenomenal scale.

• 15:10Dan Snow?

  Unimaginable. So you've talked a little bit about the meritocracy. Well, let's start with war, because I'm so fascinated by this, but moving at astonishing speed. In different, you know, 20th century, like almost armoured spearheads that then converge, attack an enemy from, at the same time, over enormous distances from different angles, not unlike the blitzkrieg of 1940.

• 15:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, I said before, he had access to a lot of horses. It's believing, you know, when he first sort of unites the tribes, he is ruling an area with maybe 1 million people and maybe 5 million horses. And those horses really matter as much as the people for what happens next. So a Mongol army, modern historians estimate it had maybe 15 to 20 horses per person. There is an awful lot of remounts there, and those remounts really matter. So a Mongol army is capable of moving at a pace of 30 to 50 miles a day, whereas its opposing armies, whether they be Chinese or Persian or European, at this period, struggles to make 10 miles a day. So these are much faster armies in

• 16:16Speaker 04

  the strategic sense that can appear in unexpected places. And then tactically, when they appear on the battlefield, as you say, they converge from different directions in the right place. But when they're actually in battle, they can control the pace of the engagement because they're much more mobile than most of their opponents. They can move within bow range, fire off a lot of arrows, move out again, do that as many times as they need before finally deciding to close and finish it. But yeah, strategically, very, very mobile, and then tactically in battle, able to control the pace of battle purely because they've got so many horses.

• 16:56Dan Snow?

  And that means you can gallop along and your remounts can chill out a bit, even though they're not carrying a human body, and you just hop from one saddle to the next onto a slightly fresher horse?

• 17:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. It's something that their opponents, whether it's primarily the Chinese, the Persians, the Europeans, really struggle to cope with.

• 17:15Dan Snow?

  And also, what really slows armies down in elsewhere, isn't it, the wagons with all the flour on, because we're bread eaters, we're stupid bread eaters, whereas they could bleed their animals. And they had these hawks, didn't they, that go off and do a bit of hawking as they're going along? The hawks are scouring the step for rodents they can eat.

• 17:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, something that's really, really hard for a 12, 13th century European or Chinese army to deal with, just something so different to what they're used to.

• 17:42Dan Snow?

  I mean, the idea of the Mongols fighting King John's army in the early 13th century is just a terrifying, terrifying thought.

• 17:50Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 17:51Dan Snow?

  And thank goodness for all those rivers and the complicated geography of Europe that was in the way. What about that sort of, the exhibition of violence, the sort of astonishing violence that we've come to associate with the Mongols? Now, is that just us being a wee bit kind of orientalist because there's plenty of violence going on elsewhere? But, or is there something about their use of exemplary violence that persuaded people not to fight them?

• 18:12Speaker 04

  They can be very violent. If you go back through Mongol legal codes, the words you become very familiar with are "the penalty is death." A surprising amount of crimes punishable by death. And yes, they were capable of using terror as a weapon. The economist in me would call this terror as a signalling device. So you turn up, if a town doesn't surrender, you massacre everyone in that town and you're doing it as a strong signal that you should do what we say or these are the consequences. That sort of use of terror is worth stepping back for a moment and thinking, you know, we've spoken about the sheer size of this Mongol Empire, but it's fundamentally an empire built on the steppe.

• 18:54Speaker 04

  That is different to the British Empire or the later Russian Empire in a similar place. When we think of empires, we often think of this in a very sort of European way of, you know, turning up, planting your flag, putting your colonial administrators in charge and, you know, ruling it as your territory. The Mongol Empire, there are bits of it that look like that in China, but there are lots of it that look more akin almost to a modern mafia protection racket. It's just that, you know, the Mongols are going to turn up several times a year, you're going to have to hand over a tribute payment. And as long as you hand over the tribute payment, they're then going to move on. And if you don't hand over the tribute payment, you're going to be subject to this horrific violence.

• 19:38Speaker 04

  But it's not necessarily a, you know, a territorial empire with administrators, it's more sort of a tribute-taking protection racket across lots of the steppe.

• 19:48Dan Snow?

  Right, so there's not a sort of Mongol garrison in your Central Asian cities around the clock?

• 19:53Speaker 04

  Not necessarily, no. Often it'll just be they're going to turn up and you have to hand over X amount of silver or grain or manufactured goods or porcelain, depends on, you know, whatever form you pay your tribute in.

• 20:07Dan Snow?

  You're listening to Dan Snow's History, talk about Genghis Khan and the Mongols, more coming up.

• 20:16Dan Snow?

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• 21:00Speaker 03

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• 22:46Dan Snow?

  Just before we leave warfare behind, I love the deception. I love the way that they would do fake retreats. They would leave the skinniest and most knackered looking horses in the wake of their army to persuade an enemy that they're really at the limit of their endurance, they're all tired and broken. And then the enemy might be filled with courage to advance towards them, and then Genghis Khan would turn around and stun them.

• 23:06Speaker 04

  Just also tactically, very sophisticated. So Mongol commanders would generally prefer never to completely surround an opponent. Because they were aware that if an opponent was completely surrounded, their soldiers would see there's no way out and might as well fight to the death. Leave a gap they can run away through is much preferable.

• 23:23Dan Snow?

  Amazing. And as they run away, I'm sure you can exact a terrible punishment.

• 23:28Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 23:29Dan Snow?

  Yeah, well Julius Caesar called that, always leave the golden bridge. So let's come back to his leadership style. Meritocratic, so noble, we could probably overstate this with our 21st century hats on, but he overlooked sometimes the more traditional ways of promotion based on birth, and he rewarded competence.

• 23:47Speaker 04

  One way to think about it is, we've spoken about the step and the character of step life, and how the climate of the step shaped societies. The people in the step, the great Eurasian plain, have never lived in complete isolation from the settled societies around them. They're always interacting with the settled societies. Sometimes that interaction has taken the form of trade. People from the step will turn up with animal produce, with leather goods, and they will trade and barter in return for rice or manufactured goods, the product of settled societies. And sometimes that interaction has been a lot more violent. People on the step raiding the settled societies to take what they need.

• 24:28Speaker 04

  If one way of thinking about what Genghis Khan achieved was, he was able to unite all of these different tribes and confederations into this giant tribute-taking protection racket. So going back again to the economics of this, you know, there was an economy of scale. One tribe raiding some Chinese towns, fine, you can steal some manufactured goods, you can carry off some rice. All of these tribes together, turning up and demanding that China hands over huge amounts of goods and tribute. There's a lot more booty there for the tribute taking empire for the Mongols. So you get this economy of scale by binding them all

• 25:10Speaker 04

  together. But the way that had to work was that this booty had to be shared.

• 25:16Dan Snow?

  So he's sharing it out. Well, I mean, how do you build a system where you can, I mean, I guess that's the one of the fundamental questions about humans in a marketplace. How do you share out the surplus to your workforce?

• 25:27Speaker 04

  This is the interesting thing. So basically, depending on your rank, you were entitled to a higher share of it. But what is quite interesting is the different sort of regional areas of the empire were all entitled to a share of each other's produce. So you see porcelain being sent from Mongol China to, you know, the Mongols who happen to be in charge in Persia. You see Persian goods being sent all of the way back to China. There is this general sense that we are all in this together and we all owe each other a bit of this tribute.

• 25:59Dan Snow?

  Speaking of these things like porcelain, what I find striking about the Mongols is they obviously had such a profoundly idiosyncratic way of making war, you know, so particular to them, you know, this horseborn, these mounted archers, this astonishing way of making war. But when they took over other societies and discovered new technology like gunpowder, they incorporated that too. He seemed to have extraordinary flexibility.

• 26:23Speaker 04

  Yes, they're really open to new ideas. You see it in warfare. You see, you know, they they get used to gunpowder in China, they incorporate that. They're very keen on, the Chinese have a lot more history of and expertise in things like siege craft. So you see Chinese siege engineers being brought along with Mongol armies as they move into Persia, into bits of Eastern Europe. And it's not just in warfare. I mean, they're open to all sorts of things. So, you know, running an empire This big is obviously a big administrative task and they rely very heavily on the traditional Chinese administrative mandarin class for that.

• 27:01Speaker 04

  Kublai Khan establishes an institute of calindrical studies to, you know, make sure there's a calendar which works across the empire. And you see this sort of mixing of ideas as well. So you see Chinese medicines being introduced into Persia. You see Persian surgical techniques being introduced into China. They are very keen on taking anything that works and trying to spread it across their entire territory.

• 27:32Dan Snow?

  Duncan, so is this why we talk about this era as one of globalization? By uniting this massive, very disparate territories across Eurasia. Is that like it's almost creating a big free trade area? Do you suddenly see an upsurge in the movement of goods and peoples and ideas across this space?

• 27:51Speaker 04

  You do. So, you know, some historians, some economic historians talk about this period from, you know, roughly 1250, a bit after Genghis Khan's death for 100, 150 years. As the Pax Mongolia, you know, the Mongolian peace in that the Mongols have conquered all of this territory. And that means for the first time in quite a long time, travel between Europe and China along the old Silk Roads is relatively safe. Because it's all Mongol territory and the Mongols are keen to encourage trade. So you do see goods, peoples, ideas on the move. Now, it's not like modern globalization and it's not even like the globalization of the late 19th and early 20th centuries before the First World War. Because the technology's not there.

• 28:37Speaker 04

  You see ideas moving and you see goods moving, but the goods that move tend to be those with a very high ratio of value to weight. Stuff that's not too heavy, but you can sell for a lot of money. It's things like spices, it's things to an extent like porcelain, it's things like slaves. It's not so much big, heavy lumber and grains.

• 29:00Dan Snow?

  Lumps of iron.

• 29:00Speaker 04

  Yeah. Obviously, the most famous European traveler in this period is obviously Marco Polo, but he's not alone. You know, there are sort of guidebooks written by Florentine and Genovese merchants, how to profit from this huge opportunity, which is the Silk Road.

• 29:16Dan Snow?

  Because if you've got a piece of paper or whatever it is from a Mongol at one end of this system, that's your ticket to cross the whole thing presumably. You can proceed without worrying about loss of goods or even life.

• 29:29Speaker 04

  Absolutely. And, you know, they police the trade routes quite effectively. You know, there's even a system for sort of returning stolen goods along the trade route. Some merchants are allowed to use the way stations which are meant for the internal imperial communications postal route where, you know, every thirty or forty miles or so, there are stations with fresh rements and a place for travellers to stay. There's even, in some cases, this sort of Mongol doctrine whereby the first time they do business with new merchants, they will give them a really good price to encourage them to come again. You know, they're very open to encouraging trade along the empire.

• 30:08Dan Snow?

  So lots of these things that we accept in the West originated in China, things like paper and gunpowder. Is this a period where you see some of those civilisation-changing bits of technology arrive in Europe? And were the Europeans aware of that? Like, oh gosh, lots of stuff coming from the East at the moment?

• 30:28Speaker 04

  This is exactly true. It's not just goods. These ideas are moving, you know, across the Silk Roads. Yes, it's when you see things like gunpowder, things like proper paper making technology coming from China along the Silk Roads down into Europe. And, you know, this is, it's not an easy journey. You know, it's relatively safe, but to go from Europe to the other end of the Silk Road is probably an eight, nine, ten, eleven month journey. But it's one worth doing because, you know, there are some numbers here. Florentine Guidebook says to do this round trip from Europe to China and back will probably cost you three and a half thousand florins, including buying trade goods, a considerable sum. But

• 31:11Speaker 04

  you will then be able to sell the stuff you bring back for 25,000 florins. So it's a huge return if you can raise the three and a half thousand florins to do it, if you can devote the time to doing it.

• 31:23Dan Snow?

  Amazing. And I guess sometimes it's what's in people's heads. If you are the guy who has the recipe for gunpowder, then you can make that journey and you will be welcome with open arms in the warlike West.

• 31:32Speaker 04

  Yeah. And you know, just the travellers along the Silk Road, they're quite impressed by lots of aspects of Mongol rule. You know, we spoke about the terror and there is an awful lot of terror used in this conquest. But once Mongol rule is in place, there are bits of it that Europeans were really impressed by. So for example, there is a system whereby if crops fail in one area, the imperial overlords will make sure that some of the surplus from neighbouring areas is brought to the area where there's been a crop failure to prevent famines, almost like an insurance system on the settled agricultural bits of the empire, which is something that Europe of that time was totally lacking. So they're quite impressed by lots of aspects of it.

• 32:17Dan Snow?

  What about religion? Were people allowed to largely go on practising their own faiths in all this great patchwork of territory that they conquered?

• 32:25Speaker 04

  Yes, people generally had to go on practising their own faiths. I mean, generally, as long as you don't miss your tribute payments, they're quite hands off. I mean, again, I go back to the analogy of the mafia protection racket. As long as you are making your payments, they are generally content for you to get on and do whatever you want, organise your society however you want, believe in whichever god you want.

• 32:47Dan Snow?

  I think it's a reasonably new study in the looking at the Black Death, the plague, and they think that that also may have been, the spread of plague may have been facilitated. The Sinneopestis bacteria may have been facilitated by this opening up of these great Eurasian trade routes. And it's only 100 or so years later than Genghis Khan, and we see that arrive via the Silk Roads into, it's Crimea, I think, Black Sea initially, and then into Italy, isn't it?

• 33:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know, it's no surprise, it's Italian merchants carrying it. They're the people doing a lot of this trade down the Silk Road. But yeah, the words of one later historian, Genghis Khan didn't just create a place where goods and ideas and people were on the move, he created a single market in microbes. Because people were moving much more, diseases were able to move much more. Yes, the Black Death almost certainly came to Europe and into the Middle East, then the Silk Roads came to Europe, reached the Crimea, boarded probably a ship from Genoa and landed in Europe. And yeah, the downside of that episode of globalisation was of course, the worst pandemic the world has ever seen.

• 33:52Dan Snow?

  Clearly, he changed the world. There's few political military individuals that have had a more direct impact on the course of history. I mean, he really did bind those Mongol tribes together, and then he led those unimaginable conquests. Politically, the legacy didn't last that long, but still significant. How do you see his legacies across state building, empire building, but also all these other areas we talked about? What does the modern world owe to Genghis Khan?

• 34:18Speaker 04

  What I found fascinating about the Mongol Empire while it lasted was if you look at the sort of the differential impact on China and Europe. China was directly conquered. Millions of Chinese people probably died during the period of conquest, and then they were ruled by the Mongols, handing over tribute for a long period. China didn't directly benefit. China paid a lot of the costs from Mongol rule. Europe, though, Europe is never directly part of the empire, but Europe benefits from these Chinese and indeed Middle Eastern innovations and ideas coming down the Silk Roads. It benefits from the trade, and it

• 35:00Speaker 04

  helps build up all of these wealthy merchants who facilitate the trade. It helps build up European capital, much of which is then later used to fund Vasco de Gana and Columbus's voyages of discovery. It sort of leaves this culture in Europe of there is money to be made out of there, and international trade is something we can benefit from. It leaves this sort of outward-looking, almost, Europe, and it leaves China a bit more fearful of outside forces. But if Genghis Khan is the father of the first great age of globalization, yeah, I think it's perfectly fair to argue he's the grandfather of the Industrial Revolution.

• 35:42Speaker 04

  The Black Death arrives because of this Pax Mongolia. The Black Death kills so many people in Europe. There's a shortage of peasants, wages start to rise, and we get into the very, very, very beginnings of a process whereby, because wages are a lot higher, people are starting to look for, is there a way I can replace human labor with machines? And eventually, that leads to the Industrial Revolution.

• 36:12Dan Snow?

  There's a study that suggests astonishing proportion of Asians today have a common ancestor around about 800 years ago, and that the thought is it might be Genghis.

• 36:22Speaker 04

  Tremendous. I've seen Genghis's legacy lives on in so many ways.

• 36:25Dan Snow?

  In so many of us. The empire did not last a very long time compared to the Roman Empire, but then again, the British Empire didn't really last a very long time. Once it really got going in the mid 18th century, it was done by the mid 20th. So longevity shouldn't be mistaken for impact. I mean, clearly the British Empire enormous impact subsequent history. And the same true of that gigantic, if you know, slightly, what lasted about a century, would you say, before it really does break into disparate and warring parts?

• 36:55Speaker 04

  It may have only lasted around a century, a century and a bit, but building an empire on the steppe, I think is really hard. I think it's almost surprising it lasted as long as it did, and it outlasted just Genghis Khan and survived his death. You can't emphasise enough that the geography, climate and social structure of the steppe is different to Europe, it's different to China. Building lasting political unions in an area where people are constantly on the move is just harder.

• 37:26Dan Snow?

  Interesting. Thank you so much indeed for coming on the podcast and talking all about Genghis Khan and how he changed the world. Fascinating stuff, Duncan Weldon. Tell us about your new book.

• 37:36Speaker 04

  Oh, thank you. Yeah, so Blood and Treasure, The Economics of Conflict from the Vikings to Ukraine is my new book. There is a Genghis Khan section, as we've been talking about, but it's generally about the kind of things we've been talking about. It's about the interaction of warfare, social organisation, economic development, how the two have played off against each other over time. You know, starting off with things like the Vikings, looking at medieval warfare, looking at Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire, all the way through to the total wars of the 20th century, Vietnam and the war in Ukraine.

• 38:15Dan Snow?

  I think we're going to have to get you back on the podcast. Do you per chance have a chapter on the British fiscal military state of the 18th century?

• 38:20Speaker 04

  I have a chapter on the British fiscal military state of the 18th century and the Seven Years' War, just for you.

• 38:25Dan Snow?

  Oh, you've got invite right away there, buddy. Thank you so much. Go and get everyone Blood and Treasure. Duncan, I look forward to getting you back on the podcast soon.

• 38:32Speaker 04

  Thank you.

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• 40:04Dan Snow?

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