Mongol Awakening seems to make sense to me as a relocation of the process that is described in Eurocentric terms as the Renaissance ~ clearly the Mongol Empire did not bring the East-Asian dominated long Axial world trading system into being, but they did re-awaken it after a period in which at least the land-based part of the trading system had gone to sleep a bit.

The thesis that as a peripheral region, Europe was not sufficiently compelling to bring the Mongol conquest to France on the western cape of the Eurasian continent is certainly not a surprising one ~ surely nobody can pretend that 1000AD Europe was anything but a peripheral region of the larger axial world system.


I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.