The impact of the sedentary world on nomads has been well-covered by previous scholarship. However, the issue of the impact of pastoral nomads on the sedentary world, and their role in it, has generated premature and incomplete conclusions which, if not outright ideological, were almost never substantiated by detailed studies, and which still need to be fitted into a comparative framework. This book will address these various shortcomings in the context of the history of Eurasia by studying the role nomads have played in the socio-economic and political development of the sedentary world, with particular emphasis on the medium and long term. Although in some periods the nomads played a very important role in political, ethno-linguistic, socio-economic and cultural developments in many parts of the sedentary world, almost nowhere was the nomadic factor on its own the determining one among the many factors that defined regional historical developments of long duration. This means that the impact of nomads cannot be isolated from the general internal dynamics of sedentary societies.
This collection deals with regions from Hungary to West Africa, North Africa, Iran, India, and China during periods ranging from the first millennium BC to the early modern period. They address issues relating to the short and medium term impact of nomads. The conclusions in most cases are remarkably congruent, whilst also showing the different ways in which the nomadic impact varied according to factors at work in the sedentary societies. Those nomadic institutions (such as the Mongol 'sharing system' or notions of divine mandate to rule bestowed on certain clans) that were at odds with sedentary ones, and were simply imposed on sedentary societies, did not last long. On the contrary, even victorious nomads had to adjust to or adopt the socio-political institutions of conquered, sedentary populations - which raises the issue of drawing a distinction between genuinely nomadic and 'post- nomadic' institutions and traditions.