Decline of Mongol Empire

3 Key excerpts on "Decline of Mongol Empire"

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  eBook - ePub

  Empires

  A Historical and Political Sociology

  • Krishan Kumar(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  fronde in France, the Thirty Years’ War in Germany, revolts – Dutch, Catalan – throughout the Spanish Empire, over to the other side of Eurasia with the bloody conflicts attending the end of the Ming dynasty and the rise of the Qing, it has seemed impossible to think of this time as other than apocalyptic – as, indeed, it seemed to many participants at the time. Much has been attributed to the great climatic shift associated with the “Little Ice Age” of the seventeenth century (Brook 2013; Parker 2013; Goldstone [1991] 2016).

  But the gloom and doom of the seventeenth century was followed by the sunny uplands of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment in Europe. The European empires – including the Ottoman – recovered (if they had ever declined) and continued for more than another two centuries, while at the same time conquering ever more of the world. In that time, the British and the French constructed the two largest empires in world history. In China, the Qing dynasty doubled the extent of the territory of the Chinese Empire and brought about one of the most prosperous periods in Chinese history (Rowe 2012: 1–2). If all this was “decline,” every state should suffer it.

  It is obvious, in fact, that “decline” is a rhetorical trope in the history of empires. It is a poetic mode that is readily available to intellectuals and statesmen when the going gets rough, on a par with the oft-repeated and equally rhetorical cry of despair, “o tempora! o mores!” (“oh, the times! oh, the customs!”). One can usually trace its antecedents in a tradition of “declinist” literature in the society in question – as, for instance, during the period of the “Warring States” in early Chinese history, or, for European societies, the laments of late Latin authors as the problems mounted in the later Roman Empire (arguably Christianity, with its early stress on the “end of time” and the dissolution of worldly society, was one such powerful source of “declinism” for these societies).1

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  The Military Collapse of China's Ming Dynasty, 1618-44

  • Kenneth M. Swope(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  8  The fall of the Ming from a global perspective

  The fall of the Ming dynasty has captivated people for centuries. After all, how could the wealthiest, most powerful empire in the world succumb to ragtag bands of peasant rebels and recently unified tribal peoples from a backward frontier? Traditionally the fall of the Ming was couched in the standard terms of the dynastic cycle, whereby a corrupt, ossified regime collapsed in upon itself and a more vigorous government that served the interests of the people came in to take its place and restore order. Of course, as the present work has hopefully demonstrated, matters were far more complicated than this. As the authors of The Cambridge History of China volume on the Ming observed more than two decades ago, “any attempts to pass over late Ming history with facile references to the inexorable workings of the dynastic cycle should be quickly and firmly rejected.”1 There were a multitude of reasons for the fall of the Ming dynasty, some of which had something in common with earlier dynastic collapses, but many of which were specific to the era in question. Most importantly, recent scholarship has identified the great degree to which the Ming were integrated into wider world developments, both economically and ecologically. Many of these developments were far beyond the capacity of the Ming, or indeed any government, to anticipate or direct. The present study has endeavored only to illuminate the military dimensions of the collapse because previous works, most notably Frederic Wakeman’s magisterial The Great Enterprise

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  Rivalry and Revolution in South and East Asia

  • Partha S. Ghosh(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  55 could not in itself resolve the fatal contradiction that lay at its heart, and hence perpetuate it for any significant period of time. In 1386, the Mongol Empire began to die, with the loss of China to the Han Ming dynasty.

  Thereafter, the Mongols reverted to internecine strife, anarchy and political marginalisation during the 15th and 16th centuries. Towards the end of the latter, during the reign of Altan Khan (1543–83) in Ordos, Tibetan Buddhism began gradually to supplant “shamanism”, thereby strengthening an older Tibetan-Mongol relationship going back to the time of Genghis Khan. This development, initially pan-Mongol in intent, failed to unify the divided Mongols in the face of growing Manchu power in China from 1644 onwards. The Chahar Mongols of what then became Inner Mongolia fell to Beijing first, followed by the Khalkha Mongols of Outer Mongolia (1691), whose princes opted for submission to the Manchu Emperor rather than accepting Oirat (western Mongol) hegemony as the price of pan-Mongol unity. The Oirats were finally conquered by the Manchus in 1759.56 The northern Buryat Mongols became part of the Russian Empire during the century prior to 1727, when the present border between Russia and China’s province of Outer Mongolia (then including Tuva) was finally determined.57

  Henceforth, the Mongols were to remain divided between two declining empires. The worst of the two, that of the Manchu Ching dynasty (16441911), kept its Mongols in a state of stagnation, economic decline and, until the late 19th century, isolation from the rest of China. Once the latter policy was changed, leading to increasing Han colonisation into Inner and Outer Mongolia, local conditions became intolerable.58 This situation, coupled with the political prescience of the Javzundamba Khutagt, was to lead directly to Mongolia’s revolution of 1911.

  Independent Mongolia

  The political prescience of the Javzundamba Khutagt, a Tibetan with a rare understanding of the Mongols, was shown as early as 1900, when he sent a secret mission to the Tsarist government in St. Petersburg asking for Russian help for his people to win independence from the dying Manchu Empire in China. No help was forthcoming. Prior to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, when the Tsarist Empire suffered defeat abroad and revolutionary upheaval at home, Mongolia was secondary to Manchuria in Russian Far Eastern strategy. After the war, however, Mongolia was divided into two spheres of influence in a number of secret treaties between Russia and Japan.59

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