This is the nearly 400-page case Marie Favereau lays out in The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World — and it’s a convincing one. A professor of history at Paris Nanterre University, Favereau’s previous published work focused on the wide-ranging geopolitical connections the Mongols made, and subtle cultural revolution that transformed them from an alien, conquering elite to deeply-rooted imperial administrators who shaped the societies they ruled. Though Favereau occasionally fixates excessively on the internecine dramas of Genghis Khan’s family, on the whole The Horde is both brisk and dense with facts and analysis about a period and people that remain unknown to most Westerners.

The Golden Horde emerged during the Pax Mongolica, when the various divisions of the Mongol Empire — Khanates —were ruled separately by the descendants of Genghis Khan, but united by treaties based on Mongol tradition. Marco Polo traversed the length of Eurasia, from Europe to China, and back, when the Mongol Empire was at its peak in the late 13th century. But the Golden Horde was the most geographically expansive of the Khanates. It stretched from modern Bulgaria and Romania in the west, to the vast Eurasian steppe north of the Black Sea, and yet further eastward still to the western edge of Mongolia. Beyond it lay the Great Yuan, who ruled most of the landmass of China and Mongolia, while the modern Middle East and southern Central Asia were under the two smaller Khanates.

The high noon of the Golden Horde’s power came between 1250 and 1400 AD, when it had unquestioned hegemony over all of the Russian principalities, northern Central Asia, Siberia and the Caucasus (Moscow remained a nominal vassal of the Horde until 1480 AD). This was an empire at enormous scale, with a vast reach — like Augustan Rome, or Spain during el Siglo de Oro, or Victorian Britain. For centuries, the Golden Horde stood athwart the trade routes of Eurasia. It was colossal.

But before there was the Horde, there were the four sons of Genghis Khan: Jochi, Chagatai, Ogedei and Tolui. It was from Jochi that the Horde would come. The eldest, he had a checkered relationship with his father, and with good reason. His mother, Börte, had been kidnapped by an enemy of Genghis Khan eight months before his birth. Although a shadow was cast over Jochi’s paternity, Genghis claimed him anyway. (Favereau straightforwardly accepts that Jochi was likely not Genghis Khan’s biological son.) After a great conference of Mongol leaders in Central Asia was held to determine the succession, and passed over Jochi, he marched his forces west, pitching his tents on the far fringe of the Mongol Empire north of the Caspian Sea.

Jochi’s self-exile set in motion a long train of consequences, and the real narrative of The Horde begins with Jochi’s sons, Orda, Batu, and Berke. Their lives illustrate three principles that reoccur again and again in The Horde. First, there is the principle of consensus and coexistence. Batu ruled the western half of the Golden Horde, while Orda ruled the east. These were the Blue and White Hordes, due to the association of these colours with the west and the east, and for over a century they respected each other’s territory. Second, the ascension of the younger Batu over Orda as Khan reversed expectation and reflected pragmatism.

Rather than slavishly following rules and customs, the Golden Horde embraced flexibility in its culture and political organisation. Finally, after the death of Batu, the youngest brother, Berke, became the Khan. Berke was the son of a Muslim woman, and he eventually converted to Islam, anticipating the later wholesale conversion of the Horde’s Mongol elite. Berke’s religious choice was also reflected in his geopolitical decision-making: he had no compunction about aligning with fellow Muslims against other Mongols. But Berke was also a pragmatist, not a fanatic, and he valued Mongol legal precedent and accepted the importance of religious toleration within his empire. The Golden Horde eventually became Muslim, but the empire it dominated was never Islamic.

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One of the major themes of The Horde is that the wealth of the ruling class of the Golden Horde was uniquely fuelled by trade, and this drove much of its diplomacy and war-making. Unlike China, Europe or the Near East, the territories of the Horde were sparsely populated. The Khans of the Golden Horde could not tax vast numbers of peasants to sustain their wealth. Rather, their economic activity was geared toward exploiting natural resources, as with furs shipped to Europe via the Hanseatic League, and customs collected on overland trade passing between Europe and China, as well as exports of slaves south to Egypt via Constantinople.

Some actions of the Khans that seem ideological on their surface turn out to have straightforward material explanations. Berke’s conversion to Islam cemented an alliance with the Mamluk regime in Egypt against the Mongol Il-Khanate. The Golden Horde supplied the Egyptians with slave soldiers to battle their Il-Khanate cousins, resulting in the first major defeat of the Mongols, which stopped their military advance. But those slave soldiers were also a major economic commodity that powered the financial health of the Golden Horde. The conflict with the Il-Khanate was not just ideological or geopolitical, but driven by the reality that the Golden Horde’s trade routes were constantly threatened by enemies — in this case, other Khanates. Berke and the Khans who succeeded him were engaging in literal trade wars.

Similarly, the amity between the two major divisions with the Horde, the Blue and the White, was not just a matter of sentimental familial bonds between the descendents of the brothers Batu and Orda. It reflected business savvy. The Golden Horde invested heavily in a Silk Road route that began at ports on the Black Sea, like the Genoese colony of Kaffa. The route continued eastward, grazing the southern fringe of Siberia, and moving onward all the way to the rich lands of the Great Yuan (Mongol-ruled China).

Cooperation between the Blue and White Hordes was necessary, not simply preferred, for this Silk Road to function. Additionally, propagandists in the service of the Horde whispered in the ears of merchant houses in Europe that the southern route that snaked through the rugged lands of the Il-Khanate was more dangerous and expensive. The ruling class of the Golden Horde wanted the world to know they were “open for business,” and offered a favourable tax regime for merchants willing to traverse their peaceful and well-ordered territories.

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But trade-fuelled prosperity is subject to the vicissitudes of globalisation. The collapse of the Il-Khanate in the 1330s resulted in the northern route achieving even greater prominence, as the southern Silk Road fractured between numerous hostile states. This monopoly was short-lived. In 1368, the great engine of west-east trade was turned off; the Mongols were expelled from China, and the ascendent Ming Dynasty shut the door to the rest of the world. If agriculturally-based empires were vulnerable to weakening in times of famine, merchant prince fortunes soared at the pleasure and caprice of foreign potentates.

Additionally, the 14th century saw the lucrative global trade in furs across the lands of the Horde facilitate the spread of the Black Death to Europe and the Near East from the eastern steppe. As we keenly feel today, one downside of globalisation is that a much larger human population can be a potential host for a pandemic. More than 30% of Europe and the Near East died from the bubonic plague, and the impact was significant on the Horde itself, as some of its leaders succumbed to the disease. The paradoxes and discontents that emerge from globalisation are long-standing.

Favereau’s narrative makes much of the reality that the Golden Horde was religiously pluralistic, a phenomenon immediately intelligible to contemporary readers. This was a legacy of Genghis Khan himself, who exempted clerics from taxation and left all houses of worship intact. He believed that the sky god, Tengri, had given him the world. Genghis and his descendants looked favourably upon all religions as the expression of the same divine principle.  Most earlier Khans were not Muslim, but devotees of Tengri. Nevertheless, they patronised Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity to cultivate relationships with subject people, most of whom were Christian or Muslim, and encourage the migration of other Mongols, many of whom were Buddhist. However, 1313, the Khan of the Golden Horde declared Islam the religion of the Mongols in the Blue and White Hordes.

Even after the Khan of the Golden Horde demanded that Mongols in his domain convert to Islam, he continued to encourage Christians to practise their religion (in contrast, Buddhist Mongols were expelled and their temples torn down). The Golden Horde exempted Russian Orthodox Church lands from taxation and encouraged European Roman Catholics in the trading cities to build their own houses of worship. Even when the Mongol ruling class became thoroughly Islamicised, they accepted religious diversity for both principle and profit.

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Though the global commercial orientation and religious tolerance of the Mongols are nothing to sneeze at, perhaps the biggest direct impact of the Golden Horde was upon the nascent identities of their subjects. Almost as an aside, Favereau notes that the Mongols liberated Wallachia from its nomadic overlords, laying down the foundation for modern Romania in the 13th century. But this is nothing, compared to how the Golden Horde played inadvertent midwife to the rise of the modern Russian state. Traditional accounts date the origin of Russia to the Christianisation of Kievan Rus’ under Vladimir the Great at the end of the 10th century. Though 1,000 years later this culture and society may seem exotic to us, Kievan Rus’ was oriented to the west and Europe, which explains how Anne of Kiev became queen of France in 1051. The deep separation between Russian culture and that of Western Europe only emerged during the period under the Golden Horde, as the ruling elite shifted its focus from Kiev in the west to Moscow in the east.

By the time the Mongols arrived, the Rus were ruled by a patchwork of more than a dozen principalities. Their main southern trading partner, the Byzantine Empire, was in sharp decline, and the Northern Crusades by German knights were impinging upon the prosperity of the Baltic-facing trading cities. The Mongol invasion was even more traumatic. In 1246, an envoy of the Pope traveled through Kiev and observed that “it has been reduced almost to nothing, for there are at the present time scarce two hundred houses.” The only major city to avoid being sacked by the Horde was Novgorod in the far north, which survived through preemptive surrender.

Modern Russia was built upon the ashes of cities the Mongols burned. The imperial Russian state of Ivan of the Terrible that rose to unprecedented power in the 16th century was not shaped by Kievan Rus. It did not face the European kingdoms to the west, but the Golden Horde to the east. Instead the rulers of Moscow were positioned between the core territories of the Rus to the west and the lands of their steppe rulers to the southeast. A perfect location to be cultural and geopolitical go-betweens.

Just as Batu had been promoted over Orda, so the Khans of the Golden Horde strategically promoted Moscow’s junior princely lineage, the Danilovich, above the others. The House of Moscow did not have the pedigree, but they got the job done, collecting revenue and suppressing revolts. In the process, Moscow accrued enormous power and influence, eventually overthrowing the “Tatar Yoke” to impose its own domination on what became imperial Russia. While 11th-century France obtained a queen from Kiev, 18th-century French asserted that if you “scratch a Russian… you find a Tartar.”

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Favereau’s contention that you cannot understand the Russian imperial order without considering the formative impact of the Golden Horde is just one aspect of her argument. A broader thesis explicit in The Horde is that the empires that arose in the last 500 years mimicked and adapted many of the features of the steppe polities they dismembered. Russian historiography speaks of the period of subordination to the Golden Horde, but the centuries of disgrace were erased only with the conquest of the lands of their erstwhile oppressors: Siberia and Central Asia.

The Russian Empire also assimilated the Horde’s ruling class. Much of the Mongol military elite became Christian and part of the Russian nobility, while Jochid princesses married into the Russian ruling houses. A tradition of autocratic rule arose that was different from the more decentralised model that had characterised Kievan Rus. Ivan the Terrible took the title Tsar only in 1547. Before that he had simply been a prince, a reflection of the Kievan legacy. His assertion that he was a Tsar reflected an imperial ambition more in keeping with the traditions of the steppe than the nation-states emerging in Western Europe.

Though there are occasions in Favereau’s narrative where fixation on the political and social intrigues of the Jochid lineage overshadow the broader lessons, The Horde is most deeply understood as a cultural and social history. Like many histories which centre the steppe, it attempts to roll back the erasure of nomadic empires from the genealogy of modern states and societies. This process is clearest in the case of Russia, but applies pervasively across Eurasian history.

Historians of the steppe observe that the kingdoms of Europe and the emirates of the Near East may have built vast stone cities which withstand the test of time, but the religious tolerance and the global mercantile orientation of the Mongols are much more in keeping with the values of modern cultures. Like the Horde, modern developed societies are not fundamentally agricultural.

Also like the Horde, modern developed societies tolerate a wide variety of religions, often with the unspoken understanding that this will be socially useful. And, like the Horde, modern nation-states tend to exhibit a centralising and expansive tendency, with an explicit hierarchy of administrators and decision-makers. The Horde argues that multicultural global empires have much more relevant lessons for modern nation-states than the agrarian societies which the Mongols ruled. Without recognising it, we all still travel on a path the Mongols carved out for us centuries ago.

So wrote the Mongol leader Hulagu Khan to the Mamluk ruler of Egypt in 1260. Two years earlier, the nomadic horsemen had sacked Baghdad, the river Tigris running black with ink as its libraries were destroyed, ending the city’s golden age with pyramids of skulls built from the slaughter.

Rather unsurprisingly, the Mongols have rather got a bad press from historians, so it seems counterintuitive that a newly published book praised in the Economist cites them as potential role models for the 21^st century. Yet it also says something about our time.

Johan Norberg’s Open: The Story of Human Progress makes the argument that many empires were forces for openness, encouraging the spread of ideas and people, along with a certain amount of social mobility. As well as the Roman Empire, which unarguably brought many benefits, Norberg praises Genghis Khan for domestic policies that “would today open him up to accusations of being a politically correct, latte-drinking virtue signaller”. So, when people tell me “I’m just right of Genghis Khan” they actually mean it as a comment on my moderation.

“The Mongols practised ethnic and religious tolerance,” as an Economist review puts it sympathetically: “which is one reason why they were so effective. They promoted skilled fighters, engineers and administrators of all backgrounds. Of the 150,000-strong horde that invaded Europe in 1241, only around a third were ethnic Mongols. Habsburg soldiers were surprised to find that one captured officer was a middle-aged literate Englishman, who had fled persecution for heresy at home and sought refuge among the more open-minded Mongols.”

This line of argument is an interesting indication of where current thinking is moving, since over the course of the 21^st century there has been growing sympathy for imperialism among sections of the intelligentsia — and with good reason.

This might seem an odd claim, since on one level empire has never been more controversial. Less than three years ago, some 170 academics signed a letter condemning Oxford University even for presenting a “balance sheet” on the British Empire, stating that they were “alarmed” by such an exercise which lacked “scholarly legitimacy”.

Then there was the case of Bruce Gilley, a political science professor who was published in the peer reviewed journal The World Quarterly arguing that there were many advantages and benefits to colonialism. The article was swiftly retracted, after 16,000 people signed a petition led by fellow academics.

Yet these controversies are not about empires as such, but race and racial supremacy, the most offensive idea to 21^st century westerners. Non-European empires often receive quite sympathetic hearings, including two relatively recent BBC documentaries on the Ottomans — and that is because the values of the 21^st century global elite align far closer with pre-modern imperial rulers than with the 19^th and 20^th century rulers of nation-states.

The modern era proper, which we might approximately date from the Battle of Waterloo or the first railways, was the age of the nation. During this period, politics aligned largely on class lines, with a working-class Left pushing for redistribution and equality, and a largely upper and middle-class Right favouring order.

Over the course of the past couple of decades, that has decisively shifted — a process known as the “great realignment” — so that politics is more about values. The leading Right-wing party is now more working-class than the leading Left-wing party, which would have been an absurd idea 20 years ago, but not 200 years ago when the wealthy were less conservative than the masses — as has been the case throughout much of history.

This new divide is sometimes characterised as being between “open” and “closed” societies, the one favouring more freedom of ideas, trade and immigration, the latter opposing outside influences like the proverbial castle raising the drawbridge. It’s an imperfect distinction because of the pejorative undertones of the term — no one thinks of themselves as “closed-minded” — and that is partly why it is so favoured by advocates of globalisation and liberalisation.

Yet there is something to it, and liberals — as opposed to socialists or progressives — are more likely to favour free exchange of ideas, free movement of capital and goods, and especially free movement of people.

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And historically, there has been one form of government above all that has done this — empire, the most effective form of globalisation and cultural cross-pollination. The author Laurence Bergreen described the Mongols as “early practitioners of globalisation, seeking to connect the entire world. They were conquerors and marauders, but more than that, they were unifiers.” And because empires are defined by diversity, their mix of languages, cultures and religions, so it is natural that supporters of globalisation might seem more sympathetic. Genghis Khan today would most certainly have read the Economist, even if their solutions might have appeared a bit technocratic for his tastes.

Empires have always been cosmopolitan. Toby Wilkinson’s The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt describes the country in the centuries after Christ as a mixture of influences, a place “where people married across the religious and cultural divide; where reliefs in Egyptian temples could depict strange, winged creatures from Zoroastrian mythology; and where second-generation Persian immigrants could adopt Egyptian nicknames… a dynamic melting pot of peoples and traditions.”

Or there was Spain under the Umayyad Caliphate, where “the emir was served by a well-run cadre led by Umayyad relatives and staffed by Syrians, muwalladun, [Muslims of Spanish descent] Jews, and Mozarabs [Arab-speaking Catholics]”. And yet, as David Levering Lewis of Moorish Spain, its people “coexisted in a flammable symbiosis”.

The Ottoman Empire is perhaps the most cancel-proof: open to racial mixing, with little sense of ethnic supremacy compared to later European empires, and even with powerful people of colour, women and even intersex people right at the top: among the most important figures at the Topkapi Palace were the Chief White Eunuch and the Chief Black Eunuch, and the latter was more powerful (claps).

And yet, like all such empires, it was authoritarian and conservative. People could practise their religion and indeed minority religious leaders were given quasi-official status — so long as they accepted the status quo. Like empires before it, it was a society terrified of changes that might throw the whole delicately-weaved network of peoples into imbalance. With good reason.

It was the very diverse nature of these imperial societies that made them unpromising ground for the political ideas that appeared in the West — liberalism, representative democracy and freedom of religion (and freedom from religion). That these novelties emerged in the far more ethnically-homogenous societies of England, the Netherlands and Scandinavia is not a coincidence, since the nations adjoining the North Sea were characterised by strong institutions, high levels of trust and little fear of competing nationalisms, or what we would now call “identity politics”.

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The correlation between diversity and low trust is well-established, and trust is crucial in the formation of civil society and of capitalism, which require strangers to share risks outside of their extended families. Over the 18^th century, 130 types of society were created in the British Isles, and some 25,000 clubs sprang up in the English-speaking world. A German resident of London wrote: “Everyone may choose his company according to his liking” and there was nowhere “where a man may live more according to his own mind, or even his whims, than in London”.

The imperial age would begin its decline with the French Revolution and the rise of nationalism, which was originally a modernising and liberal force; as Krishnan Kumar wrote in Visions of Empire, nationalism was allied “with the noble causes of spreading freedom and enlightenment in the world”. Nationalists wished to counter the rule of clerics and princes, who had always seen themselves being above such petty concerns as national identity. As Count-duke Olivares of imperial Spain wrote: “I am not nacional; that is something for children”. This, as Kumar put it, was an “expression typical of the imperial mentality”. The old aristocracy were beyond such low-status beliefs as nationalism — just like their 21^st century successors.

Most of all the age of nationalism was tied to the rise of the middle class, just as today nationalism’s fall is linked to its decline, and with the rise of a new globalised tech and finance aristocracy.

Though once aligned with liberalism, nationalism would become intolerant and violent, and its legacy was disastrous for minorities in particular. Today the cities of Eurasia are littered with the ghosts of long-established communities wiped out in the 20^th century, in Jewish Krakow, Orthodox Constantinople, Christian Baghdad and elsewhere.

On the treatment of minorities, empires can certainly claim to have a better record than nation-states. European Jews enjoyed great freedom and tolerance under the Habsburgs but when that empire fell, the results were catastrophic. Tragedy also afflicted the Greeks in Alexandria and the Arabs and Persians in Zanzibar, all of whom had to flee when the age of empires came to an end (among the latter was a young Farrokh Bulsara, whose family home in Middlesex had a picture of their former protector, the Queen of England, on the wall).

Today, while national identity is in steep retreat in the west, it has come to be replaced by a form of patriotism for an idea, the “British values” coined by New Labour and repeated by Keir Starmer last week.

As Tony Blair said in 1997: “I am a British patriot…The Britain in my vision is not Britain turning its back on the world. We are a leader of nations or nothing.” Yet what he is patriotic for is a set of values, an imperial, not a nationalist, idea. As Krishnan Kumar put it: “Imperialist ideologies are universalistic, not particularistic. That difference has to be borne in mind. Imperial peoples do not, unlike nationalists, celebrate themselves; they celebrate the causes of which they are the agents or carriers.”

Likewise if America is defined by a creed — “it is who we are”, as Barack Obama said of diversity — then that makes it less recognisable as the nation of the founding fathers and more what Rashid Dar called “a progressive caliphate”, a polity arranged around a belief system.

Nations don’t have “values”. In Nationalism and the History of Ideas, John Breuilly observed that “Nationalists are highly inward-looking. They tend to celebrate themselves — ‘we English,’ ‘we Germans,’ ‘we French’ — simply for their good fortune in being who they are, rather than for any cause or purpose in the world that might justify their existence.”

So as western societies become multicultural, they have also come to resurrect imperial models of government, with officials working among the “community” performing a similar role to that of the Ottoman millet system — repressing ethnic conflict and injustice while also imposing ideological conformity and loyalty to the empire. Faith leaders are not just tolerated but given sway over their self-appointed communities, but anyone who offends the values of the state — by, say, expressing opposition to homosexuality too openly — is deemed beyond the pale.

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Because of their vulnerability, multicultural empires must also become less hospitable towards dissenting ideas. As the United States has become more imperial, so Americans have become much less tolerant of opposing beliefs because majority ethnic nationalism, usually described as racism or “white supremacy”, threatens the fabric of society just as it haunted past empires.

That today empire is such a controversial issue is not because the rule of sultans or khans offends our principles, but because of the same ethnic politics that once plagued multicultural empires and now play a large part in American and European political life.

Everywhere, as western nation-states have evolved into modern empires, so liberalism and democracy have begun to diverge, with populist movements arising to defend “the people”, the ethnic majority, against elites who resemble imperial governors trying to protect social peace (and their own interests).

As Kumar wrote: “In the case of empires, one of the most important is to recognize the danger of nationalism, not just of the subject peoples but, perhaps even more, of the ruling people themselves. The moment the ruling people start stressing their own national identity, whether as Turks, Austrians, Russians, English, or French, that is the moment empire begins to decline… The national principle denies the imperial principle.”

And it is this question, between the new imperialism and the old nationalism, that now defines western political life in the 21^st century.