Reviews for Tibet and Her Neighbours A History

The average rating for Tibet and Her Neighbours A History based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-09-07 00:00:00 Gregory Shrock A very solid survey of the history of Turkic speaking groups. It's only 250 pages so not enough really enough to give a detailed treatment of anything and although that's understandable it's also somewhat disappointing given the interest that a detailed treatment of Ottoman society and culture, or the Great Game, or the conquests of Timur. Instead the book ties its subject together with a sort of comparative politics approach, detailing the different destinies of Turkic groups in Anatolia, the Caucasus and Central Asia who all left the same Turkic homeland of what's now Western Mongolia and continue to speak closely related languages. The two main changes Findley believes Turkic groups underwent (at around the same time) were conversion to Islam and modernity (a sort of complex integration into the modern industrialized world economy and also a grappling with new mass politics enabled through the technology). It's a fruitful approach and has a lot of interesting things to say about Islam and modernity, as well as state formation. Interestingly enough one of the main texts the work engages with is the spectacular Baburnameh, partly because it shows state formation in action in Babur's early forays in Ferghana and India. Two inconceivably massive dislocations in Turkish history were the giant changes in language found in Turkey (where the language was in the space of less than half a century denuded of Arabic and Persian loan-words and changed to the extent that Ataturk's speeches are no longer comprehensible) and Central Asia (where Soviet initiatives contributed to the diminishment of the classical languages of Persian and Chagatai Turkish common in music, etc. in favour of upgrading Turkic dialects to full languages) and detribalization (which partly as a result of the Mongol invasions and the black death, meant all the old kinship links and tribal structure fell away, a giant change in the political culture of these people). Findley's theory that Turkic groups as traditionally constituted (large and mobile groups of nomads with compound bows) could only form states parasitically (i.e. by exacting tribute from sedentary/urban populations and using it to achieve a group cohesion) is interesting and makes a lot of sense when the period after Timur is reached and gunpowder becomes wide-spread in usage; now nomads are at a firm disadvantage against sedentary populations with access to this technology and state formation has to involve a switch to a sedentary lifestyle, internal taxation, etc. (something the Ottomans and the Mughals did, anticipated by the Seljuks, 400 years earlier)

Review # 2 was written on 2014-12-06 00:00:00 Lavalle Williams Jr This book by Carter Vaughn Findley of Ohio State University (whose Wikipedia page is in Turkish), traces the movement of the Turkic and Turkish peoples through history from the earliest records of steppe nomads on the margins of ancient empires (the Scythians for the Romans, the Xiongnu for the Chinese) to the contemporary Turkish republic which inhabits Anatolia and Thrace, and Turkic post-Soviet central Asia and Xinjiang. He sees all of these folk as a loose cultural and linguistic unit, but with the important caveat that it is impossible to fix this to any one particular “ethnic” group, certainly at least in terms of genetics. The appealing metaphor he uses at the beginning is that of a caravan rolling gradually across Asia from Mongolia to Istanbul, picking up and dropping people and baggage as it goes, so that by the time it reaches its destination it is both the same vehicle that started out and yet a different phenomenon altogether. The other metaphor that threads its way through the book is that of the weaving of a Turkish carpet, so that all the shifting developments that have occurred in the Turkic/Turkish space – most significantly the conversion to Islam, and the encounter with modernity (whether in its European or Soviet forms) which characterized the 19th and 20th century Turkish/Turkic experience – are seen as strands woven into the fabric of its history by those who have created them. One dynamic that stands out is the author’s contention that historically it has been possible, even (in conditions of diffuse power) inevitable for states to be formed on the steppes, but that they have not been able to last unless they took over an Empire (the Mongols became the Yuan Dynasty, the Ottoman conquest of Byzantium) and then became sedentary themselves; otherwise the centrifugal forces were bound to overwhelm the centripetal ones. Another is the change that came with gunpowder and industry: now the steppes themselves can be pinned down by the great empires. There is plenty of dense academic analysis here, but it is Findley’s propensity for weaving metaphor in and out of the text that lifts the book into a higher class, where the provision of detailed information merges with the sympathetic human search for meaning in history and the quest to create a liberating space where once nomadic peoples can live in an age where there are no more open spaces to roam.