Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (68 page)

They also produced their own everyday clothes, jewelry, tools, wagons, housing, horse gear, and weapons and were skilled metalsmiths. The problem here is the mistaken equation of a mode of production (e.g., agriculture, metalsmithing, commerce, or nomadic herding) with a state, that is, the equation of the primary means of subsistence of one group of people in a society with the nation or state as a whole. According to this approach, state formation would actually be impossible anywhere, including societies where many people are agriculturalists, because the rulers must of necessity spend all of their time ruling, not farming, and those who produce weapons, for example, must not spend their valuable time doing something they are not specialized in either. The mistake, in short, is that states based in the Central Eurasian steppe zone must have consisted only of “pure” nomads and were thus “simple.” If that were true, the theory would be correct, because no known actual mode of production is sufficient to produce everything needed by a fully functioning society. But it is not true.
All nomadic pastoralist-dominated states that we know anything about, from the Scythians to the Junghars, were complex.
The text of Herodotus alone, which discusses in some detail the different kinds of Scythians who lived in Scythia, is sufficient to demonstrate the impossibility of the “non-autarkic” or “needy nomad” theory and its more pernicious offshoots. The Scythians practiced not only very many different modes of production but the very same modes the peripheral peoples practiced, because the states of both regions regularly expanded by force into each other’s territories and peoples who practiced agriculture and herding were found in both kinds of state.

Central Eurasian states also were multiethnic, and it is perhaps their multiethnic, multicultural nature that has caused much of the trouble, because it is so different from the ideal modern nation-state dominated by one ethnolinguistic group, which has developed out of the relatively compact (not empire-sized) premodern, typically multiethnic European state.
¹²
With the imposition of this state type throughout Central Eurasia by the peripheral powers, Central Eurasia has been changed beyond all recognition compared to its status throughout premodern history. But projecting modern situations and ideas into the past is hardly the way for historians to proceed.

Central Eurasians, including pastoral nomads, did desire exotic, luxurious products from neighboring countries, but there is no evidence that their desires for exotic luxuries were any different from those of the peripheral peoples,
¹³
except perhaps that the Central Eurasians were willing and eager to trade their own surplus goods, or goods they had obtained in trade elsewhere, in order to obtain what they wanted, even in time of war.
¹⁴

The medieval Arab geographers took great interest in the products produced, bought, and sold in the places they describe. The lists of trade goods of the great Central Asian emporiums include all kinds of raw materials as well as processed and manufactured goods produced locally or imported from near and far. All of the lists include much that was produced by the steppe peoples. For example, a description of the goods exported from Central Asia in the tenth century includes:

Barthold notes, “The greatest advantage from the trade with the nomads was derived by the Khorezmians, whose prosperity, according to Istakhrī, was founded exclusively on their trade relations with the Turks.”
¹⁸
The remarkable extent to which the trade goods in the above list were related to the steppe peoples (the Turks of the account) is a direct reflection of the fact that Central Eurasian peoples—who in theory lived in three different ecological-cultural zones and practiced three distinct modes of life—not only traded with each other but were tightly interconnected in
a single economy.
The traditional Silk Road conception notes only the international component that reached the peripheral states and assumes that—there being nothing of worth in Central Eurasia except poor nomads and a few “oasis” cities—the valuable goods that appeared at one or the other extreme of the Silk Road must have passed through by long-distance caravan, as if in a pipeline.
¹⁹
Even those who have a much more balanced view of Central Eurasia see it as essentially a trade route or collection of routes. For example, Christian defines “the Silk Roads as the long- and middle-distance land routes by which goods, ideas, and people were exchanged between major regions of Afro-Eurasia,” and despite some qualification continues to refer to the “Silk Roads” as “a system of exchanges,” noting, “The plural form is important because the Silk Roads consisted of a constantly shifting network of pathways for many different types of exchange.”
²⁰
This characterization, while perhaps an improvement over many previous ones, is still in need of emendation. The Silk Road was
not
a network of trade routes, or even a system of cultural exchange. It was the entire local political-economic-cultural system of Central Eurasia, in which commerce, whether internal or external, was very highly valued and energetically pursued—in that sense, the “Silk Road” and “Central Eurasia” are essentially two terms for the same thing. In its more restricted economic sense, the Silk Road was the Central Eurasian economy.

Chinese, Greek, and Arabic historical sources agree that the steppe peoples were above all interested in trade. The careful manner in which Central Eurasians generally undertook their conquests is revealing. They attempted to avoid conflict and tried to get cities to submit peacefully. Only when they resisted, or rebelled, was retribution necessary according to the code of the time, a code known from ancient Europe as well,
²¹
but even in such cases Central Eurasians normally did not kill everyone: they spared merchants, artisans, and any other especially productive men, and enslaved the women and children. This reveals very clearly that the sources were right in at least this respect: the Central Eurasians’ conquests were designed to acquire trade routes or trading cities. But the reason for the acquisition was to secure occupied territory that could be taxed in order to pay for the rulers’ sociopolitical infrastructure. If all this sounds exactly like what sedentary peripheral states were doing, that is because it was indeed the same thing.
²²

The old predatory, parasitic nomad model continues to be supported by some scholars, the most widely quoted being Barfield, who claims, for example,

The stereotype-filled view in this sample is based on distortion of the most tendentious of the Chinese sources. It does not take into account the biases and internal contradictions of those sources, or the problem that this view is explicitly contradicted by other, more reliable accounts in the very same sources. It has been well criticized by specialists in Central Eurasian history.
²⁴

But, one might protest, if the nomads were not really powerful aggressive
barbarians,
and if they only really wanted to trade with the peace-loving “sedentary” peoples, why were the latter forced to build walls and other fortifications to defend themselves against the Central Eurasians?

It is true that many frontier walls were built by peripheral area states in Antiquity. In China during the Warring States period, the different polities of the time, most but not all of which were “Chinese,” built a good number of such walls. They were primarily designed to hold territory conquered from neighboring states and to prevent loss of population to them (more or less exactly like the Modern-period Berlin Wall). The consolidation and extension of the northern walls into one Great Wall, the accomplishment of the First Emperor of the Ch’in Dynasty, not surprisingly had the same purpose: it was intended to hold the vast territory conquered from the Hsiung-nu
²⁵
and to prevent the loss of Chinese population to them. The frequent “raids” of the Hsiung-nu into Chinese territory after Emperor Wu’s “abandonment” of the peace treaty should hardly be surprising: the emperor’s unilateral breaking of the treaty was a declaration of war against the Hsiung-nu.
²⁶
The raids were thus not random acts by violently inclined Hsiung-nu but desperate military actions against the war declared on them by a much stronger, violently inclined expansionistic people, the Chinese.

Psarras
²⁷
notes that breaches of the treaties occurred on both sides, typically for internal political reasons. However, it is not possible to be certain about this on the Hsiung-nu side because we have no Hsiung-nu sources and must attempt to read between the lines and reinterpret the Chinese sources. As noted elsewhere, when the Chinese sources are extensive enough, they virtually always suffice to inform us that the Hsiung-nu actions were defensive or in reaction to an aggressive political move by China.
²⁸

Certainly the Hsiung-nu, like other Central Eurasians who formed great states (and also like the Chinese and other peripheral peoples who formed them), were aggressive toward their neighbors during their state-formation phase, and one should expect the aggression to include attacks on the peripheral states. Nevertheless, later cases that are historically much better known, such as that of the Junghars, make it manifestly clear that the steppe zone peoples fought almost exclusively among themselves, and mostly went out of their way to avoid conflict with the dangerous peripheral states.
²⁹
The Junghars seem never to have invaded Chinese territory, though the reverse is certainly true. Amid all the self-righteous proclamations of indignation and anger by the Manchu-Chinese, and accusations of all kinds of crimes supposedly committed by the Junghars, as well as by selected Tibetans and Uighurs,
³⁰
one fact stands out: at no time during the Manchu-Chinese Dynasty did any Junghar army invade China, nor did any Tibetan army, nor any East Turkistani army. The only offense these peoples committed against the Manchu-Chinese was their steadfast insistence on not “submitting” and on remaining the independent rulers of their own Central Eurasian lands. Nevertheless, the Manchu-Chinese continue to be portrayed as righteous, enlightened, civilized people who were the innocent victims of Central Eurasian
barbarians.

In the West, it seems evident that the Huns’ invasion of the Eastern Roman Empire was ultimately the result of the Goths’ empire-forming wars. The Goths apparently attacked the Huns but were defeated. The Huns chased those Goths who did not surrender to them into the Roman Empire, where they came into conflict with the Romans, who wanted to keep the Goths to use as mercenaries. The Romans’ own historians tell us how the Romans mistreated the Goths and, subsequently, the Huns, and brought reprisals by the victims against the Romans.

It is often argued that Central Eurasians’ attacks against peripheral peoples were motivated by poverty and greed.
³¹
Yet Psarras
³²
remarks that Barfield, “despite his contention that the
heqin
³³
was invented by the Xiongnu as a means of blackmailing the Han, nonetheless demonstrates that the actual costs to the Han were low compared to the maintenance of border guards, for instance. This being the case, one cannot but wonder why Barfield would imagine the Xiongnu engaging in ‘blackmail’ for so little return.” The same is true of the laughably petty amounts of tribute the Huns forced the Romans to pay them: they were symbolic, not substantial, and were in general fully justified. If the Central Eurasians had been desperately poor and needed money, food, and so forth, they would have asked for it.