The Modern History of Mongolia

First published in 2004. The Mongols are one of the great peoples in the history of High Asia. Their name has been familiar over the whole of the old world for close on eight hundred years. Yet at the most generous estimate it would be anachronistic to speak of a Mongol state, in the modern sense of the word, as existing before the end of 1911. The imperial adventure under Genghis Khan and his successors left the Mongols exhausted and disunited politically, and in the seventeenth century they fell, piecemeal, under Manchu domination which continued for over two hundred years. This study looks at the Mongol society as it was during the comparatively static two centuries between the final submission to the Manchus in 1691 and the national revolution of 1911. The second part of the book describes the dynamic course of events since that revolution and more especially since the second, Soviet-inspired, revolution which began in 1921.