EBOOK Sui-Tang China and Its Turko-Mongol Neighbors:Culture, Power, and Connections, 580-800

Sui-Tang China and Its Turko-Mongol Neighbors challenges readers to reconsider        China's relations with the rest of Eurasia. Investigating interstate competition and        cooperation between the successive Sui and Tang dynasties and Turkic states of        Mongolia from 580 to 800, Jonathan Skaff upends the notion that inhabitants of China        and Mongolia were irreconcilably different and hostile to each other. Rulers on both        sides deployed strikingly similar diplomacy, warfare, ideologies of rulership, and        patrimonial political networking to seek hegemony over each other and the peoples        living in the pastoral borderlands between them. The book particularly disputes the        supposed uniqueness of imperial China's tributary diplomacy by demonstrating that        similar customary norms of interstate relations existed in a wide sphere in Eurasia        as far west as Byzantium, India, and Iran. These previously unrecognized cultural        connections, therefore, were arguably as much the work of Turko-Mongol pastoral        nomads traversing the Eurasian steppe as the more commonly recognized Silk Road        monks and merchants. This interdisciplinary and multi-perspective study will appeal        to readers of comparative and world history, especially those interested in medieval        warfare, diplomacy, and cultural studies.