Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (ISBN 0-609-80964-4) is a 2004 New York Times Best Seller book by Jack Weatherford, Dewitt Wallace Professor of Anthropology at Macalester College. It is a narrative of the rise and impact of Genghis Khan, and of his successors. In addition to various accounts in English, it refers to three major non-Western sources: The Secret History of the Mongols, the Ta' rīkh-i jahān-gushā of Juvayni and the Jami al-Tawarikh of Rashid-al-Din Hamadani. Weatherford has the ambition to present Genghis Khan in a far more positive light than traditional Western historiography. The last section of the book deals with historiography of Genghis Khan in the West and argues that his earlier image as an "excellent, noble king" was converted into that of a bloodthirsty pagan during the Age of Enlightenment.
The book is a revisionist work more sympathetic to the Mongols. It has also been seen as a part of a number of other re-estimations of Genghis Khan, as in the work of Ratchnevsky, who focuses on his knack for forging alliances, his fairness in dividing the spoils, and his patronage of the sciences. Similarly, Saunders and H.H.Howorth have argued that the Mongol empire contributed to opening up intellectual interactions between China, the Middle East, and Europe.
Read more about Genghis Khan And The Making Of The Modern World: Mongol Image, Legacy, Reception, Historiography, Misrepresentations
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“Genghis Khan, in his usual jodhpurs accessorized with whip, straddled a canvas chair and gloated upon the fairyland he had built. Journalists, photographers, secretaries, sycophants, script girls, and set dressers milled and stirred around him, activity ... irresistibly reminiscent of the movement of maggots upon rotting meat.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“My idea is that the world outside—the so-called modern world—can only pervert and degrade the conceptions of the primitive instinct of art and feeling, and that our only chance is to accept the limited number of survivors—the one- in-a-thousand of born artists and poets—and to intensify the energy of feeling within that radiant centre.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“The things a man has to have are hope and confidence in himself against odds, and sometimes he needs somebody, his pal or his mother or his wife or God, to give him that confidence. He’s got to have some inner standards worth fighting for or there won’t be any way to bring him into conflict. And he must be ready to choose death before dishonor without making too much song and dance about it. That’s all there is to it.”
—Clark Gable (1901–1960)
“There is something ridiculous and even quite indecent in an individual claiming to be happy. Still more a people or a nation making such a claim. The pursuit of happiness ... is without any question the most fatuous which could possibly be undertaken. This lamentable phrase “the pursuit of happiness” is responsible for a good part of the ills and miseries of the modern world.”
—Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–1990)
“Learn of the green world what can be thy place
In scaled invention or true artistry,”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)