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)
“A man was to live in that egg-shell day and night, a mile from the shore.... Think of making your bed thus in the crest of a breaker! To have the waves, like a pack of hungry wolves, eying you always, night and day, and from time to time making a spring at you, almost sure to have you at last.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“Thus were we weaned to knowledge of the Will
That wills the natural world but wills us dead.”
—Louis MacNeice (1907–1963)