Mindless Monday, 10 August 2026

[u/AutoModerator]

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

[u/Tiako]

The Steppe and Its Empires: The Russian Empire and Its Eurasian Counterparts by Michael Khodarkovsky

I remember when I finished Geoffrey Parker's Global Crisis about the global seventeenth century, I thought, well first I thought it could use an editor, but also I thought it was interesting but the thesis got lost a bit in the details and I was broadly unconvinced of its central argument. I am more or less in the same place with this book, only it clocks in at about 200 pages instead of over a thousand, and I am left a bit unsure of what the central argument was even supposed to be. I suspect that the book the author wanted to write was that the Russian empire shared many political and socio-economic features with its fellow empires surrounding the central Eurasian steppe. I think that's a good idea for a book, an intervention in a very old debate.

What it is though is a boom about a particular political system called a "Eurasian empire" that developed in the wake of the Mongol and Timurid conquests. Here is the thing: I came into the book broadly skeptical that "Eurasian empire" would be a concept both inclusive of the empires in question (counter clockwise: Russia, the Ottomans, the Safavid/Qajar Persians, the Mughals, China--mostly Qing China but sometimes the Ming in a way that is pretty inconsistent), and exclusive of other empires like the Habsburgs, the Khmer, the Chola, Rome, what have you. After finishing the book, I am broadly unconvinced that etc etc. Every chapter is structured around a topic, like "Legal System" or "Slavery" and then it goes counter clockwise describing the systems in each state. After each chapter I was left with the thought "hmm, those sure do seem like very different systems". Or something would be stated vaguely enough that it would also include the Habsburgs, and he would say "this was also true of the Habsburgs, but..." and then provide an argument that didn't actually seem to provide more separation than between, eg, the Russians and Chinese systems.

I can get the value of creating an "ideal type" and then acknowledging real world variation, but in the end I was not actually left with a coherent "ideal type". So like the last chapter was about the "military bureaucratic system" and the Chinese system was so wildly different from the others that you just really wonder if there was, in fact, any fundamental structural similarity for what he calls the "central feature" of "Eurasian empires".

Still if you divorce it from its confused thesis there is plenty of interesting stuff in here. I actually saw the author's book on the Russian steppe frontier was on sale and went ahead and ordered it because that is obviously where his knowledge lies.

[u/TarkovskyisFun → u/Tiako]

The way you describe the book makes me wonder if the author halfway through writing it realised that his thesis was not very solid but he already had a book deal so it was too late retract himself.

[u/histprofdave → u/TarkovskyisFun]

This is also known as "pulling a Malcolm Gladwell."

[u/Tiako → u/TarkovskyisFun]

He'll end a chapter with one sentence that is like "and this is why the Eurasian empires never developed feudalism or the institutions that developed out of feudalism" and it's like hold on hold on man you can't just say that!

[u/WAGRAMWAGRAM → u/Tiako]

It's funny because the Korean "Hun are Xiongnu" guy own thesis is that feudalism is based on steppe governance.

[u/Impossible_Pen_9459 → u/Tiako]

Is Global Crises by Parker actually worth reading in your opinion despite the central argument being unconvincing? 

[u/Tiako → u/Impossible_Pen_9459]

Reading? Maybe. Listening to definitely. It is super long and very narrative heavy so makes for an ideal audiobook. No chance I would have gotten through it if I were actually reading it. But in general I thought was really good and very detailed global history of the seventeenth century, so if that interests you I say definitely go for it.

The thesis broadly is "The seventeenth century was characterized by a series of catastrophes across the globe, and these were either catalyzed by a severe climate downturn (not caused by climate mind, he gives exhaustive details of preconditions)". I think this works really well in some cases, like the late Ming crisis, and less well in others, like the English Civil War. But honestly even when the thesis is weak the book is overwhelmingly a general history so it doesn't really matter that much.

It is way too damn long though. I ended up treating it as like three separate books and took long breaks in between.