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

作者 Author:
Jonathan Karam Skaff

出版社 Publisher:
Oxford

出版年 Publication Year:
2012

內容簡介 Abstract:

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.                   


目錄 Table of Contents:

Acknowledgments
Conventions of Transliteration
Introduction: The China-Inner Asia Frontier as World History

Part I: Historical and Geographical Background
1. Eastern Eurasian Geography, History and Warfare
2. China-Inner Asian Borderlands: Discourse and Reality

Part II: Eastern Eurasian Society and Culture
3. Power through Patronage: Patrimonial Political Networking
4. Ideology and Interstate Competition
5. Diplomacy as Eurasian Ritual

Part III: Negotiating Diplomatic Relationships
6. Negotiating Investiture
7. Negotiating Kinship
8. Horse Trading and other Material Bargains
9. Breaking Bonds

Conclusion: Beyond the Silk Roads
Appendices
Bibliography