Question: Fifteen years ago the study of Mongol history was mainly the concern of specialists. What has changed ?

As Peter Jackson shows in his article (Journal of Medieval History, 2000), the period since 1986 has been extraordinarily productive - probably more so than any earlier comparable period. Sources have been edited, re-edited and translated, and many books and articles of major significance have been published. Some notable examples are the English translation of by far the best biography of Genghis Khan, by Paul Ratchnevsky, and the first serious biography in English of Qubilai, by Morris Rossabi. That book is a symptom of a notable trend, a much greater interest, among historians of China, in the period of Mongol rule there, as well as earlier periods of rule by peoples of the steppelands to the north (for example, vol. 6 of the Cambridge History of China).

The accounts of travellers in the Mongol Empire have been even more intensively studied: there have for example been several interesting new books, both controversial and non-controversial, on Marco Polo, the most famous of them all. There has been a shift away from concentration on the Mongols' military campaigns, and the massacre and destruction which they brought with them. Scholars are now much more inclined to look deeper beneath the surface of events, to try and see what else was going on: what kind of an empire was this? - how was it run? - what part in administration, as well as in cultural affairs, was played by the Mongols themselves, and what part by their conquered subjects, initially the Uighurs and the Khitans, then especially the Chinese and the Persians? When we have dealt with the massacre and destruction - the appalling character of which should not be underestimated - was there a positive side to Mongol rule? Was their empire more than an ephemeral military construct? Evidence which is now coming to light suggests, very strongly, that it was.

The work, above all, of Thomas Allsen requires us to think again about many of our previous assumptions. In Mongol Imperialism he examined the administrative framework, and the reforms to which it was subjected, which underlay the new wave of conquest during the reign of Mongke; and in Commodity and Exchange in the Mongol Empire he studied the fortunes of Muslim textile workers who were transferred east by their Mongol conquerors, to contribute especially to the Mongol obsession with gold brocade. This contribution to the understanding of cultural transfer and exchange inside the vast Mongol realm with be followed soon by an even more important book on similar lines. Essentially, I would say that the study of the history of the Mongol Empire is at last coming of age: we are getting beyond the phase of little more than "Khans and battles".