Chinggis Khan in Eurasian Intellectual History, 1650–1850

The rise and conquests of the Mongol empire, and of Chinggis Khan (1162?–1127) in particular, were of common concern for historians across early modern (1650–1850) Eurasia.  Before 1650, almost every historical tradition on the continent gave some account of these events, but these sources, albeit sometimes emerging from a common ancestor, were stamped markedly by the cultural, religious, and linguistic peculiarities of the areas in which they circulated.  Against a background of expanding empires and missionary projects, however, the boundaries between these distinct historiographical traditions began to dissolve.  Within Qing China, there was an increasing exchange of information between Chinese scholars and the historical chronicles circulating on the Mongolian steppe.  European and Russian scholars increasingly balanced sources from Chinese and Manchu against those from the Islamic world in efforts to construct a fuller account of Chinggis’s activities.  In the first half of the nineteenth century, this integration intensified.  Academic Orientalism in Europe tried more forcefully to fuse Qing and Islamic sources, and scholarship in Russia forced them to consider Mongolian-language historical chronicles for the first time.  In China, newly-translated European data on Central Eurasia and its history played an increasingly large role after 1840.  Under these conditions, this paper will use trans-continental historiography on Chinggis’s campaigns to ask whether this precociously interactive intellectual world permits us to speak of a “Eurasian intellectual history” before the modern period.  If historiographical problems, sources, and methodologies were sufficiently interpenetrated that the vantage of a single region or empire does not permit us to capture the emerging dynamic, how can a continent-wide field of intellectual activity best be captured?