Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs & Steel, attempts to answer the question “Why did Europeans colonize the rest of the world instead of some other group of people?”

His answer — that Europe benefited from a disproportionate number of domesticable plants and animals, that the close living conditions between the people and their livestock created — and developed resistances to — a wide variety of contagious diseases, and the fragmentary nature of European politics engendered centuries of warfare which produced extraordinarily effective weapons, tactics, and leadership is a pretty good answer as to why Europeans dominated Africa, the Americas, and Australia. But it has always bothered me that his theory just didn’t make sense with regard to Asia and India.

I believe very strongly that the proper lens through which we need to view current events is the ideas presented in Samuel Huntington’s book Clash of Civilizations. Huntington theorizes that modern political and economic forces are shaped by ancient historical cultural groupings. Long repressed by European colonialism, the results of two World Wars, and the Cold War, in the 21st century they are re-emerging and re-asserting their place at the center of world affairs. Those civilizations are usually identifiable by a language grouping, or a religious grouping, and usually have a clear geographic center surrounded by a more nebulous frontier. Huntington identifies the Russian Orthodox, Chinese Confucian, Arab Islamic, European Christian, North American Constitutional, and Indian Hindi civilizations as paramount. He sees Africa as having been irrevocably scrambled by colonialism and the influx of Islamic and Christian theology. He sees South America as being ripe with potential to coalesce into a cohesive culture but that culture is still embryonic. And he views some nations as caught in-between larger cultures, like Japan, Mexico, Australia, and Indochina.

Diamond’s theories about European success don’t address the reasons Europeans dominated India or China, or why they failed to defeat Arabic Islam.

Jack Weatherford’s book Genghis Kahn and the Making of the Modern World provides a lot of material needed to fill that gap. The book is based on modern scholarship regarding a work called the Secret History. This is a document created contemporaneously with the birth of the Mongol empire in the 13th century and thought to be a myth or lost until portions of the text were recovered in the 20th century, based on versions translated into Chinese from earlier versions written in in Mongolian and preserved by the Chinese for centuries. Weatherford’s book is an accessible synopsis of the Secret History, plus accounts from historical Persian sources also dating from the same timeframe that expand the narrative beyond the internal politics of the Mongols.

While it is common to think of Europe and Asia as two separate continents that is really a socioeconomic construct rather than a geophysical one. Instead we should think of the area as one supercontinent, with three parts, plus India.

And it is India that causes the division of Eurasia into three parts. When the Indian subcontinent drifted into Asia tens of millions of years ago, the collision raised the Himalaya mountains, and behind them, to the north, created a multi-tiered landscape of deserts and dry grasslands called “steppe”.

The result of that impact was the creation of territory which effectively divided the cultures of the western third of Eurasia from the cultures in the eastern third. The middle third was very difficult to cross — to the point of near impossibility without any support infrastructure. The mountains between India and the eastern third of Asia limited contact between the Chinese and the Hindi Civilizations as well.

Contrary to Diamond’s basic premise, the eastern third of Eurasia had essentially the same benefits as the western third. It had extensive agriculture, large populations, and continuos warfare. So why didn’t the east Eurasians dominate like the western Eurasians did?

Think of the steppes as both a barrier, and a pump. They are a barrier that limits contact between the west and the east almost to zero. But they are not empty. Nomadic tribes live in the steppe. Long after the east and west had become agricultural societies the people of the steppe retained their older hunter/gatherer lifestyles.

Agriculture permits human populations to massively expand. But it is a less healthy lifestyle for individual humans in that population. Hunter/gatherers have better diets and get more exercise. They suffer much less from disease. And their sense of place is vast, whereas farming peoples tend to become narrowly rooted in a limited territory bounded by who owns what land.

They are, in other words, much better warriors than the farmers.

The people of the steppe are usually too few and too disorganized to have much impact on the agricultural populations on either side of them. But occasionally the climate is exceptional and the amount of game available to the steppe nomads expands — and so does their population. During those times they may find leadership able to marshal their increased numbers and become a threat to the settled lands to east and west. Successively over thousands of years this “pump” action has injected nomadic steppe invaders into the settled farmlands. Waves of invaders who are stronger, more mobile, and who fight in unconventional ways have conquered the lands of the farmers.

This displacement had a domino effect. People fleeing the steppe nomads would rush further west or east, displacing in turn the people they encountered. It was a cascade of people on the move, pushing older inhabitants off their land and setting up new mixtures of cultures.

In the west, our histories capture these waves in names that we still remember today. Atila the Hun — the “Scourge of God”. The Goths. The Vandals.

In the east the same pattern was repeated. The steppe nomads did not often descend into India but they successively attacked and mingled with the Chinese. Every few centuries a new wave would rise in the steppes and the dynasties of China would be displaced. The result was fragmentation, with China always striving for, but not managing to become unified.

For thousands and thousands of years both the west and the east experienced civilizations which rose and became vast (the Alexandrian and Roman Empires, for example) but which crumbled and fell back into a Dark Age under pressure from the steppe nomads and the populations they displaced. Neither west nor east seemed able to sustain their civilization long enough to hit the inflection point we call “the scientific revolution”.

In the 13th century, this cycle repeated itself. But in that time, the leader that arose to unite the steppe tribes was truly a figure out of legend.

His name was Temujin. He is known to history as Genghis Khan. Abandoned by the tribe of his father and beginning from absolute destitution, Temujin forged an empire from the steppe tribes that stretched from modern day Poland to Egypt to Indonesia to Siberia. It was the largest land empire in the history of the world, and has never been surpassed.

Genghis Khan was a military leader. He coveted the wealth of the societies surrounding the steppes and he was able to motivate hundreds of thousands to follow his banner because he was generous with the spoils of war. But he was also a sophisticated politician who created a world order capable of ruling an incredibly diverse multitude of subjects. After his death his children and grandchildren would not keep his empire unified and instead split it into four autonomous regions while retaining its inherently Mongol character.

Those four regions remained interconnected in surprisingly modern ways. The family ties between Temujin’s descendants gave them all claims on parts of each other’s territories. Rather than resist those claims, the family created a surprisingly effective system of trading to keep the family’s accounts balanced. Resources, treasure, specialists, and cultural artifacts were transported thousands of miles using an ingenious system of economics and logistics.

Genghis Khan was never meaningfully defeated in battle. His forces crushed the knights of Germany, the cavalry of the Caliph, and the massed infantry of the Chinese. His children did not fare as well. One launched a seaborne invasion of Japan and actually landed a large military force on the islands, meeting and defeating a samurai army before retreating and being lost at sea in a ferocious storm — known thereafter to the Japanese as kamikaze “the divine wind”. Another spent a generation slowly grinding down the strongest and last remaining military force in China, exhausting the Mongol horde but claiming the mantle of Heaven and achieving the Chinese dream of national unification. A third fought into the European heartland, coming to the gates of Vienna before deciding that the treasure to be gained by sacking the Europeans wasn’t worth the hassle.

After the end of their age of conquest, Genghis Khan’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren instead focused on making their Empire ever grander. They promoted religious tolerance. They built an economy using fiat currency. They encouraged literacy and the widespread exchange of ideas. They connected the far east with the far west via the Silk Road and trade exploded — trade that they were happy to control and extract enormous profits therefrom. It seemed as if the Mongols had created a virtuous feedback loop and that their Empire would become ever grander, ever more advanced. Had events not been interrupted it is likely that the Mongols and not the Europeans or the Chinese would have become a global superpower. It seems inevitable that the progress in the arts and the practical sciences the Mongols promoted throughout their lands would have made them ever stronger and even more unstoppable. The ability to reach out and simply take the whole of Eurasia from ocean to ocean lay within their grasp.

Sometime in the early part of the 14th century, the Mongol dynasty controlling east Asia fell into turmoil. A terrible disease had arisen that spared neither peasant or khan. The Mongols were faced with a foe their horsemen and bows could not defeat.