Xiongnu

ebook The World's First Nomadic Empire · Oxford Studies in Early Empires

By Bryan K. Miller

cover image of Xiongnu

Sign up to save your library

With an OverDrive account, you can save your favorite libraries for at-a-glance information about availability. Find out more about OverDrive accounts.

   Not today

Find this title in Libby, the library reading app by OverDrive.

Download Libby on the App Store Download Libby on Google Play

Search for a digital library with this title

Title found at these libraries:

Library Name Distance
Loading...
This book raises the case of the world's first nomadic empire, the Xiongnu, as a prime example of the sophisticated developments and powerful influence of nomadic regimes. Launching from a reconceptualization of the social and economic institutions of mobile pastoralists, the collective chapters trace the course of the Xiongnu Empire from before its initial rise, traversing the wars that challenged it and the reformations that made it stronger, to the legacy left after its eventual fall. Xiongnu expounds the economic practices and social conventions of steppe herders as fertile foundations for institutions and infrastructure of empire, and renders a model of "empires of mobilities," which engaged the control less of towns and territories and more of the movements of communities and capital to fuel their regimes. By weaving together archaeological examinations with historical investigations, Bryan K. Miller presents a more complex and nuanced narrative of how an empire based firmly in the steppe over two thousand years ago managed to formulate a robust political economy and a complex political matrix that capitalized on mobilities and alternative forms of political participation, and allowed the Xiongnu to dominate vast realms of central Eurasia and leave lasting geopolitical effects on the many worlds around them.
Xiongnu