Post-Nomadic Empires

Abstract This article is about nomadic conquerors of settled societies and the “post-nomadic empires” they brought into being throughout history. The historical understanding has generally been that the military qualities of nomads made their conquests of settled societies a regular and likely occurrence but that the latter had no lasting impact and were usually followed by the assimilation of the nomads, concomitant with the rapid decline of their empires. By contrast, it is here argued that such an environmentally deterministic understanding reflects ancient and medieval conditions but cannot explain the development of a different type of post-nomadic empire in early modern times. The early modern Ottoman, Mughal, and Ching empires provide evidence of a new capacity for imperial consolidation and a new commitment to dynastic continuity as well as the creation of more effective and durable means of resource mobilization that constitute a departure from the earlier pattern.