Opening Remarks by Sebouh Aslanian, Assistant Professor & Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History. Presented at the one-day conference "The Mongols from the Margins: New Perspectives on Central Asians in World History."
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Duration: 12:42
Aslanian-1a-rgr.mp3
Stretching from the plains of Eastern Europe to the warm waters of the Pacific, the Pax Mongolica created Eurasia-wide networks of exchange and circulation through which not only military personnel, pathogens, and commodities circulated from China to the Eastern Mediterranean, but also ideas, customs, and social practices. How did the tenticular expansion of Mongol networks transform the cultural, social, and even imaginary realms of societies situated on the peripheries of Mongol rule? How did the societies on the margins in turn project their own representations of Mongol rule and its transformative role in the history of the region? This conference seeks to explore these two different yet related questions from the perspective of peoples on the distant margins of the Pax Mongolica who usually do not occupy a central position in the conventional historiography of Mongol Eurasia. Placing a Central Asian empire and its Eurasian outliers into the framework of a global medieval history, The Mongols from the Margins brings together international specialists on Cilician Armenia, the Caucasus, Japan, Europe, Egypt, and Byzantium to re-examine Mongol history from its multifarious peripheries.
Organized by Nile Green, Director of the Program on Central Asia and Professor of History, and Sebouh Aslanian, Assistant Professor & Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History.
For more information and media from the "The Mongols from the Margins: New Perspectives on Central Asians in World History," please visit the conference page.