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Warfare in Inner Asian History (500-1800). Edited by NICOLA DI COSMO. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2002. Handbook of Oriental Studies. Part 8 of Uralic and Central Asian Studies, vol. 6. viii, 456 pp. $112.00.
Warfare in Inner Asian History (500-1800) is a welcome addition to the growing field of Asian military history. Its purpose, in which it succeeds admirably, is to problematize the idea of the invincible steppe warrior and to examine directly the military process by which steppe peoples interacted with each other and the sedentary states and empires surrounding them. It differs from previous studies both in the diversity of the contributing scholars and in not assuming that steppe armies were always, or even necessarily, stronger than their settled counterparts. After an introduction by the editor, Nicola Di Cosmo, the text is divided into three parts: the medieval period (500-1200), the Mongol age (1200-1400), and the early modern period (1400-1800).
In the first article on the medieval period, David Graff demonstrates that Tang Taizong's (r. 626-49) defeat of the Eastern Turks was neither inevitable nor an example of what the Chinese empire could do under strong leadership but, rather, contingent upon canny exploitation of political weakness among the Turks. Michael...