March 7, 2025
10:00 am
-
11:00 am
via Zoom
This WIP will explore a case study from the steppe zone of Inner and Central Asia in the ninth and tenth centuries. By combining evidence from textual and paleoclimate archives, this case study investigates the relations between drought and a fragmented political system consisting of eight different confederations and polities, including the Oghuz (later the Turkmen of Turkmenistan), the Qirghiz (eventually the Kyrgyz of Kyrgyzstan, now the Kyrgyz Republic), the Pechenegs, the Kimak confederation, and others.
It argues that historical changes in the physical environment driven by the solar-volcanic forcing regimes of the Dark Ages Cold Period and the Medieval Climate Anomaly played a role in inter-confederation wars, socio-religious debates over rain magic and conversion, and an interregional slave trading network. The case develops previous historiography concerning the economic history of hybrid and pastoralist-commercial societies by adding a new environmental factor to the analysis. At the same time, it develops an environmental history literature dating back to the 1960s and 1970s concerning the connections between nomads and climate. This case study will be of particular interest to environmental historians because it blends culturalist and materialist approaches.
