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Post-Mongol States and Early Modern Chronology in Iran and China

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 May 2016

PAMELA KYLE CROSSLEY  and
GENE R. GARTHWAITE
PAMELA KYLE CROSSLEY
Affiliation:
Dartmouth college, Hanover, New Hampshirecrossley@dartmouth.edu
GENE R. GARTHWAITE
Affiliation:
Dartmouth College, Hanover, New HampshireGene.R.Garthwaite@Dartmouth.edu
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Abstract

In the aftermath of the Mongol occupations of the largest and most populous societies of Eurasia, greater visibility of popular religion, more widespread vernacular language use, rising literacy, and fundamental shifts in the structure of rulership and the relationship of state and society could all be observed. Many historians have related these changes to a broader chronology of early modernity. This has been problematic in the case of Iran, whose eighteenth-century passage has not been adequately explored in recent scholarship. Our comparative review of ‘post-Mongol’ Iran and China suggests that this period marks as meaningful a break between a schematic medieval and schematic early modern history in Iran as it does in China. Here, we first consider both societies in the post-Mongol period as empires with secular rulerships and increasingly popular cultural trends, and look at the role of what Crossley has called “simultaneous rulership”—rulership in which the codes of legitimacy of civilisations recognised by the conquest authority are given distinct representation in the rulership — in marking the transition away from religious-endorsed rule to self-legitimating rule as a mark of comparative early modernity.

Type
Part IV: Beyond the Empire
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 26 , Issue 1-2 , January 2016 , pp. 293 - 307
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 2016 

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References

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2 See Beatrice Manz's section ‘The fifteenth century and the creation of new models’ in her contribution to this volume.

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26 Crossley, A Translucent Mirror, p. 31.

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