The Mongols and Global History

Author Bio

Morris Rossabi is Distinguished Professor of History at Queens College, The City University of New York and Senior Research Scholar and Adjunct Professor of Inner Asian History at Columbia University. He is a historian of China and Central Asia who teaches courses in Inner Asian and East Asian history. He is also the author of Herder to Statesman (Rowman & Littlefield, 2010); Modern Mongolia: From Khans to Commissars to Capitalists (University of California Press, 2005); Khubilai Khan: His Life and Times (University of California Press, 1988).

Professor Rossabi was born in Alexandria, Egypt, and has lived, worked and researched throughout the Middle East, Central Asia, East Asia, Europe and the United States. He earned his PhD in East and Central Asian history from Columbia University in 1970.

An accessible, documents-based introduction to the history of the Mongols. The volume opens with a brief original essay by Morris Rossabi, one of the world's foremost scholars on the Mongols. Rossabi's essay gives a historical and interpretive overview of the Mongols and charts their invasions and subsequent rule over the largest contiguous land empire in world history. Following is a rich collection of primary sources translated into English from Armenian, Arabic, Chinese, Franco-Italian, Italian, Korean, Latin, Persian, Russian, Syriac, and Tibetan that will give students a clear sense of the extraordinary geographic and linguistic range of the Mongol Empire as well as insight into the empire's rise, how it governed, and how it fell. Each primary source includes a headnote and study questions. The volume ends with a list of further readings. —WW Norton & Company, Inc.