A lot of the negative reviews for this book take issue with its true historicity and its revisionist and somewhat unapologetic agenda. I admit that I got into the book expecting it to be an account of Genghis Khan's conquests with an addendum expounding his legacy, but it was rather the other way around. However, I think it was also quite clear from the outset that Jack Weatherford's aim in this book was not to recount historical facts, but rather to approach the entire perception of the Mongol Empire from a different angle.

I thought the book was well-written and easy to read, and was only after I finished reading it that I realised it's actually almost 15 years old. Although undeniably biased towards the Mongols, it certainly does the job of shedding light on elements of the Mongol story that aren't often the focus of historical accounts, and raises some thought provoking points regarding the some more subtle impacts that Genghis Khan had on the world.

Ultimately, to quote Mr Ollivander, I think Genghis Khan has to be considered 'Terrible, but great'. This book may sway slightly too far in favour of the 'great', but it's good to reminded about that perspective of history in a well articulated read. ( )

This book flipped my preconceived notions of the Mongols completely on its head. I *knew* that the Mongolian Empire brought an exchange of ideas, goods, etc. between Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. I didn't realize the true extent of the exchange and the full impact this brief empire had on the world. Nor did I truly grasp the negative campaigns against Asians (specifically the Mongols) by the Europeans as well as Communist China and Russia. Very interesting stuff.

The first part of the book is all about the life of Genghis Khan and how he formed the empire. The second part delves into his descendants and their affect on the empire. The last part deals with the decline of the empire and up to modern day. Weatherford is an archaeologist and worked with a team of folks translating ancient texts as well as pulling in other writings about Genghis Khan. However, it doesn't read like a dry history book. It almost felt like reading a fiction book, but then you remember this is history.

Definitely worth your time if you're at all curious about Genghis Khan and/or the Mongolian Empire. ( )

Our history lessons glossed over the Mongol empire which largely controlled Asia in the late 13th and 14th centuries.

But the rise of Ghengis Khan and his children added many innovations to warfare, governance, and the unification of many ethnic groups, not the least of which were the Chinese and Russians.

Khan’s armies innovated in mobile warfare, the use of canon, and siege engines.

His grandson Kubilei Khan reigned over an age of massive growth of trade, standardization of currency, the invention of diplomatic immunity, even the separation of church and state.

And the expedited trade routes also ultimately became the conduit of pandemic.

The modern world really is a stepchild to the one the Mongols created eight centuries ago. ( )

Great book indeed! Helps to see through layers of stereotypes, propaganda, demonization and just plain bullshit. ( )

This book blew my mind. I knew almost none of this history, and now everything looks a little different. ( )

It is a narrative of the rise and influence of Genghis Khan and his successors, and their influence on European civilization. Weatherford provides a different slant on Genghis Khan than has been typical in most Western accounts, attributing positive cultural effects to his rule. ( )

This book was fantastic! I found it randomly, and I wasn't sure what to expect. It has just the right amount of detail, and the history is balanced with great storytelling. I definitely recommend this for history buffs looking to branch out from the usual history of the western world. ( )

I grew up in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. For me, World History was Euro-centric. I picked up this book to fill a few enormous holes in my understanding of global history. The book delivered much more than I ever expected to learn.

Genghis Khan was much more than a Mongol conqueror from centuries gone by. In the hands of scholar and traveler Jack Weatherford, he was a flesh and blood human being from incredibly humble origins who, through determination, grit, and intelligence, united the separate tribes of the northern Asian Steppes to create an Empire the likes of which the world had never seen.

Every part of this book was a surprise to me. The intelligence of Genghis was astounding. His ideas for an ideal were some of the most impressive I’ve ever come across. He wanted the ordinary people to have a chance to succeed. Unlike many leaders today who give lip service to that idea, Genghis Khan instituted policies to ensure it.

Weatherford goes on to talk about how his Empire continued to grow but then disintegrated under the leadership of his descendants. For a little over a hundred years after his death, they ruled most of modern China, Russia, the Middle East, Mongolia, and Siberia. But, unfortunately, their impressive accomplishments were checkered with dismal failures and poor decisions.

But I was astounded by the changes the Mongols brought about. They introduced innovations that really did change the world forever, and mostly for the better. Some of their ideas, still largely untried, would make for a fair and more equitable world. Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World is one of the best history books I have ever read. I recommend it to everyone interested in the history of politics and military exploits. ( )

It's an enjoyable history book. It paints Genghis Khan and his progeny in quite a positive light, pointing out the radical ideas and polices (at the time) they had, like being not misogynistic, believing in universal education and literacy, viewing trade between nations as a positive thing, and abhorring torture and mutilation. ( )

An interesting, thought provoking history which does err slightly into over-sympathy at times. Still, very much worth reading and it should make you reconsider history from a less euro-centric viewpoint ( )

The mongols have gotten a bad rap. Weatherford Uncovers the positive influence of the Mongols on world history. Relies heavily on the Secret History of the Mongols Very little about encounter with Europe; would like to have had much more on this.

Audio book retraces much of the same ground in an epilogue read by the author.
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This book reveals how inaccurate our Western history books really are. Very insightful.

A lot of presumption or educated guesses seem to be at play, but what would you expect about history 1000 years ago? So, maybe less factual than most history books I have read, but still very good and most interesting.
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p.14

Such an excellent book on the Mongols and their history. One of the most enjoyable history books I've read in a long time! ( )

> As the Moghuls, some of them reigned in India until 1857, when the British drove out Emperor Bahadur Shah II and chopped off the heads of two of his sons and his grandson. Genghis Khan’s last ruling descendant, Alim Khan, emir of Bukhara, remained in power in Uzbekistan until deposed in 1920 by the rising tide of Soviet revolution.

> The Mongols made no technological breakthroughs, founded no new religions, wrote few books or dramas, and gave the world no new crops or methods of agriculture. Their own craftsmen could not weave cloth, cast metal, make pottery, or even bake bread. They manufactured neither porcelain nor pottery, painted no pictures, and built no buildings. Yet, as their army conquered culture after culture, they collected and passed all of these skills from one civilization to the next

> When the richest capitalists flaunted their wealth and showed antidemocratic or antiegalitarian values, they were derided as moguls, the Persian name for Mongols. … When American bombs and missiles drove the Taliban from power in Afghanistan in 2002, the Taliban soldiers equated the American invasion with that of the Mongols, and therefore, in angry revenge, massacred thousands of Hazara, the descendants of the Mongol army who had lived in Afghanistan for eight centuries.

> In Genghis Khan’s conquest of central Asia, one group suffered the worst fate of those captured. The Mongol captors slaughtered the rich and powerful.

> Ogodei erected several houses of worship for his Buddhist, Muslim, Taoist, and Christian followers. Of these, the Christians seemed to be gaining dominance at the Mongol court because Ogodei, like his three brothers, had taken Christian wives when they conquered the Kereyid and Naiman, and some of his descendants were Christian, particularly his favorite grandson, Shiremun (the Mongol version of the biblical name Solomon). Part of the attraction of the Mongols to Christianity seemed to be in the name of Jesus, Yesu, which sounded like the Mongolian word for nine, their sacred number, and the name of Genghis Khan’s father, Yesugei, who was the founder of the whole dynasty. Despite the high status of Christians, the small city of Karakorum was probably the most religiously open and tolerant city in the world at that time

> Because the subjects of the Mongol Empire used so many different languages, Khubilai Khan attempted one of the most innovative experiments in intellectual and administrative history. He sought to create a single alphabet that could be used to write all the languages of the world. He assigned this task to the Tibetan Buddhist lama Phagspa, who in 1269 presented the khan with a set of forty-one letters derived from the Tibetan alphabet. Khubilai Khan made Phagspa’s script the empire’s official script, but rather than force the system on anyone, he allowed the Chinese and all other subjects to continue using their own writing system as well in the hope that the new script would eventually replace the old by showing its superiority.

> Although never ruled by the Mongols, in many ways Europe gained the most from their world system. The Europeans received all the benefits of trade, technology transfer, and the Global Awakening without paying the cost of Mongol conquest. The Mongols had killed off the knights in Hungary and Germany, but they had not destroyed or occupied the cities. The Europeans, who had been cut off from the mainstream of civilization since the fall of Rome, eagerly drank in the new knowledge, put on the new clothes, listened to the new music, ate the new foods, and enjoyed a rapidly escalating standard of living in almost every regard.

> Just as the British executed the sons and grandson of the last Moghul emperor of India in the nineteenth century, the Soviets purged the known descendants of Genghis Khan remaining in Mongolia in the twentieth century, marching whole families into the woods to be shot and buried in unmarked pits, exiling them into the gulag of Soviet camps across Siberia where they were worked to death, or simply causing their mysterious disappearance into the night of history. ( )

Interesting and well-researched and well-written, but interest tapers off when Khan dies half-way through the book. ( )

Although mildly hyperbolic in a few places, this is a fascinating, highly readable and eye opening account of how, in the span of his lifetime, he was able to create an empire that extended from China to Russia and the Middle East. The book may be a bit too generous in attributing the "discovery" of many of the major technology advances of his era to Genghis Kahn, there is no doubt that Kahn was quick to recognize, exploit and spread them throughout the breadth of his empire.

Excellent overview of the book:
https://www.diplomacy.edu/resources/books/reviews/genghis-khan-and-making-modern... ( )

For centuries, people saw Genghis Khan as merely a blood-thirsty conquerer. Perhaps the most important reason we have seen Genghis in this light is due to his own propaganda. “Terror, he realized, was best spread not by the acts of warriors, but by the pens of scribes and scholars.”

This book attempts to counter that image of the Khans and the Mongol Empire, and shows all the great things they did that lay the foundation for the modern world: religious tolerance, paper currency, a postal system, etc.

The book was a little too “this happened then this happened then that happened” for me to really enjoy it, but the information it contained was fascinating. ( )

In most respects, this is a wonderfully surprising assessment of the founding, history, and impact of the Mongolian Empire! It's already one of my favorite popular history books!

The history presented in this book is 5-star interesting but the writing itself was a bit disappointing. Strangely repetitive and somewhat more simplistic than I expected. But this is a stylistic quibble, and it's the content that matters.

As for content, the author succumbs to the historical fallacy of ascribing modern sensibilities to historical figures (a phenomenon that's been unfortunately common in much historical literature for the past couple of decades). Yes, many of the principles on which Genghis Khan founded his empire were radical for his time and weren't seen again until the 20th century - but to call him a "modern man" (which the author does) is simply ridiculous. Like everyone, he could only be a man of his time. It would be just as accurate to say that our modern ideas are throw-backs to the 13th century ideals of Genghis Khan.

I also believe that in his zeal to prove the historical importance of Genghis Khan's influence, the author over-credits the Mongolian Empire with fueling the European Renaissance. Yes, it certainly wielded a huge influence, and the Renaissance probably wouldn't have been possible without the system of global economic and intellectual exchange built and maintained by the Mongols... but the most direct and proximal cause of the Renaissance was the rediscovery of lost classical Greek and Roman texts kept in the Arab Middle East. The Mongolian Empire may have created an environment sympathetic to a cultural rebirth but it was the Arab world that gave Europe it's direct catalyst. I think the author tries too hard to demean that part of it in favor of his personal obsession with Genghis Khan. ( )

the positive side of genocide ( )

As others have noted: this is really a re-telling of the book "The Secret History" with some stuff tacked on.

So.... it was pretty boring to start with, but got better. Really needed more sources and an editor. Didn't give the feeling of being thorough or deep. Very little about "The Making of the Modern World", though there could have been 100's of pages ('cos the Mongols' influence on the west was very deep)

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Covering hundreds of years of history, this book reviews the successes of Genghis Khan and the successes then failures of his descendants, who began the process of connecting Eurasia and brought major innovations to warfare and to governance. I would’ve liked more about the military tactics, in fact; they sound perfectly terrifying. ( )

I'm not big on nonfiction but I thoroughly enjoyed the first several chapters of this book. There was plenty of rather fascinatingly twisted anthropological information in "Genghis Kahn" to kept me interested... even though my eyes usually tend to start closing when I read history books. In college I studied the effects of the Mongol-Tatar Yoke on Russia, but this book broadened my view, albeit sometimes in vocabulary that seemed a little too 20th-century for the topic. Still, even though the history of warfare has never been my "thing," I will likely take the book out of the library again when I'm ready for more. ( )

Curious.
For an historical book, I was surprised of the acceptance at face value an apologetic single source for Gengis Khan's early years
The massacres are mentioned in passing with little comment, and the Mongol empire is presented as the single source of progress in the 1200s.
Need a counter view ( )

If you are like me, you probably thought of Genghis Khan as a barbaric bloodthirsty conqueror of nations. While he was that, Weatherford shows that he was so much more. A military genius, but also a benevolent ruler who replaced blood-line based leadership with that of based on merit and loyalty, who valued knowledge and brought together many cultures, outlawed torture, protected women and poor people, enacted religious freedom, supported trade and generally brought prosperity and unparalleled freedom, education and self-governance into those regions they conquered (after the initial shock of conquest).

I give five stars for Part I of the book, which deals with Genghis Khan's early life and his gradually establishing his empire. This is the only part where Weatherford attempts bringing personalities to life. I especially enjoyed the story of Heulun, Genghis' mother, and his love for his wife, Borte. We also get a fascinating detailed account of Mongol military might. Mongols basically were on horseback since they could walk, could stand up on horseback, and were excellent archers. They would let the enemy attack them, feign a retreat, and when the enemy pursued them, they waited until the enemy horses tired - then turned back and killed all with their deadly arrows. Infantry, knights in heavy armor were useless against them. After a couple initial local defeats, Genghis Khan was never defeated in battle.

The Mongols did not invent anything, but were always on the lookout for new technologies from nations they conquered (or later on, traded with). They created cannons by combining gunpowder from China, flamethrowers from Persia and ironworking from Europe. This gave them an incredible advantage in sieges of walled cities. They killed the aristocracies of conquered regions, which prevented revolt, but valued craftsmen, workers and all learned people. While they mercilessly killed all those they did not value, they never tortured or maimed. They had a religious reverence of the body, especially the face, and banned all disfigurement. They recoiled from the European religious tradition of parading bones of saints around - they thought it barbaric and sacriligious.

The second part of the book is four stars and deals with the reign of Genghis's children and grandchildren. Under Khubilai Khan the Mongol empire reached its largest size and greatest wealth. Khubilai was not a warrior but an astute statesman. He defeated the Chinese Sung dynasty by basically improving the freedom, living and cultural conditions of Chinese people under him that they gradually defected from the Sung dynasty, leaving only a small part easily defeated by Kubilai's talented generals. He invented paper money, printing, and supported trade in all forms. He established trading posts, roads with waystations that provided fresh animals and supplies, passports for merchants, and diplomatic immunity for envoys, even for enemy envoys. Yet, he was no longer a warrior, thus starting the erosion of the work ethic and principles of his grandfather's empire.

The third part of the book details of the impact of the Mongol empire and its decline and fall. I felt this part was dry, biased and an inflated catalog of everything the Mongols brought to all over the world. I do agree that there was much dissemination of knowledge and culture by the Mongols, but to attribute the entire Reneissance to the Mongols is a bit of a stretch. Also, they did not bring pants to Europe - Europeans have worn pants since the classic era! In general, I felt like Weatherford was working too hard to attribute any achievement of Europe after the 13th century to the Mongols. The writing was also dry, repetitive and lost in details at the end.

Overall, this is a great book that shines a very different light on much I knew about medieval history and Genghis Khan. It also contains much new research, since researching him was prohibited in the Soviet era. I highly recommend this book to all history buffs. ( )