Empires of the land, the sea, and the air

Fuelled by grass, the Mongol empire could be described as solar-powered; it was an empire of the land. Later empires, such as the British, moved by ship and were wind-powered, empires of the sea. The American empire, if it is an empire, runs on oil and is an empire of the air. On the world’s largest landmass, Iraq is a main crossroads; most aspirants to empire eventually pass through there.

(from this New Yorker article by Ian Frazier)

I'm currently reading a spanish translation of The Travels of Ibn Battuta. Battuta was a muslim traveller form the fourteenth century, roughly a contemporary of Marco Polo. The book paints a pretty depressing and desolate picture of Baghdad, reduced by the mongol invasion to a shadow of its former glory under the abbasids.

Here is a nice collection of links to material about Ibn Battuta on the web. And here is the Wikipedia entry for the Battle of Baghdad (1258).

John Dolan wrote an interesting piece on the Mongols, avaliable here.

I have a copy of The Empire of the Steppes I found really cheap on Abebooks, but I still haven't got around to reading it. This other book also looks very interesting.

Let's finish by quoting this post from The Toynbee Convector:

But now we come to the great revolution: a technological revolution by which the West made its fortune, got the better of all the other living civilizations, and forcibly united them into a single society of literally world-wide range. The revolutionary Western invention was the substitution of the Ocean for the Steppe as the principal medium of world-communication. This use of the Ocean, first by sailing ships and then by steamships, enabled the West to unify the whole inhabited and habitable world [...] The steppe-ports were put out of action when the ocean-going sailing-ship superseded the camel and the horse; and now that, under our eyes, the ocean-going steamship is being superseded by the aeroplane we may ask ourselves whether the centre of the world is not likely to jump again – and this time as sensationally as in the sixteenth century – under the impetus of a technological revolution that is at least as radical as the sixteenth-century substitution of da Gama’s caravel for Babur’s tipuchaq.