Historical Revisionism

Jack Weatherford has a clear agenda in writing Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. Western historiography has, for centuries, presented the Mongols, Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire as brutal, savage and uncivilized. They have been demonized as Asian hordes, vicious conquerors and destroyer of cultures across Europe and Asia. But Weatherford argues that this is not so. Instead, he points out that Europeans in the Renaissance held the Mongols in very high esteem and that only in the Enlightenment did European historians and culture generally begin to imagine the Mongols and their leader as dark forces.

Weatherford constantly points out the ways in which the Mongols innovated institutions in order to promote the common good. First, he points out that the Mongols ruled by consensus rather than bureaucracy and he argues that they propagated this system of governance in many parts of their...