THIS volume, like its predecessor, has argued that the distinctive geography and ecology of Inner Eurasia has exerted a sustained pressure on the histories of all Inner Eurasian societies. The argument has shown how geography and ecology shaped strategies of mobilization and the related methods of political and economic management. I have suggested that, in the agrarian era, mobilizing resources to build states was for the most part more difficult in Inner Eurasia than in Outer Eurasia, where agriculture was more widespread and supported larger populations and greater wealth. In Inner Eurasia, low productivity, scattered populations, and vast distances meant that, whether they depended on pastoral nomadism or agriculture, the most successful mobilizers were those that could mobilize labor, livestock, and resources effectively over large areas. To do that they had to build disciplined political structures that could hold together extensive military coalitions over large areas. By and large, the polities that mobilized most effectively won out over those that mobilized less successfully. And this, in combination with the relatively flat topography of much of Inner Eurasia, helps explain why exceptionally large empires would eventually dominate much of Inner Eurasia.
This volume began when the first trans-Eurasian empire, that of the Mongols, was breaking up, after the death of Khan Mongke in 1259. That empire had been based on pastoral nomadism, at a time when regions of agriculture were too isolated and unproductive to support large empires inside Inner Eurasia. The volume ended early in the twenty-first century, after the collapse of Inner Eurasia's second trans-Eurasian empire, which began life as the Russian Empire and was based, originally, in expanding agrarian regions of western Inner Eurasia.
Over more than 750 years, however, Inner Eurasian rules of mobilization have changed profoundly. Three large global changes were particularly important. First, the increasing inter-connectedness of the world since the sixteenth century meant that all polities, even in the remotest parts of Inner Eurasia, would eventually be influenced by global commercial, technological, and intellectual exchanges. Those exchanges created new forms of wealth, and new military and administrative technologies, which changed the rules of mobilization everywhere. Siberian furs could be traded in Europe and China, European cannon and muskets could be used by steppe armies, railways and the telegraph created faster, cheaper communications over the vast territories of Inner Eurasia.
The second fundamental change was the increasing importance of markets as drivers of mobilization and growth. From the sixteenth century, global markets that yielded huge profits gave commerce more importance than ever before in world history. This was the change that Marx acknowledged when he claimed that “capitalism” really arose in the sixteenth century. As the power and wealth generated within global markets increased, states became increasingly dependent on the mobilizational power of markets. And markets, it turned out, had a significant advantage over more traditional forms of direct mobilization, because they encouraged innovation and the efficient use of resources, rather than the cruder methods of traditional tributary systems. Resources mobilized within competitive markets, it turned out, could go further than resources mobilized through direct mobilization, because, as a general rule, competitive markets encouraged more efficient use of resources. In short, markets encouraged intensive as well as extensive forms of growth.
The third fundamental change was the fossil fuels revolution. Suddenly, energy was available for food production, transportation, manufacturing, and even warfare, on scales that would once have seemed unimaginable. And in the modern era, it turned out that Inner Eurasia, which had seemed ecologically impoverished in the agrarian era, was resource rich in the fossil fuels era. As well as huge amounts of land and woodland, it had vast reserves of coal, oil, and gas, and abundant supplies of the metal ores used by modern fossil fuel-powered industries.
Given these changes, has the idea of Inner Eurasia lost its salience in the modern era? The answer is probably “Yes.” As the rules by which power elites mobilize resources have changed, the borders of Inner Eurasia no longer matter as they once did. Methods and strategies of mobilization that had worked well in Inner Eurasia over many millennia no longer work as well today. What better symbol of the change could there be than the emergence of an independent Mongolia as a capitalist democracy, with ties not just to Inner Eurasia but to corporations throughout the world?
And yet… We have also seen that highly centralized strategies of political and economic mobilization have dominated the region's history, and continue to do so, though to a lesser extent, even today. In the twentieth century, Inner Eurasian societies entered the fossil fuels era under the control of one of the most highly centralized political systems that has ever existed. And even today, most of the Post-Soviet Inner Eurasian Republics have retained strong, centralized political structures that continue to play a significant role in economic management. The inertia of mobilizational strategies that had worked well for hundreds of years has proved extremely powerful, and it will surely affect the region's history for some time to come, particularly in those regions with abundant reserves of fossil fuels and mineral resources.
But if it is true that the underlying rules of mobilization really have changed, we should not be surprised if traditional mobilizational strategies prove less and less successful in the future. And we should also not assume that the modern history of Inner Eurasia was bound to be shaped by traditional mobilizational strategies. In the early twentieth centuries, as in the 1990s, there were real chances for the emergence of modern, capitalist societies with less centralized political structures. And even the politically centralized societies of Inner Eurasia, today, contain all the preconditions for a flourishing capitalism. The political ghosts of the past do indeed cling to the present in modern Inner Eurasia. Will it take one more “Time of Troubles” before they are finally exorcized? Or have the successor states to the Soviet Union already made the crucial changes needed to survive and even flourish in a modern capitalist world?
Looming beyond these questions is an even larger question faced not just by Inner Eurasia but by the world as a whole. Evidence is accumulating that humans are using the resources of the biosphere on such a vast scale that they are beginning to undermine the biospheric flows of nutrients that drive modern societies, and the climatic foundations on which they have been built. The direct mobilization of resources was always profligate, a lesson learnt by the Soviet Union in the late twentieth century. But modern capitalism, powered by fossil fuels, though more economical in its use of particular resources, has mobilized the resources of the biosphere on vastly greater scales. In the Anthropocene epoch, there is a real danger that capitalism, too, will break down, like the mobilizational machines of the Mongol and Soviet empires, because it will eventually run out of the resources it needs to keep running.