Discussing David M. Robinson's Empire's Twilight : Northeast Asia Under the Mongols

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Discussing David M. Robinson's Empire's Twilight : Northeast Asia Under the Mongols

Journal Title: International Journal of Korean History - Year 2011, Vol 16, Issue 1

Abstract

The author's attempt to provide the readers with a comprehensive discussion of the Red Turban wars is ambitious. And the author also has the courage to explore the organic nature of the Northeast Asian order. Yet there seems to be certain problems. In trying to portrait too big a picture that would engulf the entire Northeast Asian region, the author has failed to examine the situations of individual regions like Korea or Japan. Without a proper evaluation of the history of these regions, discussing the organic nature of Northeast Asia, which supposedly formed with the rise of the Mongol empire and dissolved with its decline, would fail. The author describes the 13th and 14th centuries as a time when ‘integration’ proceeded throughout Northeast Asia, and he argues that Northeast Asia was connected through constant exchanges of people, money and ideas. Yet he is not offering anything new that would shed some light on actually ‘in what kind of manner’ and ‘through what kind of occasions’ the people of this region would have continued their relationships and exchanges. The author is merely commenting upon well established facts, but we need many more ‘descriptions’ of all the exchanges. The author tries to impose such concept of ‘integration’ upon the general situation of Koryŏ, and jumps to a conclusion that Koryŏ was part of the Mongol empire(“Great Yuan Ulus”), yet the process that led to such conclusion is entirely missing. Exactly what kind of ‘criteria’ should be satisfied in order to claim that an entity was a part of another entityŏ One must determine in exactly what kind of manner those two entities have come into physical contact, and then determine how long that contact was maintained, in how many individual areas like politics, economy and culture, and finally, how such contact diverged and variated in subsequent periods. And even after that, as labeling a relationship that continued for decades or centuries between large entities instead of small individuals would be extremely difficult, we should be careful, and try to make a determination based upon the history of individual regions, which the author is not at all doing here. As a result, his documentation of the fall of Yuan and the Mongols falls rather flat, and fails to reveal how the supposed ‘decline of an order’ exactly reflected upon the history of not only individual regions like Koryŏ, but also the entire Northeast Asia in general.

Authors and Affiliations

Kang Hahn Lee

Keywords

Red Turban wars Koryŏ Mongols Yuan integration Northeast Asian order

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EP ID EP26358
DOI -
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