In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Mongols carved out the largest land-based empire in world history, stretching from Korea to Russia in the north and from China to Syria in the south, and unleashing an unprecedented level of violence. But as Morris Rossabi reveals in this Very Short Introduction, within two generations of their bloody conquests, the Mongols evolved from conquerors and predators to wise rulers who devised policies to foster the economies of the lands they had subjugated. By adopting political and economic institutions familiar to the local...

Land-locked between its giant neighbors, Russia and China, Mongolia was the first Asian country to adopt communism and the first to abandon it. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, Mongolia turned to international financial agencies--including the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank--for help in compensating for the economic changes caused by disruptions in the communist world. Modern Mongolia is the best-informed and most thorough account to date of the political economy of Mongolia during the past decade. In it, Morris Rossabi...

Toward the end of the thirteenth century, at about the time Marco Polo was being received by the great Khubilai Khan, a Nestorian Christian monk from China called Rabban Sauma was making the reverse journey from the Mongol capital (what is now Beijing) to Jerusalem. Upon reaching Baghdad--the first traveler to arrive from China--Sauma learned that his pilgrimage could not be fulfilled because of Islamic control of the Holy Land. In Voyager from Xanadu, Morris Rossabi traces Sauma's trans-Eurasian travels against the turbulent era of the Mongol Empire and the last Crusades. His...