The Empire of the Steppes:  A History of Central Asia, by Rene Grousset

This book, an extremely lengthy and thorough account of the empires great and less great, well-known (Mongol), less well-known (Seljuk Turk, Hsia-Hsia), to downright obscure (the Shaybanid Khanate, Juan-Juan, Uigur) that ruled over the entire steppe region ranging from Korea to Hungary from East to West and from the taiga of Siberia to India and Egypt from North to South.

The scope of the work is massive, but the names of the empires are hard to remember, much less their often ephemeral rulers (almost all of whose work was wasted within a few short generations because they divided up their kingdom into appenages among all of their sons which encouraged some neighboring sedentary empire (like China or Iran) to intervene in a succession dispute with what by the end seems like painfully predictable results. Also painfully predictable is the way that sedentary empires (China comes in particularly harshly here) support the most barbaric tribes possible in order to rid themselves of weakened barbarians who are protecting them from the really bad ones. The results are painful and unsurprising, as some fierce horde of pure nomads sweeps down on civilization building pyramids of skulls and killing hundreds of thousands of people, raping and pillaging at will, all because of the short-sided stupidity of some court eunuchs who are engaged in petty political plots and unaware of the massive consequences of their blundering. Why didn’t they read this book? What made them think that *they* were different than the other dozens of powerful states brought down by the exact same error? That sort of thought goes through the mind of a reader often in the course of this lengthy work, which retains its power and excellence in translation (it was originally written in French).

If you want one book to explain the history of the nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples of the steppes of the time between the Huns and the Manchu (say, between 300 BC and early 1900’s), this is the book to get. It is a masterpiece of thoughtful research, insightful analysis, and breathtaking detail. You won’t remember 90% of the names in the book by the time you are finished with it, but it scarcely matters, as the book is an epic history nonetheless.