Open up a world of Turkish inspiration with a Cornucopia digital subscription

Buy or gift a stand-alone digital subscription and get unlimited access to dozens of back issues for just £18.99 / $18.99 a year.

Please register at www.exacteditions.com/digital/cornucopia with your subscriber account number or contact subscriptions@cornucopia.net

Buy a digital subscription Go to the Digital Edition

Empires of the Steppes

The Nomadic Tribes Who Shaped Civilisation

Kenneth W Harl

Published by Bloomsbury Publishing

£30.00 / $39.25 / €35.99
($/€ approx)



Hardback, 576 pages, published 17 August 2023

‘A sweeping account of forty-five centuries of nomadic tribes’
Gillian Tett, Financial Times
Book Description

An epic and enthralling narrative history of how Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan and the so-called ‘barbarians of the steppes’ shaped the modern world.

The barbarian nomads of the Eurasian steppes have played a decisive role in world history, but their impact has gone largely unnoticed. These nomadic tribes have produced some of the world’s greatest conquerors: Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, among others. And their deeds still resonate today.

Indeed, these nomads built long-lasting empires, facilitated the first global trade of the Silk Road and disseminated religions, technology, knowledge and goods of every description that enriched and changed the lives of so many across Europe, China and the Middle East. From a single region emerged a great many peoples – the Huns, the Mongols, the Magyars, the Turks, the Xiongnu, the Scythians, the Goths – all of whom went on to profoundly and irrevocably shape the modern world.

Kenneth W. Harl draws on a lifetime of scholarship to vividly recreate the lives and world of these often-forgotten peoples from their beginnings to the early modern age. Their brutal struggle to survive on the steppes bred a resilient, pragmatic people ever-ready to learn from their neighbours. In warfare, they dominated the battlefield for over fifteen hundred years. Under charismatic rulers, they could topple empires and win their own.

Reviews for Empires of the Steppes

‘An epic history of how the so-called ‘barbarians of the steppes’ shaped the modern world. ‘This is a history of epic scope that brings together the empires of the steppe land with the caravan cities of the Silk Road and imperial China’
Martyn Rady, author of The Middle Kingdoms

‘Flips the script to present the booted, felt-capped, leather-trousered and kaftan-wearing nomads as the bearers of civilisation… Harl’s exhaustively researched book will ensure they rejoin the narrative of world history’
Marc David Baer, Guardian

Related Books
Cornucopia Bookshop

Books

Back Issues

Music

Subscriptions

Cornucopia Digital Subscription

The Digital Edition

Cornucopia works in partnership with the digital publishing platform Exact Editions to offer individual and institutional subscribers unlimited access to a searchable archive of fascinating back issues and every newly published issue. The digital edition of Cornucopia is available cross-platform on web, iOS and Android and offers a comprehensive search function, allowing the title’s cultural content to be delved into at the touch of a button.

Digital Subscription: £18.99 / $18.99 (1 year)

Subscribe now