REVIEWS

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.) Reviews: Central Asia By the end of the thirteenth century, the Mongols had defeated and eliminated more than twenty Eurasian states and established the largest contiguous empire in the history of the world. With this in mind, he makes a deliberate effort to remain even-handed and emphasize the role of contingency in explaining the Mongol legacy. [...]the Mongols are not to be credited with (nor are they to be damned for) singlehandedly causing the European Renaissance, the Bolshevik Revolution, or the bewildering popularity of disco music in the 1970s (pp. 20-21). The final chapter returns to May's central argument, which is that the most important legacy of the Mongol conquests is the Mongol rulers' deliberate and sustained efforts to promote the trans-Eurasian exchange of material goods, cultural production, agricultural products, scholarship, technical, medical and other forms of knowledge, and more.