Abstract:

The frontiers between China and Inner Asia have been theorized extensively since ancient times, and the economics of the two primary subsistence and production systems on each side – agrarianism and pastoralism – underpin much of the cultural features of their populations and the political-strategic possibilities of their elites. Generations of scholars, such as Owen Lattimore, Arthur Waldron, and David Bello, have also presented solid cases for viewing the geographic realities of this region as determining factors to how history has unfolded here. However, historians of this region tend to avoid adopting theories of universalistic ambitions. For example, to posit a center-periphery paradigm to this frontier would easily risk oversimplifying this region's political economy, not to mention reifying the racist civilization-barbarism hierarchy – criticisms commonly levied against Andre Gunder Frank’s world systems theory. Nevertheless, successive imperial formations controlling this frontier have exhibited recognizable resource management patterns while facing similar economic constraints. Therefore, to understand the dynamics of political power and the movement of natural resources in this region, the task is to reconstruct the dynamics as they occurred in the past. In this paper, I first take on a historiographical task to describe the conclusions already made about the Liao, Jin, and Yuan empires’ management of their political economy and assess the usefulness of the World Systems theory in this context. Secondly, I look at the Jürchen Jin empire’s relationship with Mongolia on the eve of Chinggis Khan’s rise to power, identifying the movement of various types of resources across the frontiers.