Military Mobilization in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century China, Russia, and Mongolia

Abstract

From the mid-seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries three agrarian states—Chinese, Mongolian, and Russian—struggled for power over the heartland of the Eurasian continent. Each had dynamic central leaders mobilizing agrarian surpluses based on drastically different ecologies, institutions, and military structures. When the dust cleared, by 1760, only two survived.