Draft versions of this essay were presented at the conference ‘Asia, Europe, and Global Processes: Economic, Cultural, and Normative Dimensions’, at the National University of Singapore, 14–16 March 2001, in two seminars at the National University of Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar, at the Faculty of Social Sciences and the School of Economic Studies, 14 March 2002, and at the First SSAPS (Swedish School of Advanced Asia Pacific Studies) Asia-Pacific Annual Conference in Gothenburg, 26–28 September 2002. We are grateful for the constructive comments received on all four occasions, and to Stanley Engerman, for the same reason. The research has been funded by a SAREC (Swedish Agency for Research Cooperation with Developing Countries) grant, which is gratefully acknowledged.

Revised from ‘The First Globalization Episode: The Creation of the Mongol Empire or the Economics of Chinggis Khan’ by Ronald Findlay and Mats Lundahl, in Göran Therborn and Habibul Haque Khondker (eds), Asia and Europe in Globalization: Continents, Regions and Nations, 2006, E. J. Brill, pp. 13–54. With kind permission of Koninklijke Brill NV.