The power of the nomad

Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World

Author: Anthony Sattin

Publisher: Hachette

Pages: 357

Price: Rs 799

As staunch nationalism congeals into violent xenophobia, travel writer Anthony Sattin offers a thought-provoking look at a counterfactual past. His book presents a less noticed alternative to the conventional story of civilisation that posits a linear projection of the ascent of man from hunter gatherers to the ultra-sapient beings of the 21st century. This self-congratulatory narrative that puts man (principally the white man) at the centre of human progress is being increasingly challenged by a host of thoughtful writers from Yuval Noah Harari to Amitav Ghosh, as evidence of the man-made devastation of the planet becomes frighteningly evident each year.

Mr Sattin keeps humankind at the centre of his history but they’re people with a different worldview and way of life: Nomads. His key contention is that it is the nomad “civilisations” created by people on the move that shaped our world, and we’d be better off if we re-engaged with those original values.

This, then, is a sweeping look at the nomad engagement with the settled world, centred on the people of the central Asian steppe and West Asia and North Africa. In the beginning, he says, “all humankind lived on the move across a world in which the only barriers were the natural ones of forest, river, mountain and desert and the ones that humans made from branches and thorns. By the end of the book, wanderers must pick their way across a world divided by borders, highways and walls and by international agreements made by nation-states.”

This grand tour — reflecting Immanuel Kant’s view that geography lies as the basis of history” — takes us through the transition from hunter-gatherers to farming and herding, to “more complex forms of nomadism” — the rise and fall of empires created by people who still lived mobile lives — and concludes with the birth of the modern age when Western scholars such as Francis Bacon and their triumphal philosophies of scientific methods and racial domination, providing the philosophical underpinnings for the Industrial Revolution and the colonial imperative.

His contention is that although nomads appear to live on the “shadow side” of history, their story is “no less wonderful or less significant” than ours. As an example, he cites a second century BCE example when the Roman Republic was on the ascendant and China flourished under the Han dynasty, the two connected along the nascent Silk Road. At the same time, he says Scythian nomads and their allies controlled land between the Black Sea and the Altai mountains (in modern-day Kazakhstan) making up an empire that was not only significantly larger but also more powerful than the Romans and Chinese. Excavations of their burials reveal not a primitive people but ones that made full use of the luxuries that travelled along these trade routes.  

Mr Sattin is an imaginative narrator. He understands that the stories we relate about ourselves say as much about our civilisations as the monuments we build or other conventional markers of “progress”. He frames the fable of Cain (a farmer) and Abel (a shepherd or nomad) to explain the early tensions between nomadic and settled lives. The famous Epic of Gilgamesh is presented through the lens of an engagement between humans who inhabit the natural world and Gilgamesh, king of a settled city state.

From the mists of our ante-diluvian past, Mr Sattin takes us on an enthralling ride through the Indus Valley, the Aryans, ancient Rome and Greece, the Persian and Islamic civilisation on this historical journey. It is interesting to discover, for instance, that the Persian Empire was essentially a nomadic one. Readers may be taken aback to find

Mr Stattin presenting the Huns and Mongols as beacons of civilisational values, but that is very much part of the revisionist lens through which these groups are being viewed in recent years.

Mr Sattin’s contention in describing the history of these hugely influential nomadic tribes is slightly different. He draws on the work, Muqaddimah, by the respected 14th century historian Ibn Khaldun which stated that civilisation “began and was renewed by people with natural goodness and energy, people who understood the natural world, who lived light and on the move.” They are bound by the concept of asabiyya, a term that loosely translates as team spirit, espirit de corp or tribal solidarity. Ibn Khaldun suggested that civilisations tend to disintegrate when this asabiyya is weakened or lost. Mr Sattin agrees, pointing to the birth and spread of Islam as the product of a closely knit quasi-nomadic trading community, the rise of the Mongols as a central Asian power based on a compact between Genghis Khan’s successors and the American Indian way of life.

Mr Sattin is a fluent and evocative writer so this book is extremely readable, informative and definitely worth the price. But his denunciatory conclusions about civilisation lacking asabiyya appear somewhat naive. Looked at another way, however, asabiyya could be destructive too. White supremacist or religious nationalists all have a strong team spirit but they cannot be described as positive forces of civilisation.

Sure, the world must learn to get along and there’s nothing wrong with the concept of living light. But like many others, this narrowly focused history has ignored the role that institutions have and can play in the story of progress. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s Why Nations Fail would have been a useful addition to his bibliography. That may have complicated his conclusions but, then, civilisation is a complex business.