Instead, they simply sought to gain access to the resources which they lacked themselves - if not by trade, then by raiding. Regular wars would only break out as the Chinese tried to shut out or drive away the nomads, closing border markets or abrogating treaties. Khazanov, who made this the central thesis of his 1984 book Nomads and the Outside World. Barfield develops this idea by arguing that the nomads' primary aim was almost never conquest (the Mongol empire was a rare exception). This idea that nomad societies were "non-autharcic" and hence dependent on trading with or raiding neighboring agricultural peoples is derived from A. M. Unable to tax their own too mobile and pasturing population, they lived on extracting wealth from China. One influential theory about the relations between China and the steppe nomads is Thomas Barfield's. His 1989 book The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China (the main argument of which is recapitulated in a 2001 essay, "The Shadow Empires") argues that the nomadic empires of the Xiongnu, Mongols and Uyghurs were "shadow empires" or secondary formations, rising and falling in tandem with the primary empire, China. When nothing else worked, the empire would have to buy peace by tribute, as the Han Dynasty did from the Xiongnu or the Tang Dynasty from the Uyghur, or attempt to wall itself in, as the Ming Dynasty did when it abandoned the steppe and erected the Great Wall. The inability of successive Chinese dynasties to ever defeat the nomads decisively before the Qing Dynasty stemmed from the fact that the nomads could almost withdraw into the interior of the steppe, retreating to a point where the bulky imperial armies could be ambushed or where their supply lines would be stretched too far. The empires' means of controlling the nomads were therefore limited, the best results usually being gained by playing out nomad clans against each other, domesticating part of them by selective rewards such as trade or political support in inter-clan struggles. The common association of steppe nomads with mobility and military power - think for instance of Deleuze and Guattari's "nomadic war machine" - seems partly rooted in the actual conduct of warfare.
My hope is that these brief jottings about what I thought while reading these books will help me put the various perspectives offered on the subject of empires and nomads into some kind of order.
During the last year I have been doing some reading about China and its steppe neighbors (Xiongnu, Mongols, Uyghur.).
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