Interview with Nicola Di CosmoOn December 9, 2015, Nicola Di Cosmo, Luce Found

ation Professor of East Asian Studies at the School of Historical Studies of t

he Institute for Advanced Study, joined Dumbarton Oaks for its first Inter-Pro
gram Lecture, Climate, Ecology, and Mobility in the History of Eurasian Step
pe Nomads. We spoke with Di Cosmo about the growing field of nomadic history
and the integration of climatic and ecological data into historical study.

Dumbarton Oaks: Your prior work was in Chinese military history. How did you b
ecome interested in the interactions of ecology and climate with nomadic histo
ry?

Nicola Di Cosmo: I was very interested in understanding Chinese history, not j

ust in terms of Chinese history, but also in terms of the interactions between
Chinese people with other parts of Asia and Eurasia. That started a general in
terest in language, from Chinese to Mongoliantrying to learn more about the
languages of people who were very influential in Chinese history, but whose st
ories you dont learn when you study Chinese history. In China, everything is
fit through a very standard, very official, very orthodox way of understanding
Chinese history, which is through dynastic histories, standard histories.

In some moments of history, these nomads become particularly important, partic

ularly relevant beyond their own environment, beyond their own regions, beyond
China, beyond Asia. They are important in European history, and I think this i
s an imperial tradition that has not been recognized much. We know about the R
omans, the Mediterranean civilizations, the Chinese, Indian, and Iranian civil
izations. But the nomads have never really been recognized as a civilization
quite the opposite, right? Theyre anti-civilization, the barbarians. And,
in fact, the interaction between nomads and other people has been very produc
tive in world history and has produced expansions of networks and more connect
ions among different places. It also has been, I think, very influential in de
veloping institutionsin Russia, for instance, in the Ottoman Empire, which i
s Islamic but also nomadic. In the Mughal Empire in India and the Qing or Manc
hu dynasties in China, they all owe something to this nomadic culture that the
y were coming from. So, I think in a number of ways they are also very importa
nt as we try to reconceptualize world history, because we need to include this
large part of Eurasia, which is the steppe, and if we want to understand how t
echnology culture, trade, was transmitted or connected to different parts of E
urasia, the nomads were very important and central to the story.
I also work with archaeology, and thats a very important part. Im not an a
rchaeologist myself, but if you want to learn a little bit more about the hist
ory of the nomads, you cant just work with documentary sources.

DO: You talked specifically about how the nomadic narrative is left out of Chi
nese history, which tends to focus on imperial, dynastic history. Do you have
any thoughts on what accounts for nomadic tradition being left out of history?

NDC: In China, certainly the traditional wisdom is that the greater powerthe
Chinese civilizationalways conquered these people, that they were eventually
assimilated and acculturated to China. Therefore the Chinese civilization was
conquered, but then the Chinese civilization conquered the conquerors. That ha
s been the myth of Sinicization, of becoming Chinese. Thats been the dominan
t framework, in which this relationshipwhich has never been totally hostile
or inimicalhas been, as I said before, a productive relationship whereby the
res been a lot of exchange between the two. We always see it in terms of the
aggressiveness of the nomads versus the cultured stance of the Chinese, wh
o try to educate them or convert them to Chinese civilization or assimilate th
em. You never see the other side, which is what these nomads brought into Chin
a and how China was changed by these people. If you look at every period of Ch
inese history, this relationship is very important. It generates new instituti
ons and new ways of configuring the Chinese Empire, new ways of conceptualizin
g power and sovereigntyBuddhism, for instance. Who brings Buddhism to China?
It is not the Chinese. That transforms the philosophical, political, and relig
ious aspects of China. China would not be the same, of course. Its just a my
th that the Chinese civilization endured unchanged for two thousand years. The
re is a continuity there, but there are also breaks and moments in which the f
oreign influence is actually predominant. I work from the very beginning of th
e presence of nomadic societies on the Chinese frontiers, all the way until th
e eighteenth century, so its about two and a half millennia of reconstructin
g this relationship.

DO: On the topic of origins, how did your visit to Dumbarton Oaks come about?

NDC: Michael Maas is responsible for bringing me here. Michael and I have had,
for several years, a very productive collaboration. We are working on editing
a book calledEurasian Empires in Late Antiquityfor Cambridge University Press.
We are coeditors of the book, which grew out of a common interest in a period
of world history in which steppe nomads seem to be important: during the fall
of the Roman Empire in the Late Antique periodthe so-called period of disu
nity (a terrible term) in Chinese history between the Han and the Tang dynas
ty.

The collapse of what we might consider two strong centers of power, the Chines
e Empire and the Roman Empire, frees up a lot of political space for other pol
itical agents to assert themselves. So, you have foreign dynasties in Chinan
ot very long-lived, but important, especially in northern China. You have the
barbarian invasion in Rome. You have the new relationship with the steppe peop
le and new forms of diplomacy that emerge on both sides. Therefore, I think th
is is a very productive collaboration between East Asian scholars and European
scholars, especially those who work on the late antique and early medieval per
iod, to expand horizons on both sides and try to see the linkages between East
Asia and West Asia and the Mediterranean world.

We are recognizing a set of similarities that certainly cannot be casual: it

s this culture of nomads, of steppe people, that is permeating the political s
pace of other people, both in the west and in the east. Its very important t
o recognize that there are, perhaps, sets of networks and common political cul
tures that are expanding in this period of time and that will become important
in the medieval periodcertainly in Chinabecause the Tang dynasty is the he
ir of these foreign dynasties that flourish in northern China. Buddhism expand
s in Central Asia and East Asianot so much in the westbut the networks are
very broad. Nomads are participants in these trading and religious networks th
roughout Eurasia. We have a new way of thinking about this period, not limited
to one region or one country but more in terms of broad spaces and connections.

I think Michael was interested in some of my collaborations with scientists, c

limatologists in particular. I think this is the first lecture that addresses
the broader community of Dumbarton Oaks, not just Byzantine, Garden and Landsc
ape, or Pre-Columbian programs. I think Michael thought my interest in working
with different types of sourcesdocumentary, material sources, and scientific
proxy datamight have a broader interest outside of just our work or Eurasia
or Late Antiquity. Pre-Columbian scholars, for instance, have the same problem
s working with archaeological sources.

DO: What do you think can be borne from the relationship between traditional h
umanities scholarship and the sciences?
NDC: I work on nomadic history. We need to find other ways to understand nomad
ic history beyond the horizon of the written sources because written sources o
nly appear when nomads got out of their natural environment. What happens whil
e they are in the steppes is never represented in any way. As historians, we n
eed to put our hands on whatever information we can get. Over the past ten to
twenty years, there have been incredible advances in archaeology. Archaeology
is very much influenced by new scientific methods. Archaeology has been transf
ormed by isotopic research and climate data. Archaeology is important, but als
o a direct connection between historians and scientists is quite important; th
e development in the paleosciences is critical for the history, not just proto
history, of peoples with no writing. We can get information about their diet,
about their movements, about their environments and how their environments cha
nged, about their material culture through metallographic analysis. There is a
ll this production of climate data and many other types of data in scientific
journals that scientists just dont readI want to bring it into the histori
cal world.

DO: Did you come up against a learning curve as you branched out to begin incl
uding scientific data in your historical arguments?

NDC: Its still going on. In my bookAncient China and Its Enemies, I had to l
earn how to read archaeological reports, so that was the first learning curve
to move from documentary sources to material culture. That goes on. Theres
a methodological issuehow you interpret these thingsand the quantitative i
ssue, especially in China, where they publish constantly, and its almost imp
ossible to follow everything. Archaeology is just one additional tool kit, and
there are many tool kits. The science data is another one. In my view, we need
to put together as many tool kits as possible. Its great to read the Chinese
sources, but they are written by Chinese for the Chinese, so they only represe
nt part of the picture and need to be decoded in various ways. It is the same
with the material culture and with the science data. But as long as we can inc
rease the number of data and get a richer, more articulate picture of the envi
ronment that these people were living in, of the objects that they were able t
o produce and exchange and value, and of their movements, we can probably say
something more interesting. Its all about getting a denser, richer picture t
hat can help us understand why, at some points in time, nomads become importan
t.