A key feature of the history of East Asia, and of Eurasia as a whole, was the intermittent rise of empire from out of the pastoral grasslands of Inner Asia. The basis of their power—out of all proportion to population size—was the ability to raise effective cavalry armies made up of all the men in the community. The most famous example of this is, of course, the rise of the Mongols in the thirteenth century. An earlier example is visited in Chen Hao’s A History of the Second Türk Empire (ca. 682–745 AD). The book makes some substantive contributions to the study of this state, while showing the need for further work in this field.

The term Türk itself has two overlapping meanings. As used in Chen’s book, and as used in the eighth-century Orkhon stele inscriptions that are the book’s central focus, Türk is the self-selected name of...

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