Jack Weatherford

Jack Weatherford is a celebrated anthropologist whose bestselling biography Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World radically transformed our understanding of the Mongols and their legacy. He has spent eighteen years exploring areas of Mongolia closed until the fall of the Soviet Union and researching The Secret History of the Mongols, an astonishing document written in code that was only recently discovered. 

Jack Weatherford holds the DeWitt Wallace Chair of Anthropology at Macalester College in Minnesota, and an honorary position at Chinggis Khaan University in Mongolia. In 2007 he received the Order of the Polar Star, the highest award for service to the Mongol Nation for writing Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, which has been translated into seventeen languages and has sold over 355,000 copies in North America alone.

A specialist in tribal peoples, he was for many years a professor of anthropology at Macalaster College in Minnesota and divides his time between the United States and Mongolia.

Bestselling author Jack Weatherford is currently researching and writing his next work,

EMPEROR OF THE SEAS,

to be published by Bloomsbury in September 2024.

Emperor of the Seas: Kublai Khan and the Making of China

Genghis Khan built a formidable land empire, but he never crossed the sea. Yet by the time his grandson Kublai Khan had defeated the last vestiges of the Song empire and established the Yuan dynasty in 1279, the Mongols controlled the most powerful navy in the world. How did a nomad come to conquer China and master the sea? Based on ten years of research and a lifetime of immersion in Mongol culture and tradition, Emperor of the Seas brings this little-known story vibrantly to life.

Kublai Khan is one of history's most fascinating characters. He brought Islamic mathematicians to his court, where they invented modern cartography and celestial measurement. He transformed the world's largest land mass into a unified, diverse and economically progressive empire, introducing paper money. And, after bitter early setbacks, he transformed China into an outward looking sea-faring empire.

By the end of his reign, the Chinese were building and supplying remarkable ships to transport men, grain, and weapons over vast distances, of a size and dexterity that would be inconceivable in Europe for hundreds of years. Khan had come to a brilliant realization: control the sea, and you control everything.

A master storyteller with an unparalleled grasp of Mongol sources, Jack Weatherford shows how Chinese naval hegemony changed the world forever - revolutionizing world commerce and transforming tastes as far away as England and France.

(Bloomsbury, October 2024)

Genghis Kahn and the Making of the Modern World

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

The startling true history of how one extraordinary man from a remote corner of the world created an empire that led the world into the modern age—by the author featured in Echoes of the Empire: Beyond Genghis Khan.

The Mongol army led by Genghis Khan subjugated more lands and people in twenty-five years than the Romans did in four hundred. In nearly every country the Mongols conquered, they brought an unprecedented rise in cultural communication, expanded trade, and a blossoming of civilization. Vastly more progressive than his European or Asian counterparts, Genghis Khan abolished torture, granted universal religious freedom, and smashed feudal systems of aristocratic privilege.

From the story of his rise through the tribal culture to the explosion of civilization that the Mongol Empire unleashed, this brilliant work of revisionist history is nothing less than the epic story of how the modern world was made.

(Crown, March 2005)

Indian Givers: How Native Americans Transformed the World

An utterly compelling story of how the cultural, social, and political practices of Native Americans transformed the way life is lived throughout the world, with a new introduction by the author.

“As entertaining as it is thoughtful . . . Few contemporary writers have Weatherford’s talent for making the deep sweep of history seem vital and immediate.”—The Washington Post

After 500 years, the world’s huge debt to the wisdom of the Native Americans has finally been explored in all its vivid drama by anthropologist Jack Weatherford. He traces the crucial contributions made by the Native Americans to our federal system of government, our democratic institutions, modern medicine, agriculture, architecture, and ecology, and in this astonishing, ground-breaking book takes a giant step toward recovering a true American history.

(Crown, August 2010)

The Secret History of the Mongol Queens

The Mongol queens of the thirteenth century ruled the largest empire the world has ever known. The daughters of the Silk Route turned their father’s conquests into the first truly international empire, fostering trade, education, and religion throughout their territories and creating an economic system that stretched from the Pacific to the Mediterranean.

Yet sometime near the end of the century, censors cut a section about the queens from the Secret History of the Mongols, and, with that one act, the dynasty of these royals had seemingly been extinguished forever, as even their names were erased from the historical record.

With The Secret History of the Mongol Queens, a groundbreaking and magnificently researched narrative, Jack Weatherford restores the queens’ missing chapter to the annals of history.

(Crown, February 2010)