Was Genghis Khan the World’s First Globalist?

We usually remember Genghis Khan as history’s ultimate destroyer but what if he was also its first great economic integrator? In this episode, we rethink the Mongol Empire not as pure terror, but as the largest continuous free‑trade zone the world has ever seen, stretching from Korea to Ukraine. By reopening the Silk Road after a thousand years, the Mongols allowed ideas, technologies, and capital to flow from China to Europe; paper, gunpowder, money, insurance, trade associations, even early globalisation itself. The same networks that spread innovation also carried the Black Death, halving Europe’s population and accidentally laying the economic foundations for the Renaissance. From biological warfare to free movement of people and goods, this is the story of how a nomadic empire reshaped the global economy, and why globalization is far older, darker, and stranger than we like to admit.

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