In this useful book, Elizabeth Endicott describes the past and present of land use in Mongolia and offers some valuable lessons and suggestions for the future in a rapidly changing Mongolia. As she notes in her introduction, Endicott (emerita in history at Middlebury College) writes from a historian's perspective but with a hope that the work will be of interest to policymakers, particularly those in Mongolia. Thus, although she alludes to the more recondite scholarly debates on the topic, her approach is broad and her language nontechnical. As a result, A History of Land Use in Mongolia will undoubtedly be welcomed by the broader public that is interested in what is happening in Mongolia today and how policies can be crafted to preserve the economically, socially, and culturally valuable aspects of mobile pastoralism alongside the development of mining, arable agriculture, and tourism. With its broad range, nontechnical style, and focus on the present, a more affordable paperback edition could also serve undergraduate instructors as an accessible introduction to nomadism in Mongolia.

A History of Land Use in Mongolia is divided into seven chapters. After surveying the current controversies over land use in Mongolia in the introduction, Endicott describes the various ecological and vegetational zones in Mongolia, and how terrain, climate, insects, availability of wood, and other factors shape the differing patterns of khangai (partially wooded mountain steppe), steppe, and gobi (habitable desert and semi-desert) nomadism in Mongolia. Here, as throughout, her focus is limited to the lands within the current state of Mongolia (Mongol uls), formerly known as “Outer Mongolia.” In chapter 3, she covers the history of land use in Mongolia from the time of the Mongol empire in the thirteenth century up to the eve of the twentieth century, with a special focus on changes generated by the growth of Buddhist monasteries and the distinctive institutions adopted by the Qing empire in Mongolia. Chapter 4 then describes how land use and mobile pastoralism changed in the twentieth century, focusing on the collectives that were introduced in the late 1950s and shaped Mongolian rural life until the democratic transition of 1990–92. While the historical survey is mostly well done, it is too brief to more than touch on many important issues.

Chapters 5 (“Post-1990 Developments”), 6 (“Agriculture, Mining, and Tourism”), and 7 (“Concluding Thoughts”) constitute the heart of the book and will be of greatest interest to scholars and the general public. In contrast to much of the literature on the Mongolian postsocialist transition, which is often either unrelievedly negative or positive, Endicott's book offers a judicious assessment of the pluses and minuses of the post-1990 privatization process, the activities of foreign aid organizations in Mongolia, plans for rebuilding collectives on a voluntary basis, dispute resolution in pastoral land use, and the 2002 land law. Endicott also covers the controversies inherent in Mongolia's bipartisan push to promote mining as the main economic engine and agriculture as a way to protect national security and self-sufficiency. Brief comparisons with Kazakhstan, Inner Mongolia, and the Tibetan plateau highlight many of the distinctive features of the Mongolian path of modernization. Finally, she presents a cautiously optimistic picture of the future of pastoral nomadism in modern Mongolia and offers some suggestions for how policymakers could, without altering the fundamental path of Mongolian development, preserve it as an economically viable and culturally valued way of life in the future.

In presenting her survey, Endicott relies largely on the published literature. In treating such a vast topic in a little over 200 pages, selectivity is necessary, yet it is surprising to see rich and insightful works like Alekseĭ Matveevich Pozdneyev's Mongolia and the Mongols (1896–98; English translation, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971) and Tomasz Potkanski and Slavoj Szynkiewicz's Social Context of Liberalisation of the Mongolian Pastoral Economy (Brighton, U.K.: Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, 1993) omitted. On the other hand, she makes excellent use of the likewise rich research of A. D. Simukov, who in the 1930s, before his tragic death in the Stalinist purges, laid much of the conceptual and empirical groundwork for the study of Mongolian mobile pastoralism.

Endicott also draws on her thirty-three years of experience traveling in Mongolia, visiting most of the provinces for longer or shorter periods of time. While she has not done concentrated ethnographic or anthropological fieldwork, her long experience in the country shows both in the balanced assessment of numerous controversial issues today and in her obvious affection for rural Mongolia's people. Together with her many well-chosen photographs, this fair-minded sympathy makes A History of Land Use in Mongolia an appealing classroom introduction to the past, present, and future of mobile pastoralism in Mongolia. A cheaper paperback edition would be very welcome.