Encyclopedia of Mongolia and the Mongol Empire

Christopher P. Atwood is a historian of Mongolia and Inner Asia, and this Facts on File volume is a single author reference encyclopedia covering the Mongol Empire and the broader Turkic Mongolic steppe world from the early khaganates through the modern period. Its strength is unusual for a reference work of this scope, one specialist scholar wrote every entry, giving it a consistency of interpretation and sourcing that a multi contributor encyclopedia cannot match, while still covering an enormous range of topics, peoples and periods. Its limit is the tradeoff that comes with single authorship at this scale, individual entries are necessarily concise summaries rather than deep original research, so a claim needing extended argument on one narrow topic is better served by a focused monograph than by an encyclopedia entry, however well sourced.