René Grousset

Biography

French historian and orientalist, born in the Gard in 1885 and died in Paris in 1952. He long directed the Musée Guimet and was one of the leading French scholars of Asian history in the first half of the twentieth century, writing on Central Asia, the Mongols, China and the Far East. His major work, L'Empire des steppes (The Empire of the Steppes, 1939), was the first to narrate the nomadic polities of the Eurasian steppe as one continuous whole, and remains a reference point in Turco-Mongol studies.