The Silk Roads

The short analysis

Most popular accounts of world history begin and end in Europe, moving from classical antiquity to the Renaissance to the age of European empires. Peter Frankopan's 'The Silk Roads' challenges that framing at its root. His argument is that the real engine of history for most of the past two millennia was the vast web of overland and maritime trade routes connecting China, Central Asia, Persia, the Arab world, and the eastern Mediterranean. Goods, ideas, religions, diseases, and political power all travelled those corridors, and the civilisations that controlled them were, for most of recorded history, wealthier and more sophisticated than anything in western Europe. Frankopan draws on sources from across Eurasia to show that the rise of Islam, the Mongol conquests, the Black Death, and the eventual European push into the Atlantic were all deeply shaped by what was happening along these routes. Europe's so-called Age of Discovery, he contends, was less a story of bold curiosity than a scramble to find a new path to the riches that had long flowed through the East after Ottoman and other powers tightened their grip on older corridors. The result is a book that does not so much rewrite history as relocate its centre of gravity, inviting readers to see the modern world as a consequence of connections that ran through Samarkand and Baghdad long before they ran through London or Lisbon.