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The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by [Peter Frankopan]

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Peter Frankopan

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World Kindle Edition

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INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • Far more than a history of the Silk Roads, this book is truly a revelatory new history of the world, promising to destabilize notions of where we come from and where we are headed next.

"A rare book that makes you question your assumptions about the world.” —The Wall Street Journal

From the Middle East and its political instability to China and its economic rise, the vast region stretching eastward from the Balkans across the steppe and South Asia has been thrust into the global spotlight in recent years. Frankopan teaches us that to understand what is at stake for the cities and nations built on these intricate trade routes, we must first understand their astounding pasts.

Frankopan realigns our understanding of the world, pointing us eastward. It was on the Silk Roads that East and West first encountered each other through trade and conquest, leading to the spread of ideas, cultures and religions. From the rise and fall of empires to the spread of Buddhism and the advent of Christianity and Islam, right up to the great wars of the twentieth century—this book shows how the fate of the West has always been inextricably linked to the East.

Also available: The New Silk Roads, a timely exploration of the dramatic and profound changes our world is undergoing right now—as seen from the perspective of the rising powers of the East.

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February 16, 2016
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Indeed, even in the Middle Ages, there were many more Christians in Asia than there were in Europe.
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We think of globalisation as a uniquely modern phenomenon; yet 2,000 years ago too, it was a fact of life, one that presented opportunities, created problems and prompted technological advance.
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United by a common interest in repelling the barbarian hordes, Persia and Rome now formed a remarkable alliance.
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“One of Mr. Frankopan’s gifts as a storyteller is his ability to draw unusual connections across his vast canvas . . . . Frankopan has written a rare book that makes you question your assumptions about the world.” —The Wall Street Journal

“This provocative history challenges the view of the West as heir to a pure Greco-Roman culture. . . . Frankopan marshals diverse examples to demonstrate the interconnectedness of cultures, showing in vivid detail the economic and social impact of the silk and the slave trades, the Black Death, and the Buddhist influence on Christianity.” —The New Yorker

“In his new book, The Silk Roads, Frankopan has created something that forces us to sit up and reconsider the world and the way we've always thought about it. . . . The book takes us by surprise right from the start.” —NPR

“This is deeply researched popular history at its most invigorating, primed to dislodge routine preconceptions and to pour in other light. The freshness of . . . Frankopan’s sources is stimulating, and their sheer range can provoke surprising connections. He likes to administer passing electric shocks.” —Colin Thubron, New York Review of Books

“This is history on a grand scale, with a sweep and ambition that is rare. . . . A remarkable book on many levels, a proper historical epic of dazzling range and achievement.” —William Dalrymple, The Guardian

“A glorious read. . . . Frankopan is an exhilarating companion for the journey along the routes which conveyed silk, slaves, ideas, religion, and disease, and around which today may hang the destiny of the world.” —Vanity Fair

“Dazzlingly rich and accessible. . . . By reorienting the history of the last few millennia to the east, and by resolutely keeping the camera rolling there, Frankopan unhooks us from the usual story of ‘Western Civ’ and gives us a startling and brilliant perspective on events that may once have been familiar—and plenty that aren’t.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Beautifully constructed, a terrific and exhilarating read and a new perspective on world history.” —History Today

Review

"A glorious read...Frankopan is an exhilarating companion for the journey along the routes which conveyed silk, slaves, ideas, religion, and disease and around which today may hang the destiny of the world."

-- "Vanity Fair"

"Laurence Kennedy is a solid narrator. His pacing is slow but always clear, and his voice is deep and pleasant to listen to...His cultured British accent suits Frankopan's Oxford vocabulary and English outlook."

-- "AudioFile"

"This is history on a grand scale, with a sweep and ambition that is rare...A remarkable book on many levels, a proper historical epic of dazzling range and achievement."

-- " Guardian (London)"

"This provocative history challenges the view of the West as heir to a pure Greco-Roman culture...Frankopan marshals diverse examples to demonstrate the interconnectedness of cultures, showing in vivid detail the economic and social impact of the silk and the slave trades, the Black Death, and the Buddhist influence on Christianity."

-- "New Yorker" --This text refers to the audioCD edition.

About the Author

PETER FRANKOPAN is a historian based at Oxford University. He is the author of The First Crusade: The Call from the East, a major monograph about Byzantium, Islam and the West in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. He is a senior research fellow at Worcester College, Oxford, and the director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research at Oxford University. His revised translation of The Alexiad was published in the United States in 2009. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Preface

As a child, one of my most prized possessions was a large map of the world. It was pinned on the wall by my bed, and I would stare at it every night before I went to sleep. Before long, I had memorised the names and locations of all the countries, noting their capital cities, as well as the oceans and seas, and the rivers that flowed in to them; the names of major mountain ranges and deserts, written in urgent italics, thrilled with adventure and danger.

By the time I was a teenager, I had become uneasy about the relentlessly narrow geographic focus of my classes at school, which concentrated solely on western Europe and the United States and left most of the rest of the world untouched. We had been taught about the Romans in Britain; the Norman conquest of 1066; Henry VIII and the Tudors; the American War of Independence; Victorian industrialisation; the battle of the Somme; and the rise and fall of Nazi Germany. I would look up at my map and see huge regions of the world that had been passed over in silence.

For my fourteenth birthday my parents gave me a book by the anthropologist Eric Wolf, which really lit the tinder. The accepted and lazy history of civilisation, wrote Wolf, is one where “Ancient Greece begat Rome, Rome begat Christian Europe, Christian Europe begat the Renaissance, the Renaissance the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment political democracy and the industrial revolution. Industry crossed with democracy in turn yielded the United States, embodying the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” I immediately recognised that this was exactly the story that I had been told: the mantra of the political, cultural and moral triumph of the west. But this account was flawed; there were alternative ways of looking at history—ones that did not involve looking at the past from the perspective of the winners of recent history.

I was hooked. It was suddenly obvious that the regions we were not being taught about had become lost, suffocated by the insistent story of the rise of Europe. I begged my father to take me to see the Hereford Mappa Mundi, which located Jerusalem as its focus and mid-point, with England and other western countries placed off to one side, all but irrelevancies. When I read about Arab geographers whose works were accompanied by charts that seemed upside down and put the Caspian Sea at its centre, I was transfixed—as I was when I found out about an important medieval Turkish map in Istanbul that had at its heart a city called Balāsāghūn, which I had never even heard of, which did not appear on any maps, and whose very location was uncertain until recently, and yet was once considered the centre of the world.

I wanted to know more about Russia and Central Asia, about Persia and Mesopotamia. I wanted to understand the origins of Christianity when viewed from Asia; and how the Crusades looked to those living in the great cities of the Middle Ages—Constantinople, Jerusalem, Baghdad and Cairo, for example; I wanted to learn about the great empires of the east, about the Mongols and their conquests; and to understand how two world wars looked when viewed not from Flanders or the eastern front, but from Afghanistan and India.

It was extraordinarily fortunate therefore that I was able to learn Russian at school, where I was taught by Dick Haddon, a brilliant man who had served in Naval Intelligence and believed that the way to understand the Russian language and dusha, or soul, was through its sparkling literature and its peasant music. I was even more fortunate when he offered to give Arabic lessons to those who were interested, introducing half a dozen of us to Islamic culture and history, and immersing us in the beauty of classical Arabic. These languages helped unlock a world waiting to be discovered, or, as I soon realised, to be rediscovered by those of us in the west.

Today, much attention is devoted to assessing the likely impact of rapid economic growth in China, where demand for luxury goods is forecast to quadruple in the next decade, or to considering social change in India, where more people have access to a mobile phone than to a flushing toilet. But neither offers the best vantage point to view the world’s past and its present. In fact, for millennia, it was the region lying between east and west, linking Europe with the Pacific Ocean, that was the axis on which the globe spun.

The halfway point between east and west, running broadly from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea to the Himalayas, might seem an unpromising position from which to assess the world. This is a region that is now home to states that evoke the exotic and the peripheral, like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and the countries of the Caucasus; it is a region associated with regimes that are unstable, violent and a threat to international security, like Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Syria, or ill versed in the best practices of democracy, like Russia and Azerbaijan. Overall, it appears to be a region that is home to a series of failed or failing states, led by dictators who win impossibly large majorities in national elections and whose families and friends control sprawling business interests, own vast assets and wield political power. They are places with poor records on human rights, where freedom of expression in matters of faith, conscience and sexuality is limited, and where control of the media dictates what does and what does not appear in the press.

While such countries may seem wild to us, these are no backwaters, no obscure wastelands. In fact the bridge between east and west is the very crossroads of civilisation. Far from being on the fringe of global affairs, these countries lie at its very centre—as they have done since the beginning of history. It was here that Civilisation was born, and where many believed Mankind had been created—in the Garden of Eden, “planted by the Lord God” with “every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food,” which was widely thought to be located in the rich fields between the Tigris and Euphrates.

It was in this bridge between east and west that great metropolises were established nearly 5,000 years ago, where the cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro in the Indus valley were wonders of the ancient world, with populations numbering in the tens of thousands and streets connecting into a sophisticated sewage system that would not be rivalled in Europe for thousands of years. Other great centres of civilisation such as Babylon, Nineveh, Uruk and Akkad in Mesopotamia were famed for their grandeur and architectural innovation. One Chinese geographer, meanwhile, writing more than two millennia ago, noted that the inhabitants of Bactria, centred on the Oxus river and now located in northern Afghanistan, were legendary negotiators and traders; its capital city was home to a market where a huge range of products were bought and sold, carried from far and wide.

This region is where the world’s great religions burst into life, where Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism jostled with each other. It is the cauldron where language groups competed, where Indo-European, Semitic and Sino-Tibetan tongues wagged alongside those speaking Altaic, Turkic and Caucasian. This is where great empires rose and fell, where the after-effects of clashes between cultures and rivals were felt thousands of miles away. Standing here opened up new ways to view the past and showed a world that was profoundly interconnected, where what happened on one continent had an impact on another, where the after-shocks of what happened on the steppes of Central Asia could be felt in North Africa, where events in Baghdad resonated in Scandinavia, where discoveries in the Americas altered the prices of goods in China and led to a surge in demand in the horse markets of northern India.

These tremors were carried along a network that fans out in every direction, routes along which pilgrims and warriors, nomads and merchants have travelled, goods and produce have been bought and sold, and ideas exchanged, adapted and refined. They have carried not only prosperity, but also death and violence, disease and disaster. In the late nineteenth century, this sprawling web of connections was given a name by an eminent German geologist, Ferdinand von Richthofen (uncle of the First World War flying ace the “Red Baron”) that has stuck ever since: “Seidenstraßen”—the Silk Roads.

These pathways serve as the world’s central nervous system, connecting peoples and places together, but lying beneath the skin, invisible to the naked eye. Just as anatomy explains how the body functions, understanding these connections allows us to understand how the world works. And yet, despite the importance of this part of the world, it has been forgotten by mainstream history. In part, this is because of what has been called “orientalism”—the strident and overwhelmingly negative view of the east as undeveloped and inferior to the west, and therefore unworthy of serious study. But it also stems from the fact that the narrative of the past has become so dominant and well established that there is no place for a region that has long been seen as peripheral to the story of the rise of Europe and of western society.

Today, Jalalabad and Herat in Afghanistan, Fallujah and Mosul in Iraq or Homs and Aleppo in Syria seem synonymous with religious fundamentalism and sectarian violence. The present has washed away the past: gone are the days when the name of Kabul conjured up images of the gardens planted and tended by the great Bābur, founder of the Mughal Empire in India. The Bagh-i-Wafa (“Garden of Fidelity”) included a pool surrounded by orange and pomegranate trees and a clover meadow—of which Bābur was extremely proud: “This is the best part of the garden, a most beautiful sight when the oranges take colour. Truly that garden is admirably situated!”

In the same way, modern impressions about Iran have obscured the glories of its more distant history when its Persian predecessor was a byword for good taste in everything, from the fruit served at dinner, to the stunning miniature portraits produced by its legendary artists, to the paper that scholars wrote on. A beautifully considered work written by Simi Nīshāpūrī, a librarian from Mashad in eastern Iran around 1400, records in careful detail the advice of a book lover who shared his passion. Anyone thinking of writing, he counsels solemnly, should be advised that the best paper for calligraphy is produced in Damascus, Baghdad or Samarkand. Paper from elsewhere “is generally rough, blotches and is impermanent.” Bear in mind, he cautions, that it is worth giving paper a slight tint before committing ink to it, “because white is hard on the eyes and the master calligraphic specimens that have been observed have all been on tinted paper.”

Places whose names are all but forgotten once dominated, such as Merv, described by one tenth-century geographer as a “delightful, fine, elegant, brilliant, extensive and pleasant city,” and “the mother of the world”; or Rayy, not far from modern Teheran, which to another writer around the same time was so glorious as to be considered “the bridegroom of the earth” and the world’s “most beautiful creation.” Dotted across the spine of Asia, these cities were strung like pearls, linking the Pacific to the Mediterranean.

Urban centres spurred each other on, with rivalry between rulers and elites prompting ever more ambitious architecture and spectacular monuments. Libraries, places of worship, churches and observatories of immense scale and cultural influence dotted the region, connecting Constantinople to Damascus, Isfahan, Samarkand, Kabul and Kashgar. Cities such as these became home to brilliant scholars who advanced the frontiers of their subjects. The names of only a small handful are familiar today—men like Ibn Sīnā, better known as Avicenna, al-Bīrūnī _and al-Khwārizmi—giants in the fields of astronomy and medicine; but there were many more besides. For centuries before the early modern era, the intellectual centres of excellence of the world, the Oxfords and Cambridges, the Harvards and Yales, were not located in Europe or the west, but in Baghdad and Balkh, Bukhara and Samarkand.

There was good reason why the cultures, cities and peoples who lived along the Silk Roads developed and advanced: as they traded and exchanged ideas, they learnt and borrowed from each other, stimulating further advances in philosophy, the sciences, language and religion. Progress was essential, as one of the rulers of the kingdom of Zhao in north-eastern China at one extremity of Asia more than 2,000 years ago knew all too well. “A talent for following the ways of yesterday,” declared King Wu-ling in 307 bc, “is not sufficient to improve the world of today.” Leaders in the past understood how important it was to keep up with the times.

The mantle of progress shifted, however, in the early modern period as a result of two great maritime expeditions that took place at the end of the fifteenth century. In the course of six years in the 1490s, the foundations were laid for a major disruption to the rhythm of long-established systems of exchange. First Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic, paving the way for two great land masses that were hitherto untouched to connect to Europe and beyond; then, just a few years later, Vasco da Gama successfully navigated the southern tip of Africa, sailing on to India, opening new sea routes in the process. The discoveries changed patterns of interaction and trade, and effected a remarkable change in the world’s political and economic centre of gravity. Suddenly, western Europe was transformed from its position as a regional backwater into the fulcrum of a sprawling communication, transportation and trading system: at a stroke, it became the new mid-point between east and west.

The rise of Europe sparked a fierce battle for power—and for control of the past. As rivals squared up to each other, history was reshaped to emphasise the events, themes and ideas that could be used in the ideological clashes that raged alongside the struggle for resources and for command of the sea lanes. Busts were made of leading politicians and generals wearing togas to make them look like Roman heroes of the past; magnificent new buildings were constructed in grand classical style that appropriated the glories of the ancient world as their own direct antecedents. History was twisted and manipulated to create an insistent narrative where the rise of the west was not only natural and inevitable, but a continuation of what had gone before.

Many stories set me on the path to looking at the world’s past in a different way. But one stood out in particular. Greek mythology had it that Zeus, father of the gods, released two eagles, one at each end of the earth, and commanded them to fly towards each other. A sacred stone, the omphalos—the navel of the world—was placed where they met, to enable communication with the divine. I learnt later that the concept of this stone has long been a source of fascination for philosophers and psychoanalysts.

I remember gazing at my map when I first heard this tale, wondering where the eagles would have met. I imagined them taking off from the shores of the western Atlantic and the Pacific coast of China and heading inland. The precise position changed, depending where I placed my fingers to start measuring equal distances from east and west. But I always ended up somewhere between the Black Sea and the Himalayas. I would lie awake at night, pondering the map on my bedroom wall, Zeus’ eagles and the history of a region that was never mentioned in the books that I read—and did not have a name.

Not so long ago, Europeans divided Asia into three broad zones—the Near, Middle and Far East. Yet whenever I heard or read about present-day problems as I was growing up, it seemed that the second of these, the Middle East, had shifted in meaning and even location, being used to refer to Israel, Palestine and the surrounding area, and occasionally to the Persian Gulf. And I could not understand why I kept being told of the importance of the Mediterranean as a cradle of civilisation, when it seemed so obvious that this was not where civilisation had really been forged. The real crucible, the “Mediterranean” in its literal meaning—the centre of the world—was not a sea separating Europe and North Africa, but right in the heart of Asia.

My hope is that I can embolden others to study peoples and places that have been ignored by scholars for generations by opening up new questions and new areas of research. I hope to prompt new questions to be asked about the past, and for truisms to be challenged and scrutinised. Above all, I hope to inspire those who read this book to look at history in a different way.

Worcester College, Oxford
April 2015 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00XST7IX2
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; Reprint edition (February 16, 2016)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ February 16, 2016
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 78106 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 657 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 1408839997

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Robin Wakeman Salmans

Examining the Long History of What is now Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 28, 2018

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Author Peter Frankopan sets out, mostly successfully, to reorient our knowledge of history as taught in Europe and North America — history as viewed through the lens of Western Civilization courses. My quibble is that this is still a view of Central Asia though European eyes, and arguably the author pays slight attention to the history of ancient India and China and overplays the history of Central Asia and Western misconceptions of the Mongols.

Frankopan’s main thesis is that the region stretching from the Mediterranean to China, and particularly the region that is now Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, remains the crossroads of civilization and the center of global affairs. As such, we need to understand ancient history and historical development over more recent centuries, as well as the way history is perceived by those in the region.

The book proceeds chronologically. Chapter headings trace the many “silk roads” that have influenced global history, including the emergence and migration of major forms of religious faith, the rise and fall of empires at a time when Europe was an uncivilized backwater, and the role of trade as a conduit for the spread of ideas and wealth.

We learn, for example, that the early expansion of Islam was benign. Often the major religions coexisted peacefully. Mohammed and the Jews needed each other as both repudiated Jesus as the Messiah. In Damascus, churches were untouched even as Islam became the religion of the majority. Only after divisions began to develop in Islam did attitudes harden toward other religions, says the author.

Western Europe in the 600s and 700s was barbaric, while Baghdad was at the height of its wealth and academic achievement. Thus, traders and intellectuals along the Mediterranean were oriented toward the East, not Western Europe. Among conventional beliefs that Frankopan seeks to puncture is the notion that the Mongols were chaotic. Instead he says they were good bureaucrats and operated as a meritocracy. Terror was applied selectively but was broadcast broadly as a tool of coercion. The result was to control wealthy territories with a minimum of effort.

As Elizabethan England competed with Spain, says the author, there was an opportunistic alliance with the Muslim world against a common enemy. Both the English and the Moors engaged in piracy against the Spanish and Portuguese. The English freed Muslims who had been “galley slaves” and returned them home, and had Muslim support for the 1596 attack on Cadiz. Shakespeare portrays positively the Moor in Othello and Persia was also characterized favorably in English literature of the time.

By the late 18th and early 19th Century, however, the power relationship between rising Western European powers and Persia and neighboring countries had been reversed. India became a crown jewel in the British Empire and the British became preoccupied with fear of Russian expansion into Persia. Misunderstandings were rife. “The British cannot say what they mean and the Persians do not mean what they say,” noted one observer.

In the aftermath of World War I, the British created Iraq out of Mesopotamia, arbitrarily combining a hodgepodge of nationalities. As oil was discovered in Iraq and Iran, the British moved quickly to exploit these resources and minimize the royalties that were paid to the nations from which oil was extracted. Dissatisfaction with British oil companies resulted in a greater role for American oil companies, but the exploitation of the region changed little until OPEC was formed.

The final 40% of the book is devoted to British and American ignorance and arrogance in the 20th and 21st Centuries, resulting in the support of the Shah in Iran, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and Ayub Khan in Pakistan among others. Frankopan characterizes British, then American strategy as “solving today’s problems without worrying too much about tomorrow’s problems.”
This is useful background for anyone trying to understand the resentment felt in Iraq and Iran toward the West today.

As Frankopan looks forward, there is little analysis of the potential role of China in the balance of power that could shape the region’s future or of India whose population and economy are among the world’s largest and fastest-growing.

Instead, with an emphasis on what was once known as Mesopotamia, the author asserts that, “the Silk Roads are rising up once more.” Events that appear chaotic instead are the “birthing pains of a region that once dominated the intellectual, cultural and economic landscape of the world…We are seeing the signs of the world’s centre of gravity shifting — back to where it lay for millennia.” This seems an optimistic analysis.

In sum, the value for many readers will be found in the first half of the book, as a balance to the history taught in the West. The resentments held in the region toward American and British influence are the result not just of recent decades but of exploitation taking place in the past 100 years. Oddly, though, the author’s contemporary assessment of the region seems viewed through the same Western lens that he criticizes as having warped our understanding of the past.

213 people found this helpful

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Kindle Customer

Great read

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 29, 2023

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Insightful, eye opening and finding a way to glue together history around the center of the world through the silk road.

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Ali Sedehi

Must Read

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 4, 2023

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For anyone that is interested in current affairs—this book is a must read. The author does a fantastic job of highlighting the history from antiquity to modern times, and the role that empires—including the US and UK—have played in forming the current world order.

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Not quite a decentralized look at EurAsia

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 3, 2022

Verified Purchase

This text is well written and well researched. Not sure what bias one of the lengthy one star reviews is talking about. Not going to get into a refutation of those complaints. What needs to be recognized here is that the focus on Europe in a history about trade routes that didn’t include Europe for quite a while is suspicious and yet this is a much better perspective than A PEOPLES HISTORY OF THE WORLD which couldn’t get out of Europe no matter how hard it tried.

I think the most impressive section is the one covering the 20th century where the author manages to weave together a number of various disasters caused mostly by the British, Russians, and Americans (as well as Iran and Iraq with the help of said Europeans).

I felt that the absence of China in various points was odd since it was Chinese silk that named these roads but overall this was a fascinating read.

I followed this up with DESTINY DISRUPTED which is a history of the world from the perspective of Islam. That gave some great perspective to this book and is recommended for anyone who read SILK ROADS.

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kyounghwa esther sung

Reading this book is the simple way to take a few stride forward to the reality of how the world works.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 2, 2017

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THE SILK ROADS by Peter Frankopan
A New History Of The World

It's true to say that history is a story told by the winner. It's all very well to get a big head and wield a sword as a now victor; but it's of pivotal importance to remember that forces on the other side or on the periphery would be flexing their muscles, on the alert for a chance to settle scores.

Peter Frankopan, a historian based at Oxford University and the author of THE SILK ROADS, has a prodigiously profound insight on historical events and is an extraordinarily hard-working researcher which we know from 100 pages of notes and bibliography accompanying 507 pages of text. This book is something none other than Peter himself couldn't have written. He pulled multiple strands together in this single great work. An epic story indeed! Incredibly informative and compellingly attractive. This ambitious book spans centries, continents and cultures. It shows a historical tapestry woven with his epochal perspective: how cultures, slaves, products, natural resources, religions and ways of life have been traded for over two thousand years; how the center of powers has changed so far and which it's heading into.

This book takes the form of a series of what marked milestones in global history chronologically arranged from ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia to the Crusades to the post ww2 era to the recent consideration of Turkey joining the SCO not the EU to the present when half-a-mile-long trains carrying millions of products from China to Germany in just sixteen days and vice versa. It of course includes factual accounts of events with the additional explanations on the causality between some nitty-gritty issues. But what the author is really willing to give is a warning against solving today's problems without worrying tomorrow's. THE SILK ROADS enables us all who read it to see a broad region that had been or is in turmoil. It reveals the dangers of the lack of perspective about global history. Great turning points in human history, I've learned from this book, have been bound together by, against the backdrop of, many big and small talks and decisions which occurred in the barren steppes, in conference rooms, on the phone and sometimes in a prison cell.

I owe much to Peter Frankopan. My knowledge of the world history was admittedly sparse. When it comes to history related literature, I, as a person who had no interest in the stuff of global history, have only read several books focusing on a narrow subject matter over shortening timeframesㅡUNBROKEN, ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE, DEAD WAKE, just to name a few. Now, after reading this book from beginning to end, highlighting and underlining sentences, making notes in the margins, I feel my heart ten times more fluttering than when I first saw the jacket image of an incredibly beautiful decorative ceiling of a certain madrasah in Uzbekistan. There is a greater quiver of excitement now in my mind than there was just after reading 7-page preface which made me all aflutter in anticipation of the following text.

The bottom line: go online with your smart phone to do a search for THE SILK ROADS by Peter Frankopan, add it to cart and proceed to checkout! Some time later you would take a few stride forward to the reality of how the world works.

9 people found this helpful

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consumer in Charlotte

thoughtful, commodity-centered, Middle East-focused perspective

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 7, 2023

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Fascinating, readable history through around 1800. It then sharply weakens as it approaches contemporary times, to the point of becoming barely convincing, as the central metaphor becomes increasingly strained. Well worth reading for the thoughtful, commodity-centered, Middle East-focused perspective.

5 people found this helpful

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Ignacio Gomez Maya

Great history book

Reviewed in Mexico 🇲🇽 on April 15, 2023

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Offers a wonderful sight of the ignored human history. Goes beyond typical academic scope. Openeye of the new world order that is comming.

BP

Money makes the world go round... and maybe go bust.

Reviewed in Spain 🇪🇸 on August 3, 2022

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Buen libro que dibuja la historia humana en grandes rasgos seguiendo las rutas de la codicia humana para con todo lo que le hace a uno persona/región/país ricos e influyentes.

No apto para mentes idealistas que sueñan con una humanidad más social, más justa, más empática. El libro peca de pintarlo todo demasiado "bonito", desde la óptica de una élite exitosa, sobre todo en la era antigua. No hay una historia aquí sobre el sufrimiento de gran parte de la humanidad por conseguir ese "éxito" (cuestionable) de unos pocos.

2 people found this helpful

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Kosmix

Lettura per appassionati conoscitori delle relazioni fra Occidente e Asia

Reviewed in Italy 🇮🇹 on September 16, 2017

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Frankopan è un accademico, direttore del Centro di ricerche bizantine a Oxford. Tutta l'opera sembra molto "persianocentrica", le 'Vie della seta' del titolo sono le arterie lungo le quali persone, merci, idee, religioni, eserciti e malattie hanno viaggiato, da/per il Mediterraneo e verso l'Asia.
Il libro presuppone la conoscenza di vari particolari storici-politici, khan, anche se c'è qualche svarione (specie relativo a fatti concretamente avvenuti nell'epoca delle Crociate e in Vicino Oriente).
Ciò nonostante, è un libro davvero intrigante e affascinante, con l'immaginazione fa viaggiare.

One person found this helpful

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格さん

内容と地名

Reviewed in Japan 🇯🇵 on April 7, 2017

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内容は非常に面白いが、地名が我々の知っている現在の地名と異なるので、一寸興味が減退する。

9 people found this helpful

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Jessica

this is, by far, the best history book I've read

Reviewed in Mexico 🇲🇽 on May 1, 2022

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the best thing about this book is that it makes you want to read 1,000+ more books about all sorts of different topics

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