This book disappointed me. Central Asian history is definitely a neglected part of my education, so I was excited to dive into a big book by an Oxford history professor on the topic. Having read it, I suggest that people look elsewhere to educate themselves.
This book is a feel-good history of central Asia. But it's also misleading, and consistently anti-western in its bias. It's pro-central Asia--wildly pro-central Asia, like what you'd expect from drunken football fans. I can't think of a reason I need a history that tells such a cleaned up one-sided tale. His narrative is so pro-central Asia that many of the events he includes can't be made sense of. He spends so many chapters explaining the daring architecture of central Asia, the incredible gardens, the breath-taking palaces (only once mentioning the slaves!) and keeps commenting on how backwards Europe was during this time (500's through 1500's). And then suddenly Europeans have the most advanced ocean-going ships in the world! How did that happen? He says it's because they fought so much. They fought their way to the best ships in the world. It doesn't make any sense.
History can't be objective. Selecting one fact over infinite others makes the presentation unavoidably biased. But one can have a clean bias, one can be upfront with their thesis. Frankopan fails to do this the whole way through. Instead of a thesis he has themes. Like the "unique violence of Europe," which he returns to many times. Or the assertion that Europe was uniquely greedy, and this explains its actions and outcomes. He doesn't seem to miss any opportunities to point out European excesses, violence, and greed. But always forgets to look for financial motives or mention the masscres, or the intolerance of Persia, or the Muslim caliphate.
I could write about Frankopan's bad theories on the unique violence of Europe. I could dissect his claim that Islam takes better care of women than Christian Europe does, in the area of inheritance. I could give a critique of his poor understanding of economics based on the outsized significance he places on trade and the absence of the role of private property, banking, capitalism, and a well-paid consumer class. I could argue against his dark age thesis after the fall of Rome. I could argue against his case that the Persian empire and the Muslim kingdoms were bastions of tolerance and learning. These were all terrible problems in his history that ruined this book as a useful source of information. But I'll keep my critique to 3 concrete problems with his text.
First the good. This is a very easy to read history book, compelling even; I always wanted to pick it up and find out what happened next. And he included some interesting details I had never heard about. The giant Buddhas of Bamiyan that stood in northern Afghanistan for 1500 years until the Taliban blew them up, that was interesting. He spoke of some remarkable scholarship carried out by middle easterners from the 800's to 1100's. I became curious and looked into it some more. One of the men he mentioned, just briefly, Ibn al-Haytham, actually put the finishing touch on the scientific method in Egypt in 1021 when he published a book on astronomy and optics and proposed that along with the Greek insights of observing nature and using reason, we should also conduct experiments to verify our theories. He didn't start a scientific revolution, but he seems to be the first person to publish and advocate for such an approach. I didn't know!
But where this book goes wrong seems to be everywhere else. There's no clear thesis. He sprinkles outrageous claims throughout the book without supporting them with any reasoning or evidence, and even sometimes contrary to the narrative he just finished laying out. To keep the flow moving along he is very sparing with his insertion of numbers. I started circling dates on the pages, because he'd go for pages without giving a date, just narrating events, and I'd page back trying to find where we were in the timeline again. There are very few other numbers. When Alexander the Great defeated a "vastly superior Persian army"(6), how many men did each side have? (Best estimates are: 100,000 Persians, 40,000 Greeks. Resulting in 40,000 dead on the Persian side, and only 500 dead Greeks. Wow!) You'll be glad wikipedia is more obliging than Frankopan.
Or this, the "1956 military action began against Egypt, with British and French forces moving to secure the canal zone..."(410). Frankopan suggests this intervention was due to Western greed and Imperial proclivities. He's bizarrely circumspect when it comes to the Suez canal, even though his whole book is purportedly about the trade linkages between east and west, of which the Suez is clearly the most important, after the European standardization of ocean-crossing trade. Again, thanks to the internet I was able to discover the real story. The French went to the administrator of the department of Egypt, Sa'id, and in 1856 signed a concession to build a canal, and operate it for 99 years from the time of the completion of the construction, which was in 1869. So the Suez canal company should have legally maintained operation until 1968. They raised money by selling shares in the company. Egypt bought 44% of the shares, but later sold them to the British when they got into some financial trouble. It took 10 years and $100 million to build. That's $2.7 billion in today's dollars. So when Egyptian president Gamal Nasser seized the canal and nationalized it, the French and British felt their legal and financial rights had been violated, because they had been. Nasser deprived the British and French of 12 years of proceeds legally due to them. Nasser said that it was unjust that Egypt wasn't earning anything from the canal, but that's what happens when you sell all your shares in an enterprise. Frankopan agrees with Nasser, while explaining none of the ways the British and French had funded, engineered, even invented the machinery necessary to do the task.
Frankopan does a biased curation of events to make either Christians or the West look like the bad guys. He cites some wrongs that can't be disputed. Britain seized control of Bengal. Britain forced the sale of opium to the Chinese despite the fierce objection of Chinese rulers. The French and British looting and burning of the Summer Palace in Beijing wasn't nice. Or the terrible act of a British destroyer ramming a Jewish refugee ship so it couldn't go to Palestine. And then returning the holocaust survivors to Germany, etc. etc. There are plenty of wrongs that the West is guilty of.
But I'm not sure how to understand a host of wrongs he blames the West for that the West wasn't guilty of. "The Mayan Empire had also been flourishing before the arrival of the Europeans"(231). What a bizarre thing to say! The Mayan empire fell due to a host of factors almost 600 years before the Europeans arrived. And I don't think I'd say they were flourishing exactly when they were in the midst of a self-created ecological collapse, an incredibly bloody civil war, and a drought. Is he saying things were generally better for people in the Americas before Europeans came?
Or he expresses his admiration for the Incan civilization and how the elites were required to work in the fields a certain number of days each year so as not to "affront the poor" (252). He describes these societies as "enlightened in comparison to the highly stratified societies" of Europe. As if the Incan and Aztec societies weren't highly stratified. As if it's better to have the elites do a couple days of pretend work than it is to have a much more wealthy and prosperous working class like Europe had.
Another strange passage "...its global significance [The D'Arcy oil concession from Iran] is on a par with Columbus' trans-Atlantic discovery of 1492. Then too, immense treasures and riches had been expropriated by the conquistadores and shipped back to Europe. The same thing happened again" (320). First, I wouldn't characterize what happened in the Americas this way. I guess the similarity is that in both cases European powers benefited? That's an incredibly thin similarity. Expropriated is a fancy way of saying "stolen." When Frankopan made the above statement he had just finished one of his more detailed accounts, filling 6 pages, explaining how Knox D'Arcy wasn't interested in this venture, he had to be recruited to it by a Persian agent. Then they spent an unknown amount of time greasing palms in Persia to get a contract (a concession) signed by the Shah. Both parties freely agreed to it. The Shah was paid 20,000 pounds up front, 20,000 pound in shares of the company, and 16% annual royalty on net profits. All he had to do was sign the paper. D'Arcy's oil company had to do all the work. After 3 years of drilling and getting nothing, and multiple rounds of seeking additional investors, they finally had their big strike right at the edge of bankruptcy. And once the oil started to flow, and the profits, suddenly elements in Persia became resentful, claiming the deal was unjust, and Frankopan seems to agree! I wish he'd clarify what the exact injustice is. Because despite his lengthy account, I can't see one. Is it injustice if European powers make a deal to use their greater expertise in a mutual deal in another country? Is it wrong if European nations benefit from enterprises they built, funded, and successfully operated? Why would these industrialists have taken these risks, made these huge financial outlays if there hadn't been favorable terms in the contract? All the resentment Frankopan notes of the Persians, seems better fitted to the British, who were constantly black mailed, had their work stopped by religious festivals, etc. And the Persians could have been happy that a valuable resource they literally didn't have the expertise to unlock, had finally been made accessible, and now there were new possibilities, and a new revenue stream, not to mention all the secondary revenue streams that come with major industry starting operation in your country. But no, they'd been swindled by the contract they'd freely signed. And according to Frankopan, the theft was of the same quantity and kind as all the gold and silver Europe got from the Americas. Except there was a legal contract. Except that the only reason oil was being pumped was because the Shah agreed that it was a good idea. There is no moral equivalency here.
Last example, "This is imperial policy in all but name" (453). Frankopan concludes that US president Jimmy Carter's stated policy that the US will act to protect our critical investments and resource and trade arrangements around the world, is a statement of Imperial intent. He makes another passing comment about how the US is an empire (pg 475 "...gift of the American empire..."). For an historian Frankopan seems shockingly fuzzy on key concepts like "Empire." The British had an empire, as did Russia, and Rome and Persia. What makes them empires is that one political unit took over others and ruled them, often against their will. Britain was its own self-contained nation. But then it went around the world picking up lands and peoples like a rock star at an after party. It directly ruled these places, like India, Australia, South Africa, etc. And all the other empires did this too. The US has never done this. As nations go, the USA is a superpower. It is the most militarily and economically powerful nation in the world right now. It pursues its interests like all nations do, but it can do that more effectively because it has so much power. When the US acts to protect its interests abroad, meaning allies, trade relations, key pieces of global infrastructure that we and many nations of the world benefit from, this is what every nation does that has the power to do so. Yes, sometimes the US invades a country. But it doesn't keep those countries, they don't become part of the USA. The US is always looking for more friendly governments to do business with. And it supports governments that it likes and undermines governments it does not like. Other countries do this too. If any of this activity makes the US an empire then we have to change the definition of empire, and make it apply to many countries. No empire in history matches this description.
I would give this book negative stars if I could. It is highly misleading, it doesn't help one understand why things happened, if anything it obscures the true causes. Yes, the author is a professor of history at the prestigious Oxford university. But don't let that fool you. This book is garbage. He has a thick section of citations, and I don't doubt any of them. I think he knows the Europeans didn't destroy the Mayan Empire. He knows the US is not an empire like Britain and Russia were. He knows that Europe was more scientifically and technologically advanced than any other place on earth by the 1400's, the 1500's, in the 1600's and on. He has good sources, he knows the facts of the matter, so why does he tell this twisted absurd history? It looks to me like the answer is ideology. He's committed to finding fault with Europe and over-praising the East. A trend that's popular these days. Using this tactic kind of proves the opposite though. If central Asia was as good as he claims it is, as progressive, innovative and important, then one wouldn't have to lie to convince people. But that's what this is. Leave out all the bad things they did, really focus in on the bad things the West did, "my doesn't central Asia look good now!" It's like central Asia is catfishing us. And then we go on a date and find out they're still pushing gay people off rooftops, there's no democracy or human rights, it's an extreme unrepentant patriarchy. The land is barren, people live mostly in poverty with very little education. And then you're like "Oh! This is a back water! The West may not be perfect, but it's WAAAAYY better than this!"
Frankopan has crafted a transparent misrepresentation. He can do that if he wants. But we don't have to fall for it, and we don't have to recommend his book. And I for one will be recommending a much better book of world history "How the West Won" by Rodney Stark.
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