The Silk Roads
2015
- east and west
- history / world
- trade routes
- acculturation
- travel / asia / china
- imperialism
- culture conflict
- world history
- history / civilization
- history
The story
"Our world was made on and by the Silk Roads. For millennia it was here that East and West encountered each other through trade and conquest, leading to the spread of ideas and cultures, the birth of the world's great religions, the appetites for foreign goods that drove economies and the growth of nations. From the first cities in Mesopotamia to the growth of Greece and Rome to the depredations by the Mongols and the Black Death to the Great Game and the fall of Communism, the fate of the West has always been inextricably linked to the East. The Silk Roads vividly captures the importance of the networks that crisscrossed the spine of Asia and linked the Atlantic with the Pacific, the Mediterranean with India, America with the Persian Gulf. By way of events as disparate as the American Revolution and the horrific world wars of the twentieth century, Peter Frankopan realigns the world, orientating us eastwards, and illuminating how even the rise of the West 500 years ago resulted from its efforts to gain access to and control these Eurasian trading networks. In an increasingly globalized planet, where current events in Asia and the Middle East dominate the world's attention, this magnificent work of history is very much a work of our times"--
What it’s like
Dense, unhurried and quietly expansive, this is a book that feels like being handed a very large, very old atlas and invited to trace it with a finger over a long afternoon. Its prose is measured and authoritative, the voice of a confident narrator who is happy to pause, digress and circle back, so the sentences carry the patient rhythm of a lecture given without notes. Images arrive in sweeps rather than close-ups: caravans crossing dust and mountain passes, merchants weighing silk and spice in crowded bazaars, cities rising and falling along river valleys, grasslands cut by horsemen. The mood is curious and reflective, with a steady undertow of melancholy about empires that flared and faded. Violence is present as history rather than spectacle; conquest, plague and war are recounted briskly and without graphic detail. It suits a rainy Sunday with a pot of tea, a long-haul flight, or slow reading over several weeks, and it will reward readers who enjoy big-picture world history, maps in the mind, and the pleasure of having their assumptions about the globe gently rearranged.
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