The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World vast terrain from the early days of Mesopotamia to the fall of the Twin Towers. In between we find the rise of Islam, the Great Crusades, Mongols, Vikings, Huns and Genghis Khan, to say nothing of war and oil, religious conflict and conquest, and, of course, trade. This is a deep and dense tome, an academic work in the truest sense, perhaps not best suited for the casual reader. I was most interested in the trade aspect of Frankopan's work, but found the book more focused on the highest level of globalization than on the trade that underpins it.

Ultimately, I believe that Frankopan is attempting to convey a sense of the Silk Roads - and trade more broadly - as a means of exchanging not only goods and currencies, but everything from religions, cultures, and ideas, to disease. Ostensibly, the book's focus is trade, but by Frankopan treated trade as the vehicle for everything else, such that it's less a history of Central Asia and the Middle East as a trade hub and more about how it's role as a hub influenced geopolitics and culture, for example. The high water mark for trade comes relatively early, in my opinion, specifically when Frankopan writes that the Taj Mahal represents "globalized international trade that brought such wealth to [Shah Jahan] that he was able to contemplate this extraordinary gesture to his beloved spouse." (p. 231). Nearly 300 pages remained. 

In the end, I came away feeling that Frankopan had attempted to do too much. Any one of these topics is a book (or books!) unto itself. See Desert Queen, The Orientalist, A Splendid Exchange, Where the West Ends, or Hero, just for starters. Which is perhaps to say that I read too much and too widely (is there such a thing?), or at a minimum that most readers will not have already delved so deeply into this topic.

Perhaps more disconcertingly, though, I had the nagging sense that Frankopan was angry with history, Europe in particular. I could not help but feel that any crime perpetrated by Europeans was trumped up, while those committed by Easterners were somehow minimized. This sentiment crystallized for me toward the end of the book when Frankopan wrote, "...typified by the European Union being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012: how wonderful that Europe, which had been responsible for almost continuous warfare not just in its own continent but across the world for centuries, had managed to avoid conflict for several decades." (p. 383). Yet, as anyone who has read much on world history can attest, warfare has been one of the constants since time immemorial. I don't disagree that Europe was a mess. I'm just not convinced it was that much messier than the rest of the world. I should note, too, that I'm not the only one he noticed this. S. Frederick Starr wrote in his review for the Washington Post that "in chapter after chapter, Europeans emerge as the villains. ... [Frankopan] concludes that “Europe’s distinctive character as more aggressive, more unstable, and less peace-minded than other parts of the world now paid off.”" Indeed.

Complaints aside, Frankopan does an excellent job of filling in the gaps and connecting the dots. Even more than Hero or Desert Queen, Silk Roads provides comprehensive historical background on the West's interaction with and interference in the Middle East and Central Asia for the past several centuries. Scanning headlines today, it's not easy to understand intuitively how certain countries have become allies or enemies; by revisiting every slight and slander for the last millennium, Frankopan allows his reader to understand these historical ties and their on-going impacts.