Book Review: The Silk Roads

From The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, by Peter Frankopan:

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"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."

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Book Review: "The Silk Roads: A New History of the World"

I chose to read this book under a misapprehension. I thought it was a history of the Silk Road. I should have paid more attention to the subtitle, "A New History of the World." That's what it is, a history of the world from ancient times to the present day, all viewed through the lens of central Asia. B+

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Grade: B+

It's no accident that when Alexander the Great set out to conquer the world he looked east to Persia, not west to Europe. The same for the Roman Empire. Sure, Julius Caesar made his mark by conquering Gaul, but when he became emperor, he, like Alexander, turned his eyes east, to Egypt. Soon, Roman ships were trading with India. In the fourth century Emperor Constantine moved the capital from Rome to a new city, Constantinople, to be closer to the center of action. Christianity flourished with Constantine. Peter and Paul traveled west to Rome, but the early church spread out in all directions. The east was rich in religions which Christianity vied with and borrowed from: Zorastrianism, Judaism, Buddhism. In the 7th Century a new great religion arose, Islam, which swept all before it from Arabia to the Atlantic Ocean. The success of Islam was helped by the fact that "Cohabitation of the faiths was an important hallmark of early Islamic expansion." Maybe more important was the fact the western world was devastated by invasions by Goths, Alans, Vandals and Huns from central Asia, all of whom rampaged across Europe in the 5th Century, also brought from central Asia. Then, much of the world was devastated by bubonic plague in the 6th Century.

You get the idea. This is a comprehensive history. We're not yet to the Mongol invasion of the 12th Century. Or Marco Polo's travels in the late 13th Century. Or the glories of Tamerlane's achievements in the late 14th Century. That's the "Silk Road" that captured my interest since childhood. The allure of Bukhara, Samarkand, and Tashkent called me to this part of the world in 1977 when I made it as close as Afghanistan, but central Asia was closed to me behind the borders of the Soviet Union. Now, almost fifty years later, I finally have an opportunity to get to the heart of the Silk Roads. We are planning a trip to Uzbekistan later this year, home of those famous Silk Road cities.

But Peter Frankopan hardly slows down in his history before he moves on to the Age of Exploration, when the Portuguese and Spanish sailed west, not east, and not only explored the world but set in motion Europe's eventual domination of the world from 16th Century to, arguably, the end of World War II. Frankopan ends his history with America's involvement in the Silk Road countries. By the way, central Asia had a hand in the English colonies in America gaining independence. England needed to raise taxes in America to finance its aims in Asia against France and Russia. The rest, as they say, is history. After World War II, America replaced Great Britain in seeking to control the lands from the Mediterranean Sea to the Himalayan Mountains (think Big Oil and Forever Wars) and made a mess of everything we touched. Those chapters are worth the price of the whole book.

Frankopan concludes by saying, "In many ways, the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have represented something of a disaster for the United States and Europe as they have played out their doomed struggle to retain their position in the vital territories that link east with west. What has been striking throughout the events of recent decades is the west's lack of perspective about global history—about the bigger picture, the wider themes and the larger patterns playing out in the region."

And, so, although the sweep of history in this book is much broader than I expected, I can't say that what I learned is not more important than what I asked for.