The Silk Roads : A New History of the World

Brilliant book, good read.

In around 1340 AD, a Mongol army laid siege to a fort in Caffa, modern day Crimea. Soon the Mongol army was annihilated not by the enemy but by an unknown illness that killed thousands of its soldiers. As Mongols retreated, they ordered that corpses be catapulted into the city, hoping to overwhelm the city with the smell of decaying bodies. Little did they realize that they had become first army to use biological weapons. Soon, Caffa, a Genoese - modern day Italy- trading post in Central Asia was infected with Plague. The Genoese traders and merchants in Caffa returned to Genoa, Sicily, and Venice, not only with the trade from Asia, but also with the devastating infection.Black death had arrived.In next few years almost one third of Europe’s population (~ 2.5 Crore people) will die from this deadly infection .Anecdotes like these make The Silk Roads - A New History of World an interesting book to read for a casual reader like me. Author Peter Frankopan intends to write the history of the world as seen from the east. The expanse of the book is ambitious to say the least. It starts with Alexander and ends with junior Bush. Peter Frankopan looks at almost all (!) the major events and empires of last 2500 years and tries to weave a coherent story using threads of Silk Roads. It is fascinating to read how this trade route between China and Mediterranean has been singularly instrumental in shaping the contours of History. The essence of the book is that the history of world is the history of control of Silk Routes.One of the constant themes of the book is to challenge East versus West binary. It is sometime easy to forget that seat of Roman empire for almost 1000 years was not Rome but further east in Istanbul (Constantinople). Similarly it is almost impossible to view Christianity as another eastern religion. In one the more fascinating chapters, Peter Frankopan takes us through the early rise of Christianity in Persia and Central Asia. It is interesting to see how Christianity borrowed heavily from Buddhism which was dominant religion in what is today Afghanistan and Central Asia. It is the quirk of history that early Romans saw east including India as morally corrupting culture. Who would think that it was Asia who taught Italians to drink, make love and appreciate art !Another recurring theme is Globalization. World was flat long before Nandan Nilekani coined that term and Thomas Friedman wrote his best seller. In 2nd century AD, about 50% of total minted money from Rome found its way to Asia (largely India). One of the key trading ports then was Barygaza, also known to us as Bharuch. Flourishing trade on this route also meant that may towns rose to become great urban centres of their times. One such city was Palmyra , whose ruins were recently destroyed by ISIS. Trade fairs in Palmyra would attract thousands of traders from faraway places like India and China. Imagine merchants travelling thousands of treacherous miles on foot, and sea ! To cater to such a large flux of traders many new cities came up along the silk routes. One such city in 9th century was Baghdad. At its peak it was the richest and most populous city of the world. One of the earliest Mega cities. Few other cities that sprung up during this time were Basra, known for its market, and Mosul known for the finest public baths. Sadly all are synonymous with death and destruction today.Much further down the timeline, in the 18th century , there is another interesting story which challenges the belief that globalization is a modern day phenomenon. In 1757, with Robert Clive’s conquest of Bengal, the centre of gravity of world power had firmly moved to Britain. Robert Clive became the Dewan of Bengal. With Dewani came the power to tax Bengal, one of the richest parts of the World. Bengal was the centre of booming textile industry which made India the proverbial sone ki chidiya. Robert Clive went on to kill the golden goose. Quite literally. Exorbitant taxes were imposed. Food prices skyrocketed leading to the infamous Bengal famine. Millions of Indians died (rather killed). Robert Clive became the richest man on earth. But over a short period of time an entire industry was destroyed. Revenues from Bengal dropped and East India company was on the verge of Bankruptcy. The shocks were felt across the Pacific. To make up for the losses in Bengal, the British Empire passed Tea Act in America. This triggered a fury among the local population in America and eventually led to American revolution. The world has been interconnected much longer than we sometime imagine !Sadly, Silk Routes is not only the story of prosperity, wealth, and great cities. Wealth has come (and gone) at a great price. Silk routes are drenched with blood from relentless wars. Empires have come and gone, their banners have changed colors , they have come on horses, camels , tanks and F16s, but threads of Silk Routes have always been tangled.Year was 627 AD, Persian army had taken over Palestine and Syria after a decade long war. Romans barely held control of their last fortress, the Constantinople. In a remarkable turnaround Romans with the help of nomadic Turks crushed the large Persian army in the modern day Iraq. Almost 1400 years later , a war is still being fought on precisely the same plains between almost the same empires.Amazing.

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.

This book has been around for four or five years now, but it looks like I read it at just the right time, given current events in Iran (as of early January 2020).It claims to be a new history of the world. That’s a bit grandiose, but it certainly is an alternative way of looking at world history over the last two or three thousand years. For the most part, because although the author strives to avoid being Eurocentric, there are times when he just can’t help it, given the role that Europe – and its empires – have played in world history, particularly over the last five hundred years.I have to say that the opening is not very promising. Roman history is clearly not the author’s forte and he skates over the Roman conquest of Egypt and the defeat of Cleopatra in a pretty perfunctory and not entirely accurate way. However, from then on the book gets much better. This is not so much original research as original thinking and a meticulous synthesis of what we know and what we don’t know about the history of central Asia, or specifically the corridor from Turkey to the Himalayas. Some of this is familiar – the rise of Islam, the Crusades, the Mongols, Timur Lang – but the beauty of this book is the fine detail that the author adds and the connections he makes between events and places that don’t immediately appear to be connected. I could give dozens of examples, but one striking one is the discovery of Roman coins deep in India. Another is the way Buddhism had to jazz itself up to make itself more appealing to people who wanted temples, rituals and statues. Similarly we hear of a 4th century bishop complaining that Jewish services are far more entertaining than Christian ones because they have music and dancing, tambourines and cymbals, and we’ve got to raise our game if we’re going to compete for market share.There is another apparent blip when the author switches to Columbus, Portugal and Spain and the “discovery” of the Americas. It seems like a digression till you realise that 1492 did shift the centre of gravity temporarily from central Asia to central America; or in Eurocentric terms from Venice to Lisbon and Seville. It also opened up new trade routes between East and West (and made those terms largely meaningless once the globe had been circumnavigated).As the book moves closer to the twenty-first century, we get new insights into where we are now, such as the rise of China and Iran’s role as a regional power. For example, I was familiar with British nineteenth century Russophobia and the “great game” which largely involved using Afghanistan as a buffer to prevent the Russians from attacking British-ruled India. However, I was very hazy about British involvement in Persia and this book taught me a lot about why the Iranians are so hostile towards us westerners, especially the US and Britain. Whether you agree with the author’s analysis or not, it seems incontestable that much of our intervention in central Asia over the last two hundred or more years has been a concoction of short-termism and naked self-interest mixed with large doses of hypocrisy and double standards, all served up with a thick white supremacist sauce. For example, consider the games the US played during the first Gulf War between Iraq and Iran. First they backed Saddam Hussein of course; but by the mid-eighties the US was not only supplying conventional weapons to Iran; they were also providing the capability for Iran to develop nuclear weapons – and other western countries were falling over themselves to get a slice of the pie. Seems ironic now that Trump is threatening Iran with World War III. NB the author focuses on the role of one Dick Cheney, both in the 1980s as a supplier of arms and nuclear technology and more recently as someone who wants to see the Iranian nuclear programme – that he enabled – blown to dust.All in all this is a superb book for understanding the world we live in now and I Iook forward to reading the sequel shortly.

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.

Superb and thought provoking.Offers a great insight into why the world is so!