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"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"--… (more)
User reviews
This is a book that looks at how influential parts of the world dismissed by people were on actual history, not only of their own countries but on the world and how ignoring those influences is toxic, a reducio ad absurdam of reality.
However it also dismisses certain other almost insignificant moments that became significant, like the influence Irish Nationalism had on nationalism in other colonies and how other colonies avoided the shambles of a rising like our 1916 one. But in ways I'm nitpicking, I'm from a western country, with western history at the fore and I grew up with a fairly insular view of history from textbooks that was very Ireland centric and tended to blame England for most of what happened to us but I had a cynical view of that idea.
Yes, we need a more holistic view of history, but it's a hard task for anyone, history will always be filtered by experience, knowledge, access to information and upbringing, bias can be acknowledged but will always creep in, the trick is to understand that it will always be there.
The author starts well in pre and early history by emphasising the richness, cultural superiority and innovation of the region compared with the backward, poverty stricken, remote Europe. He maintains his focus as Europe comes more onto the seen in the early middle ages. But he loses sight of what he set out to achieve once Columbus and the American continent arrive on the scene and the British begin to build an empire in Asia. The book then becomes a more standard history from a European, transatlantic point of view and their interests in the region. The long section towars the end on the Iran/Iraq war and western interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq are interesting but overdone.
The author almost completely ignores China. It is mentioned of course but only incidentally as a source of goods transitting central Asia on their way to European markets. As a historian he should have included more geography. Information about populations, climates and transport systems are cursory.
A good effort but Mr Frankopan lost sight of his objectives as he progressed through the ages.
Short on details of the ancient world. Very heavy on details of events whose sources are more easily available - from the 1900s onwards.
Synthetic histories like this (those based in syntheses of the works of others as well as the author’s own) require a special skill, particularly when they carry a strong thesis. This is a wonderful book with strengths in both breadth and depth, yet the balance seems a bit off.
Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of the routes that traversed ‘the Stans’, those vast tracts that were formerly part of the Soviet Union, allowing the exchange of trade, news and religious views over the centuries.
A comprehensively researched and clearly written account of an area of the world and aspect of history that has too often been neglected.
It was the Silk Road that sucked me in - the very idea of ancient trade links across Asia linking China to Europe is full of exotic potential,
So, good writing, good history, full of interesting insights, but ultimately a little disappointing because the book does not fulfil its stated purpose.
As an aside, the publication of this ebook is poor. The font used in the e-text is unable to deal with the diacritical marks used in the original text, and some jury-rigged fix has been attempted by inserted what seem to be small images of the accented letters. Besides being hard to see and harder to read, this means that you cannot use word search for words with an accent.
As a second aside, the book lacks maps. There are a few maps, but these are too small and lack the information needed to help the reader. The author says in the introduction that he wants to improve general knowledge of the history of this fascinating region. As a first step he should get his publisher on board and improve the range and detail of the maps.
Read ebook Feb 2016
.....The same short terms was evident in the case of Iraq, where the sharp focus on removing Saddam Hussain from power was set against a lack of planning on how the country would look in the future......
There is little that is new about the history contained in the book. It certainly is not a history of
If you picked this up in the hope of learning about the trade routes and the people who live or travel along them, you've picked the wrong book.
Sure there were a few interesting snippets of history in this, but the authors choice of not going into a lot of detail and preferring to follow up events with other events without providing a lot of deliberations about the possible connections or effects, does not make for inspiring reading. Unless, that is, we are talking about the inspiration to look for other books.
Maybe the premise of the book was a little too ambitious? Maybe some editor should have pointed out some of the gaps ... or at least that the title does not reflect the content of the book?
Whatever the cause of its failings, I was hoping for a thoughtful insight into the history of the Silk Roads, but all I got from the books was what read like the work of a self-congratulatory academic who couldn't make up his mind what to write about and looked at history mostly through Union-Jack-striped goggles.
The thesis of the book, if it can be said to have one, is the impact of history on recent events in "that part of Asia which lies between the Mediterranean and the Himalayas." Here the book comes into its own, showing how the Europe and the United States have maneuvered themselves into losing influence and trust in the region.
Western countries have dominated the planet for the last 500 years but in this book he argues that most of these turning points in history have had some greater or lesser influence from the Silk Road in world history. Not sure I agree with all of the inferences, but I think that he is right in that the fulcrum is tilting world power away from the West and back to the East once again. It is a very detailed, huge, broad-brush view of world history seen through the prism of this ancient route from Europe to the Far East. I had hoped there would be more on the ancient history of place and people that trekked and made their lives from the Silk Road network; there wasn’t sadly, but it was still a good history of the world seen from this perspective. 3.5 Stars overall.
Throughout the book, Frankopan provides fairly concise stories about the growth of Islam, the Mongol invasions of Europe, and a host of other topics. These are the clearest and most informative I have read. This book is not written in a simplistic manner, but neither is it burdened with incomprehensible academic speak. Highly, highly recommended.
The writing style makes it relatively easy to read, although a certain amount of hopping between times and places sometimes make it difficult to follow. One message that comes through very clearly is that the West [including Russia] should never have become involved in Afghanistan in the twntieth century and beyond, whatever the justification. We should have learned our lessons from the past! We all know that there is shift in economic power from West to East going on; this book helps us to understand it.
Frankopan centres his story on the swathe of geography running from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean through to India and China (south of the Caspian and Aral Seas, north of the Persian Gulf). He contends that is these societies and nations, interacting through trade and conquest, that drove the development of human civilisation and that it is only in the last few hundred years that Europe and Western civilisation have come to dominate. In closing, Frankopan believes that even now the focus is swinging away from the West and back to the East and Eurasian states as the fulcrum of world affairs.
This is a powerfully written narrative that drives the (Western) reader through a largely unknown set of geographies, peoples, cultures and historical events.
I remain unconvinced that the Eastern/Eurasian civilisations are the true heart of world history and human development, with the western, European focus tagged on at the end. I also found the final chapters describing the impact of European empires and politics on Eastern states in the 20th century a little too quick to blame the West and portray the East as unfortunate pawns in some game. I am sure to some extent this is true, but the nations of central Asia must take some responsibility for the calamities of the last 100 years.
Highly recommended as a different perspective on the development of human civilisation
Silk Roads also upset me for not being the book I was
It struck me that the intro to Gombrich's History of the World, whilst Euro-centric, felt the need to explain that he'd shoved a few extra chapters in the English version because, for the most part, Britain just hasn't been that interesting. A view not widely held amongst Etonians that go on to Oxbridge.
There is much to like about the book: I'd really quite like to go to the steppes now, but it's marred by uneven temporal and geographic focus. I'd happily trade the minutes of US official meetings leading to Iraq I in favour of more colour to the Eastern end of the road: the Indian spices and Chinese silks that got this political route opened and maintained.
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