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The Silk Roads are the symbol of the interconnectedness of ancient Eurasian civilizations. Using challenging land and maritime routes, merchants and adventurers, diplomats and missionaries, sailors and soldiers, and camels, horses and ships, carried their commodities, ideas, languages and pathogens enormous distances across Eurasia. The result was an underlying unity that traveled the length of the routes, and which is preserved to this day, expressed in common technologies, artistic styles, cultures and religions, and even disease and immunity patterns. In words and images, Craig Benjamin explores the processes that allowed for the comingling of so many goods, ideas, and diseases around a geographical hub deep in central Eurasia. He argues that the first Silk Roads era was the catalyst for an extraordinary increase in the complexity of human relationships and collective learning, a complexity that helped drive our species inexorably along a path towards modernity.… (more)
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Once he has detailed the emergence of the trade routes, Craig shifts his focus and describes the four empires — those of the Romans, the Parthians, the Kushans, and the Han —whose presence made them possible. These chapters serve as excellent introductions to the empires for anyone unfamiliar with them, while their explanation of their roles as markets and guarantors of stability underscore well the conditions necessary for the trade to flourish. Craig then covers the development of the maritime routes, which gradually become the preferred method of shipping much of the trade, before concluding with the impact the disruption of these empire in the third century CE played in the decline of the trade routes. Taken together, it makes for an excellent summary of the first transcontinental trading routes in Eurasia, one that explains nicely the role of trade in the ancient world and provides some useful context for how global trade developed.