Review: "The Silk Roads"

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Review: The Silk Roads – A New History of the World, P Frankopan (Bloomsbury, 2015) – 521 pages (in paperback), with notes, acknowledgements and index.

This is a book to take time with as Peter Frankopan attempts the double challenge of writing a world history and of writing it through a different lens.

Firstly, the challenge of a world history. History occurs at the intersection of space and time and so they give the scaffolding of a world history. This book starts with the laws of the Babylonian King Hammurabi (c. 1810 BC - 1750 BC) and ends in the year of its writing. That’s a big temporal scope and gives the writer a dreadful problem of inclusion / exclusion. Every reader will find omissions to bewail!

Despite the vast temporal scope, the book is not quite a ‘world’ history as proclaimed in the sub-title, for it is spatially limited. Frankopan self-consciously writes from an Asia-centric view (more on that below). Regions such as Europe, Scandinavia, Africa, the Americas and the Pacific only appear insofar as they impact on or are impacted by Asia. Even within Asia, there are limitations. For example, a major Asian nation like Indonesia is only mentioned once and that as a colony of a European power in its old guise of Batavia.  To see this is not to offer a criticism, but rather to note a limitation and perhaps to suggest that others write parallel world histories from other spatial lens.

Secondly, the book offers a world history through a different lens to most English language books of similar intent.  The standard English language history writes through the lens of western tradition as developed under Greek and Roman culture and then as flowering in Western Europe and North America. In these treatments, the rest of the world appears only insofar as it impacts on or is impacted by the western tradition. Frankopan’s scholarly base is in a small island off the north-western European coast, but he writes as a Byzantine specialist who knows the area east of the Mediterranean and through to the eastern shores of continental Asia. That being said, north Asia and South East Asia are somewhat under-represented in the book – with the notable exception of China. Russia presents another definitional challenge – is it Asia, Europe or something else again?

The result is a very different way of looking at the world. For me, the experience of reading was like seeing a world map drawn from an alternate physical perspective (such as a southern-centric map). Things that once seemed all-important are reduced in perspective. For example, western Europe and the Americas appear as late influencers on world history and ones whose present apparent demise risks them being seen as ‘easy come and easy go”. The flip side of this is that things that are footnotes in western-centric historical writing take centre stage. The book introduced me to empires, movements and people of whom I knew little. That’s welcome.

Frankopan contends that Asia is again on the rise, that new silk roads are being forged and that present-future world history cannot be understood outside an Asia-centric lens. That’s a more than plausible contention, as a glance at the nightly news shows day after yet another day. It would be quite wrong to read the book as a future guide, but it certainly sketches the spatial/temporal scaffolding of the present world scene.

This is why this is a book with which to spend time. It gives a different view of the past and an insightful view of the present.