Christopher I. Beckwith . Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present . Princeton : Princeton University Press . 2009 . Pp. xxv, 472. $35.00.

Abstract

Christopher I. Beckwith is known as a prolific specialist in historical linguistics—see, for example, his recent work, Medieval Tibeto-Burman Languages III (2008). He has tackled historical subjects in the past, and his most notable work in that field is the highly regarded The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia: A History of the Struggle for Great Power among Tibetans, Turks, Arabs, and Chinese during the Early Middle Ages (1987). The present volume, an ambitious study of 5,000 years of Central Eurasian history, represents a bold departure from his previous work. At the onset, Beckwith sets out a number of objectives. Following a passionate rejection of “Modernism and its hyper-Modern mutation, Postmodernism” (p. x), he announces his intention “to write a realistic, objective view of the history of Central Eurasia” (p. xii) from the Bronze Age to the present, and to do so in a way that is accessible to the non-specialist. One of his more important goals is to dispel the notion that Central Eurasian peoples were “barbarians” who eked out a meager existence as pastoral nomads in the steppe as they waited for the next opportunity to invade their more “civilized” sedentary neighbors. Throughout the volume he mounts a vigorous defense of the Central Eurasians, and in this regard he goes so far as to turn the received wisdom on its head: “Recognition of the struggles of the Central Eurasian peoples against the more than two-millennia-long mistreatment by their peripheral neighbors is long overdue. The warriors of Central Eurasia were not barbarians. They were heroes, and the epics of their peoples sing their undying fame” (p. xxv).