Review: The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, by Peter Frankopan

Abstract

Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World . New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016. xix + 645 pp., 44 illustrations, 9 maps. ISBN 97811019463219. $30.00. In the Preface to his new book, Peter Frankopan writes, “Above all, I hope to inspire those who read this book to look at history in a different way” (xix). This “different way” is linked to his choice of a geographical and cultural focus through which to consider the world's history. Rather than placing the Mediterranean and Western Europe at the center of this work, Frankopan, a historian of Byzantium and the Crusades, emphasizes the region from the Eastern shores of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea in the west to the Hindu Kush in the east—a macroregion that he describes as the “center,” “heart,” or “spine” of Eurasia (and sometimes the world). The region was not chosen arbitrarily, but for its central role in the transmission of goods, technologies, ideas and beliefs, practices, and even illnesses. It is in this sense that Frankopan employs the term “Silk Roads,” referring to the routes through which these exchanges occurred and extending his meaning of this term beyond the “classic” Silk Roads that crossed central Eurasia to include an ultimately global network of land and sea routes. This ambitious and absorbing book is intended to challenge narratives of world history that emphasize Europe from the ancient Greeks to the European Union, and successfully does so. Yet there is no denying that it still has a strong Western focus; even Frankopan's “heart” of Eurasia is given the greatest attention when it interacts with political or cultural forces in Europe and the United States. This tendency can be seen from the book's first chapter, which begins with Iran in the sixth century B.C.E. and then swiftly moves to Alexander's invasion. Frankopan explores the political and cultural encounters that resulted when communities of Greeks came to live along the “spine” of Eurasia, where they influenced …