The Silk Road has been a vague part of our collective psyche since we were children in school, reading about Pakistan’s place in the world. Neither a country nor an ocean, it is still one of those unique geographical features that we employ to situate ourselves. In recent times, the name has become plural – ‘the Silk Roads’ - suggesting the possibility of multiple definitions. The name is gaining currency as China plans to develop its foreign policy around it and revitalise the regional economy by building infrastructure that connects Asian nations amongst themselves and with the rest of the world more than ever before. Against this backdrop comes another, very ambitious history by Oxford historian Peter Frankopan. Entitled “The Silk Roads - A new history of the world”, the book itself establishes the currency of its subject in the words: “for all their apparent otherness these lands have always been of pivotal importance in global history in one way or another, linking east and west, serving as a melting-pot where ideas, customs and languages have jostled with each other from antiquity to today. And today the Silk Roads are rising again - unobserved and overlooked by many.” The book is, on the surface, a daunting volume, running up to 636 pages. Surprisingly though, it is far too fascinating and well-written to be put down, even by those who do not claim to be history-buffs. In a shift from his previous publications (published, for instance, by Harvard University Press), this one has been published by Bloomsbury, thus establishing its accessibility for the general public.
The book begins with a discussion of time, location and empire - thus intertwining the three bases of both history and this book. Frankopan situates the Silk Road in ‘the heart of Asia’, a vague enough phrase which he then cleverly reworks in the rest of the book to show the reader myriad stops on a road that winds through most of Asia and connects it to Europe, and in some cases, to America too. From Seneca’s horror at the indecency of silk-clad forms to the design of coinage in Asia and the form of buildings in northern Afghanistan, the author shows the multifaceted nature of cultural exchange, which could never have been limited to mere exchange of goods. The Silk Roads aims to tell a history of the world from the East’s perspective, a difficult enough venture in the context of some prohibitive academic works which regard anything written by a Westerner about the ‘Orient’ as paternalistic and well, just wrong. Putting aside such binaries, this book presents a well-researched picture of the different journeys that have taken place along this road, involving races and places that tend to get overlooked in histories focusing chiefly on Western accomplishments. As Frankopan writes in his preface, “It was obvious that the regions we were not being taught about had become lost, suffocated by the insistent story of the rise of Europe.” Thus, one can get an idea of the vast scope of the book from the titles of its chapters alone. Focusing on various themes, they range from faith to empire to genocide and tragedy.
The Silk Roads aims to tell a history of the world from the East's perspective
Frankopan revisits popular perceptions about the events that have shaped our world today, writing in one instance of the Muslim conquest of Palestine, where he cites the archaeological record as proof that the Arab conquests were “neither as brutal nor as shocking as the commentators make out.” Subtly undercutting other similar narratives, he writes of the ingrained hypocrisy of the West, which now claims to stand for human rights and seeks to eliminate reminders of its colonial tendencies. He writes in detail of a coloniser who made tremendous amounts of money in India by exploiting both people and natural resources and, for posterity, gave both money and his name to a college in America, which thus became Yale University. In the context of the furor over tearing down the statue and forgetting the name of the man after whom the Rhodes scholarship is named, such an example is a potent reminder of what most of the West’s wealth and its claim to educational superiority are based on. Writing of Hitler and his ambitions, Frankopan writes of the same tendency in the West to glamourise exploitation of the weak, thus setting a precedent for fascists who saw it as a profitable enterprise and wanted a piece of the colonial pie: “the British in India were constantly cited by the Nazi leadership as a model of how large-scale domination could be accomplished by few people.” Hitler, too, wanted colonies and set his sights on Africa - which was already being carved up between Britain and France. But unlike these nations, he made the mistake of not limiting his barbarity to the coloured races. Frankopan’s narrative therefore highlights the trend of compartmentalising history and focusing on singular aspects.
The book revolves around the themes of time, location and empire
Travelling further down the Silk Road, one comes to one of the most interesting parts of the book, which describes how the Middle East changed after the discovery of oil. Colonial exploitation took on a new form as indigenous rulers collaborated with foreign investors to get rich at the expense of the local populace. Such practices gave rise to resentment, which kept gathering steam and leading towards nationalism and, ultimately, revolution. This changed the face of this region forever and also the manner in which its people reacted to crises brought on by rulers who were willing to collude with foreigners for short-term personal gains. Frankopan shows how most of Western foreign policy has been determined by such considerations of appropriating resources: from Hitler’s Holocaust being a result of the failure of land to generate enough food to feed the population to British support of Jewish settlement in Palestine due to its intentions of controlling the oilfields nearby - Western statesmen with very different ideologies had similar imperatives behind momentous decisions.
The road to power also lead to questionable alliances, generally with extremist elements, like the one that the United States made in Afghanistan, leading in its turn to reverberations for many years to come. And, as has always been the case in a world connected through roads like the one in question, what happened in Afghanistan did not stay in Afghanistan. It lead to radicalisation in many quarters of the world, from China to South Asia to the Middle East. American involvement in Asia is shown as an unadulterated example of the pitfalls of involving oneself in another region with a sense of entitlement and superiority. When the CIA orchestrated the coup of 1953 in Iran, it was “the point where the United States came into serious contact with the region crisscrossed for centuries by the Silk Roads - and set about trying to control it. But there were dangers ahead. Posturing about democracy on the one hand while being prepared to sanction and even orchestrate regime change on the other made for uncomfortable bedfellows.”
Chinese geostrategic thinking now lays great emphasis on the potential of a new Silk Road to link the economies of the Eurasian landmass
Writing a book of history that attempts to significantly revise the way we read and understand certain events, one might fear that the author would present us with conspiracy theories presenting the West as the villain out to get the East. The Silk Roads, however, is a completely different proposition. It presents facts and research to balance out a narrative that might well paint everybody in black and white. It is thus a meaningful reflection on events that have been a part of our collective human experience - the mistakes made (and brushed under the carpet) as well as how history has the remarkable tendency of repeating itself, especially when it concerns the impossibility of preventing influences from travelling - at various paces - down a road as vast and well-connected as the Silk Road.
