The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

by Peter Frankopan

The No. 1 Sunday Times and international bestseller - a major reassessment of world history in light of the economic and political renaissance in the re-emerging east

For centuries, fame and fortune was to be found in the west - in the New World of the Americas. Today, it is the east which calls out to those in search of adventure and riches. The region stretching from eastern Europe and sweeping right across Central Asia deep into China and India, is taking centre stage in international politics, commerce and culture - and is shaping the modern world.

This region, the true centre of the earth, is obscure to many in the English-speaking world. Yet this is where civilization itself began, where the world's great religions were born and took root. The Silk Roads were no exotic series of connections, but networks that linked continents and oceans together. Along them flowed ideas, goods, disease and death. This was where empires were won - and where they were lost. As a new era emerges, the patterns of exchange are mirroring those that have criss-crossed Asia for millennia. The Silk Roads are rising again.

A major reassessment of world history, The Silk Roads is an important account of the forces that have shaped the global economy and the political renaissance in the re-emerging east.

• ISBN10: 1408839970
• ISBN13: 9781408839973
• Publish Date: 27 August 2015
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Imprint: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 656
• Language: English

Reviews

[brokentune]

1.5*

This book. It's been such a disappointment: Not only is the title an exercise in how to cram several misrepresentations in less than ten words, but the writing style left me rather unimpressed, too.

There is little that is new about the history contained in the book. It certainly is not a history of the world (Europe, perhaps, but the focus on the power struggles between Christianity and Islam, and later on the West v. the East, and the US against Iraq/Iran/Afghanistan does not make this a book about the history of world). It is even less a book about the Silk Roads.

If you picked this up in the hope of learning about the trade routes and the people who live or travel along them, you've picked the wrong book.

Sure there were a few interesting snippets of history in this, but the authors choice of not going into a lot of detail and preferring to follow up events with other events without providing a lot of deliberations about the possible connections or effects, does not make for inspiring reading. Unless, that is, we are talking about the inspiration to look for other books.

Maybe the premise of the book was a little too ambitious? Maybe some editor should have pointed out some of the gaps ... or at least that the title does not reflect the content of the book?

Whatever the cause of its failings, I was hoping for a thoughtful insight into the history of the Silk Roads, but all I got from the books was what read like the work of a self-congratulatory academic who couldn't make up his mind what to write about and looked at history mostly through Union-Jack-striped goggles.

[wyvernfriend]

A different view of the world, taking a more oriental view of what happens in the world. Instead of the usual history of the world where the centre of attention is to Europe, this looks at the Middle East and Asia and looks at how, often they were as much or more influential than we were taught and badly served by current received history. It complains about how lots of history of these players on the world stage were ignored but ripples happened from many parts of empires, It's a useful for a reminder to reframe history to include more places but also a reminder that no matter what we do, we will still fail to see all the wood for the trees.