Book review: Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads pivots history towards Asia

The Silk Road that stretched across the vastness of Central Asia fizzed with culture and commerce - an impressive new book refocuses our attention on the glories of these lands.

A print showing Venetian merchant Marco Polo, who travelled to the court of the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan via the Silk Road and spent 17 years in China before returning to his home country. Oxford SShow more

Peter Frankopan's "new history of the world" is an often exhilarating tour of 2,000 years of history in a little more than 500 pages. There is plenty of bang for your buck as you journey through The Silk Roads. Frankopan upends the usual world-history narrative oriented around ancient Rome and Greece and the irrepressible rise of Europe.

Writing against “the mantra of the political, cultural and moral triumph of the west”, the author turns his gaze eastward and looks at “the halfway point between east and west, running broadly from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean to the Black Sea and the Himalayas”. It was, Frankopan argues, a civilisational proving ground, perhaps like none other in human history.

This vast swath of the central Asian land mass gave rise to the world’s great religions – Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism. It pulsed not only with the trafficking of goods such as silks, furs, spices, silver and human property – slavery also played its ugly role – but also ideas and culture. (It also spawned the bubonic plague, which ravaged Asia and Europe in the 14th century.) Great centres of learning grew in Constantinople, Baghdad, Damascus, Isfahan, Samarkand, Kabul and Kashgar. It was the pathways connecting these places that a German geologist dubbed “Die Seidenstrasse” – the Silk Roads – in the late 19th century.

Frankopan’s account sweeps along from the conquests of Alexander the Great and the rise of the Persian Empire, through the Crusades and Mongol conquests, to the high-stakes geopolitical contests of the 20th century that played out across Central Asia as Russia, Great Britain and the United States manoeuvred for access – and oil.

In a series of brisk chapters – The Road of Faiths, The Road of Furs and so on – studded with state-of-the-art research that is sourced from at least a dozen languages, the author brings wondrous histories to vivid life.

Here is a work for our networked age, for the Silk Roads were a series of communications and transport arteries binding together disparate regions and cultures. Between about 320BC and the early centuries of the first millennium, Alexander the Great pushing east and then later the Han Chinese pushing westward across rugged terrain, put in place a rough template for the development of the routes that would link up east and west.

Frankopan is fascinated by the interconnections he finds along the way and the fizzing dynamic of back and forth between cultures and religions. Ideas travelled far, so did money: the Kushan tribes of eastern Persia minted coins modelled on Roman currency. China did a brisk business with Persia. Frankincense and myrrh, which actually came from Ethiopia and Yemen, were known as Possu or Persian goods.

The director of Oxford University’s Centre for Byzantine Research, Frankopan is particularly good on the crowded marketplace for religious beliefs. Buddhism spread to an astonishingly far direction westward, onto the Arabian Gulf, and religious boundaries were nothing if not porous. Frankopan is at pains to remind us that early Christianity was deeply Asian, moving into Mesopotamia and northwards to the steppes. By the middle of the sixth century, Basra, Mosul and Tikrit had growing Christian populations and, long before Canterbury did, there were archbishoprics in Merv and Kashgar, the gateway to China.

Whatever the religious cleavages of our own time, Frankopan notes that the rise of Islam was hardly opposed to Christianity or Judaism. Quite the contrary, he writes: “in the early years of their coexistence, relations were not so much pacific as warmly encouraging. And if anything, the relationship between Islam and Judaism was even more striking for its mutual compatibility. The support of the Jews in the Middle East was vital for the propagation and spread of the word of Muhammad.”

Frankopan hardly downplays conflict and violence, but he argues that such was the commercial vitality of the Silk Roads that matters of faith were often shoved aside in the pursuit of riches. In another bit of provocative revisionism, Frankopan rescues the Mongols from the contempt of posterity. These notorious baddies were actually enlightened statesmen, Frankopan contends, who used violence selectively (and yes, brutally) to bring their subjects into line. Hardly barbarians, they were savvy in their business dealings and governing style.

The fiscal conservatives of their day, the Mongols did brisk business with traders from Genoa and Venice in the 13th century. “Sensitive pricing and a deliberate policy of keeping taxes low were symptomatic of the bureaucratic nous of the Mongol Empire, which gets too easily lost beneath the images of violence and wanton destruction. In fact, the Mongols success lay not in indiscriminate brutality but in their willingness to compromise and co-operate, thanks to the relentless effort to sustain a system that renewed central control.”

If forbearance (traffic in slavery aside) in the pursuit of riches was generally the rule in Central Asia, the same thing can’t be said about the European empires that rose in the 15th and 16th centuries. These seaborne ventures – first Portugal and Spain, then Great Britain – profoundly altered the balance of world power.

The silver flowing from the New World coursed through European capitals, as a powerful middle class with disposable income to spend and invest rose up. The coffers of the Ottoman Empire filled with revenue from trade. Frankopan highlights a golden age of Ottoman architecture and the triumphs of the Safavid dynasty in Persia. Isfahan became one the glories of the Muslim world, “like a paradise”, one observer who visited the city noted, “with charming buildings, parks in which the perfume of the flowers uplifted the spirit, and streams and gardens”. Yet, such cultural richness came at a price, as thousands of miles away, the Americas were stripped of its natural resources, its indigenous people wiped out or enslaved. Frankopan takes a dim view of the European colonial project and Europe in general. For much of the first half of his account, Europe is a backwater – it was the civilisations of the east that mattered. He contends that the rise of Europe was a disturbing phenomenon, because here was a continent that was almost pathologically violent, its constituent powers constantly at war with one another.

Of political philosopher Thomas Hobbes and his great work Leviathan, Frankopan remarks, "only a European author could have concluded that the natural state of man was to be in a constant state of violence; and only a European author would have been right". This is fair enough, up to a point. But he does not dig deep enough. The last third of Frankopan's otherwise stunning book flags a bit as he explains the decline of the civilisations of the Silk Roads. His research remains impeccable but his argument is not as sophisticated or supple as it is in his preceding sections.

To Frankopan, one moment, which he compares to Columbus’s voyages of 1492, matters above all else – the granting of an oil concession by the Persian shah to the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in 1901.

This kick-started a scramble for resources by the western imperial powers – Frankopan compares what ensued in the Middle East to the stripping of the Americas by the Spanish – the consequences of which are profoundly felt today. Again, this is true up to a point. But Frankopan’s concluding chapters are a recitation of familiar facts and episodes, a clichéd parade of tyrants, terrorists, CIA machinations and attendant blowback from covert operations.

It is not difficult to make a damning case against the United States' policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, whose lands formed key components of the Central Asian spine, along with Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and the other countries of the steppe. We overlook such places at our peril. "For all their apparent 'otherness', however, 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." In The Silk Roads, Peter Frankopan has provided a bracing wake up call.

Matthew Price is a regular contributor to The National.