The Silk Roads: A New History of the World review

Peter Frankopan's The Silk Roads proposes a radical recentering of world history. The conventional Western narrative places Europe — Greece, Rome, the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution — at the center of the story. Frankopan argues this is a parochial distortion. For most of recorded history, the great flows of goods, ideas, religion, and power moved along the routes connecting Central Asia, Persia, Mesopotamia, the Indian subcontinent, and China. The spine of civilization, he argues, was the Silk Roads — a network of overland and maritime trade routes that linked these regions for millennia before European maritime empires disrupted and eventually dominated them.

The book begins not in Athens or Rome but in Persia, tracing the Persian Empire's central role as a connector of the ancient world. It then follows the diffusion of Buddhism and later Islam along trade routes, the material basis of the Islamic Golden Age, the Mongol Empire as a brief but transformative force for cross-continental exchange, and the devastating disruptions wrought by plague and climate. Frankopan is particularly strong on the medieval period, where Central Asia and the Middle East were the centers of wealth, learning, and power while Europe was a peripheral backwater trading furs and slaves.