63 pages • 2 hours read
Peter FrankopanThe Silk Roads: A New History of the World
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Importance of Trade in Global History
The central idea of Frankopan’s The Silk Roads is that the major networks connecting civilizations were built on and motivated by trade. Because of this, it is only natural that Central Asia and Mesopotamia—as “bridge between east and west” (xv)—have played such an important role in global history. The trade that passed along the trade routes known as the “Silk Roads” gave rise to the greatest empires of history. As Frankopan states at the opening of Chapter 1, “[f]rom the beginning of time, the centre of Asia was where empires were made” (3). Thus, the Persians, Romans, Ottomans, British, and many others all rose to power by taking advantage of the trade routes connecting the world and by creating “Silk Roads” of their own. The Silk Roads also provided opportunities for other peoples, including the nomads of the Central Asian steppes, to carve out positions of importance, as Sogdians, Bedouins, Uighers, and others grew wealthy by driving caravans through Asia.
Historical shifts and developments were often reflected in shifts and developments along trade routes. The empires of the Persians (including the Achaemenids and the Sasanians) were built on the trade that passed through their heartland. Both they and, later, the Mongols conquered territory by leveraging networks that had their origins in trade. The rise to power of the Northern Europeans in the 10th and 11th centuries, like the rise to power of all civilizations, was dictated by “trade and access to desirable goods” (126). In the 1490s, the European “Age of Exploration” gave the West a more central role in the Silk Roads, as their growing wealth (much of it from their exploitation of the newly discovered Americas) allowed them to gradually take control of the trade routes of the East. More recently, the importance of oil has increasingly placed the oil-producing countries of the Middle East—countries such as Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia—at the heart of the global economy.
The greatest world powers have also shown themselves capable of taking advantage of trade routes to bolster their own global importance. Frankopan praises the “fiscal sophistication and restraint” (172) of the Mongols as the real “great achievement of Genghis Khan and his successors” (173), describing how savvy control of trade in this case helped transform the economies of Asia and Europe. Frankopan argues that globalization—far from being an exclusively modern phenomenon—has been a driving force of world history from an early period. The silk roads that carried luxury goods from China to Europe—bringing both devastation and development—were an early instance of globalization. Globalization that gave rise to the European empires of the early modern period, and globalization spurred great expressions of culture and art such as the Taj Mahal.
The Relationship Between Trade and Cultural Exchange
Frankopan emphasizes from early on that the Silk Roads were important for facilitating not only trade but also cultural exchange: “It was not only goods that flowed along the arteries that linked the Pacific, Central Asia, India, the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean in antiquity; so did ideas” (28). The Silk Roads were thus instrumental to the rise and spread of religions such as Christianity and Islam, which traveled along existing trade routes to win believers. These trade routes also allowed cultural and technological developments to spread far beyond their points of origin. As Frankopan observes when discussing the Mongols’ adoption of European military technology, “[c]ontrol of the Silk Roads gave their masters access to information and ideas that could be replicated and deployed thousands of miles away” (157).
The ability of commercial networks to facilitate the exchange of culture, ideas, religion, and technology contributes to the massive importance of these networks and of Frankopan’s “Silk Roads.” The early chapters of the book focus especially on the role of the Silk Roads in spreading religions, exploring how Buddhism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Islam (and many other religions too) influenced and competed with one another, “jostling and blending to create composite worldviews that are difficult to disentangle” (101). Religion heavily influenced the history of the Silk Roads, from the Christianization of the Roman Empire to the Islamic conquests to the Crusades. The movement of ideas along the Silk Roads often enriched civilizations no less than the movement of goods. Cultural exchange made the Muslim world of the seventh and eighth centuries into “a cosmopolitan utopia of sorts” (97), and the inflow of culture and knowledge from the East contributed to Europe’s rise as a global power after the voyages of exploration of the 1490s. Wealth earned from trade also served to stimulate advances in culture and the arts across the Silk Roads, as seen for instance in the prosperous wake of the Mongol conquests: “It was a pattern repeated time and again: money poured into towns that were rebuilt and re-energised, with particular attention paid to championing the arts, crafts and production” (157).
It is no coincidence, then, that many of history’s great cultural centers rose on strategic points along the Silk Roads. Constantinople, which became the capital of the Roman Empire in the early fourth century, commanded a key strategic position on the Dardanelles at the crossroads between Asia and Europe. In addition to being rich and powerful, Constantinople was famous for its art, architecture, and literature. Baghdad, a major center of power, culture, and learning that emerged from the Muslim conquests, was “made possible by the extraordinarily large tax revenue brought in from a vast, productive and monetised empire” (91). In other words, trade and cultural exchange go hand-in-hand.
Power Dynamics Between East and West
One of the central themes of Frankopan’s The Silk Roads is the power dynamics between the East and the West. Specifically, Frankopan sets out to challenge the Eurocentric narrative of world history, stressing instead the central role played by the East, especially Central Asia and Mesopotamia, ever since antiquity. This region, as “the bridge between east and west,” is identified by Frankopan as “the very crossroads of civilization” (xv). It was in the East that the great empires of antiquity arose, including the Persians and Han Chinese. Even the empires built by the Greeks and Romans looked East for their wealthiest and most important holdings, and it was ultimately the Persians who marked the eastern limit of Roman expansion.
Europe, by comparison, was relatively unimportant in global affairs until more recently. To the Greek conqueror Alexander the Great, Europe “offered nothing at all” (6), the Romans found few places in Western Europe that “looked promising” (14). In the Medieval Period, European commercial, political, and even cultural developments were often responses to developments in the East: The burgeoning slave trade of the ninth and 10th centuries, for instance, was at least initially born of increased demand from the prosperous Muslim world. Consequently, throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages, the most important cities of the West were those that connected the West to the East—cities such as Constantinople, Kherson in the Crimea, or Novgorod.
Beginning in the 11th century, the Crusades first opened Europe to the commercial opportunities of the Eastern Mediterranean, with Venice and Genoa becoming rich as trading centers. Unsurprisingly, then, the material gains of the Crusades soon became just as important as the religious aims. The third and fourth Crusades, for instance, were both sidetracked by wealthy potential targets in the East and never even reached Jerusalem, and these wars showed on more than one occasion that “the Europeans would stop at nothing to take what they wanted—and needed—to get to the centre of where the world’s wealth and power lay” (151). In the following centuries, the “centre of the world’s wealth and power” would remain in the East, even as Europe grew more important. Frankopan even argues that the Mongol conquests of the 13th century never sought to make major inroads in Europe because “there were fatter and better targets elsewhere” (162).
Things would change in the 1490s, when Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama discovered new maritime routes that would shift Europe’s role in global affairs. The colonization of the Americas and the opening of new trade routes with Asia gave Europe a central and strategic position for the first time in history (it was at this point, according to Frankopan, that the Europeans reinvented their history, imagining themselves as the direct heirs of the Greek and Roman empires of antiquity). Europe’s newfound importance “brought terrible suffering in newly discovered locations” (197) and led to rampant imperialism throughout the globe as Europeans were able to dominate the world “thanks to the relentless advances in military and naval technology” (197) as well as their “entrenched relationship with violence and militarism” (250). But European imperialism still looked largely eastward, with the British, Portuguese, French, and Russians (among others) all vying to control Asia and the important trade routes of the East (as late as the 20th century, it was these East-facing rivalries that contributed to both World Wars).
The later chapters of the book explore some of the reasons behind the weaknesses and ultimate failure of the West. Frankopan illustrates how Western imperialistic and colonialist exploitation increasingly fell out of favor, especially in strategically important and resource-rich areas such as Iran and India. Matters were only made worse in the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, when the United States (and, until 1990, the Soviet Union) relentlessly pursued virtually imperialist policies in the East, putting commercial interests above everything else while ignoring—or even condoning—human rights violations and injustice. Today, as Frankopan argues in his conclusions, new Silk Roads are emerging—and these are all based in the East, where the Silk Roads have been ever since the beginning of history.
