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The Silk Roads: Questioning the Eurocentric View of History

In The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, Peter Frankopan seeks to counter the Eurocentric view of history by providing a comprehensive history of intellectual, physical and commercial exchange across The Silk Roads.

Peter Frankopan,2015. The Silk Roads: a new history of the world, Bloomsbury.

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Why this book?

Peter Frankopan explains why he writes his new book, The Silk Roads: a new history of the world. It is because the Westerners have a distorted view of history. The history told and taught in the western countries has a narrow geographic focus, concentrating solely on western Europe and the United States and left most of the rest of the world untouched. And history is twisted and manipulated to create an insistent narrative where the rise of the west was not only natural and inevitable, but a continuation of what had gone before.

Peter Frankopan attempts to look at history in alternative ways–ones that did not involve looking at the past from the perspective of the winners of recent history. And he shifts the geographic focus to the center of the world. It is not a sea separating Europe and North Africa, but right in the heart of Asia.

In fact, for millennia, it was the region lying between east and west, linking Europe with the Pacific Ocean, that was the axis on which the globe spun. These pathways serve as the world's central nervous system, connecting peoples and places together, but lying beneath the skin, invisible to the naked eye. Just as anatomy explains how the body functions, understanding these connections allows us to understand how the world works.

And yet, despite the importance of this part of the world, it has been forgotten by mainstream history. In part, this is because of what has been called "orientalism" – the strident and overwhelmingly negative view of the east as undeveloped and inferior to the west, and therefore unworthy of serious study. But it also stems from the fact that the narrative of the past has become so dominant and well established that there is no place for a region that has long been seen as peripheral to the story of the rise of Europe and of western society.

The west's fixation on its own history has led us to ignore the vast terrain of the 'Silk Roads', to which we owe our civilization, and thus to misunderstand its peoples. Peter Frankopan aims to correct this eurocentric view by telling the world history from the perspective of the Silk Roads.

There is nothing new in insisting that the world’s center lies to the east: Christopher Marlowe called Persia/Iran “the middle of the world” back in 1587 and many historians have echoed that thought. But Frankopan ranges further than many before him, digs deeper in archives, quotes more texts to make his point. Drawing on a rich series of sources in Greek, Latin, French, Italian, German, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Russian, Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Hebrew, Syriac and Chinese, The Silk Roads provides a major re-assessment of world history from antiquity to the modern day. The book consists of 25 chapters and moves chronologically from the earliest civilizations in Central Asia to the Second Gulf War and touches, in conclusion, on the current challenges facing what the West terms the ‘Middle East’.

What are the Silk Roads?

The silk roads are the arteries along which people, goods, ideas, religions, disease and many other things have flowed. The “silk road (Seidenstraßen)” label is relatively recent, coined only in 1877 by the German geologist Ferdinand von Richthofen, uncle of the first world war flying ace, the “Red Baron” and the name of silk road has stuck ever since.

The region of the Silk Roads is obscure to many in the English-speaking world. Yet the region linking East with West is where civilization itself began, where the world's great religions were born and took root, where goods were exchanged, and where languages, ideas and disease spread.

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It is a region that is the halfway point between east and west, running broadly from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea to the Himalayas. It is a region that is now home to states that evoke the exotic and the peripheral, like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and the countries of the Caucasus; it is a region associated with regimes that are unstable, violent and a threat to international security, like Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Syria, or ill versed in the best practices of democracy, like Russia and Azerbaijan.

It is a region that is the very crossroads of civilization. Far from being on the fringe of global affairs, these countries lie at its very center – as they have done since the beginning of history. It was here that civilization was born, and where many believed mankind had been created. It is a region that great metropolises were established nearly 5,000 years ago, where the cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro in the Indus valley were wonders of the ancient world, with populations numbering in the tens of thousands and streets connected to a sophisticated sewage system that would not be rivalled in Europe for thousands of years. Other great centers of civilization such as Babylon, Nineveh, Uruk and Akkad in Mesopotamia were famed for their grandeur and architectural innovation.

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It is a region where the world's great religions burst into life, where Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism jostled with each other. 

It is the cauldron where language groups competed, where Indo-European, Semitic and Sino-Tibetan tongues wagged alongside those speaking Altaic, Turkic and Caucasian. For centuries before the early modern era, the intellectual centers of excellence of the world, the Oxfords and Cambridges, the Harvards and Yales, were not located in Europe or the west, but in Baghdad and Balkh, Bukhara and Samarkand. There was good reason why the cultures, cities and peoples who lived along the Silk Roads developed and advanced: as they traded and exchanged ideas, they learnt and borrowed from each other, stimulating further advances in philosophy, the sciences, language and religion.

But not everything that passed along the roads was beneficial. Violence was a regular traveler – there is a particularly good chapter on the rise of the Mongols, who wreaked havoc as they went, and another on the spread of the Slavs and the rise of the Rus, and on British and American meddling since the 19th century. The spread of plague, the black death, is also well handled, with Frankopan pointing out that the decimation of Europe’s population had its advantages: because there were fewer workers, the price of labour rose, wealth was spread (a little) more evenly and, as a result, the cultural flowering that was the Renaissance happened.

It was not just trade and conquest that flowed along the Silk Roads; so did disease. The most devastating was the Black Death, which ravaged Asia and Europe in the fourteenth century. Victims depicted in the Toggenburg Bible have the distinctive swellings that Boccaccio said could be the size of apples. 

China became increasingly interested in the world beyond the Pacific in the fifteenth century. The Chinese Admiral Zheng He explored the Indian Ocean and the coast of East Africa. This wall painting from the Chinese Temple Shrine, Penang, Malaysia, shows one of his ships.

The Silk Roads were no exotic series of connections, but networks that linked continents and oceans together. They were - and still are - the world's central nervous system. This is where empires were won - and where they were lost.

The “One Belt, One Road” proposed by Chinese President Xi Jinping and the New Silk Roads

The silk roads are not only the past, but also the present and the future. As a new era emerges, the patterns of exchange are mirroring those that have criss-crossed Asia for millennia. We are seeing the signs of the world’s center of gravity shifting – back to where it lay for millennia.

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. New connections are springing up across the spine of Asia, linking this key region to the north, south, east and west, and taking many different routes, shapes and forms. The Chinese government is building networks carefully and deliberately to connect to minerals, energy sources and access to cities, harbors and oceans.

The New Silk Road is a theme taken up by the Chinese President, Xi Jinping. For more than 2,000 years, he announced in Astana during a major tour of the center of Asia in the autumn of 2013, the peoples who live in the region that connects east and west have been able to coexist, co-operate and flourish despite ‘differences in race, belief and cultural background’. It is a ‘foreign policy priority’, he went on, ‘for China to develop friendly co-operative relations with the Central Asian countries. The time has come, he went on, to make economic ties closer, improve communication, encourage trade and enhance monetary circulation. The time has come, he said, for a ‘Silk Road Economic Belt’ to be built – in other words, a New Silk Road.

Heydar Aliyev International Aiport in Baku, Azerbaijan. One of the state of the art transport hubs being built along the New Silk Road.

The Silk Roads are rising again.

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