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ianpauljones 's review for:
The Silk Roads: A New History of the World
by Peter Frankopan
This book has been around for four or five years now, but it looks like I read it at just the right time, given current events in Iran (as of early January 2020).
It claims to be a new history of the world. That’s a bit grandiose, but it certainly is an alternative way of looking at world history over the last two or three thousand years. For the most part, because although the author strives to avoid being Eurocentric, there are times when he just can’t help it, given the role that Europe – and its empires – have played in world history, particularly over the last five hundred years.
I have to say that the opening is not very promising. Roman history is clearly not the author’s forte and he skates over the Roman conquest of Egypt and the defeat of Cleopatra in a pretty perfunctory and not entirely accurate way. However, from then on the book gets much better. This is not so much original research as original thinking and a meticulous synthesis of what we know and what we don’t know about the history of central Asia, or specifically the corridor from Turkey to the Himalayas. Some of this is familiar – the rise of Islam, the Crusades, the Mongols, Timur Lang – but the beauty of this book is the fine detail that the author adds and the connections he makes between events and places that don’t immediately appear to be connected. I could give dozens of examples, but one striking one is the discovery of Roman coins deep in India. Another is the way Buddhism had to jazz itself up to make itself more appealing to people who wanted temples, rituals and statues. Similarly we hear of a 4th century bishop complaining that Jewish services are far more entertaining than Christian ones because they have music and dancing, tambourines and cymbals, and we’ve got to raise our game if we’re going to compete for market share.
There is another apparent blip when the author switches to Columbus, Portugal and Spain and the “discovery” of the Americas. It seems like a digression till you realise that 1492 did shift the centre of gravity temporarily from central Asia to central America; or in Eurocentric terms from Venice to Lisbon and Seville. It also opened up new trade routes between East and West (and made those terms largely meaningless once the globe had been circumnavigated).
As the book moves closer to the twenty-first century, we get new insights into where we are now, such as the rise of China and Iran’s role as a regional power. For example, I was familiar with British nineteenth century Russophobia and the “great game” which largely involved using Afghanistan as a buffer to prevent the Russians from attacking British-ruled India. However, I was very hazy about British involvement in Persia and this book taught me a lot about why the Iranians are so hostile towards us westerners, especially the US and Britain. Whether you agree with the author’s analysis or not, it seems incontestable that much of our intervention in central Asia over the last two hundred or more years has been a concoction of short-termism and naked self-interest mixed with large doses of hypocrisy and double standards, all served up with a thick white supremacist sauce. For example, consider the games the US played during the first Gulf War between Iraq and Iran. First they backed Saddam Hussein of course; but by the mid-eighties the US was not only supplying conventional weapons to Iran; they were also providing the capability for Iran to develop nuclear weapons – and other western countries were falling over themselves to get a slice of the pie. Seems ironic now that Trump is threatening Iran with World War III. NB the author focuses on the role of one Dick Cheney, both in the 1980s as a supplier of arms and nuclear technology and more recently as someone who wants to see the Iranian nuclear programme – that he enabled – blown to dust.
All in all this is a superb book for understanding the world we live in now and I Iook forward to reading the sequel shortly.
It claims to be a new history of the world. That’s a bit grandiose, but it certainly is an alternative way of looking at world history over the last two or three thousand years. For the most part, because although the author strives to avoid being Eurocentric, there are times when he just can’t help it, given the role that Europe – and its empires – have played in world history, particularly over the last five hundred years.
I have to say that the opening is not very promising. Roman history is clearly not the author’s forte and he skates over the Roman conquest of Egypt and the defeat of Cleopatra in a pretty perfunctory and not entirely accurate way. However, from then on the book gets much better. This is not so much original research as original thinking and a meticulous synthesis of what we know and what we don’t know about the history of central Asia, or specifically the corridor from Turkey to the Himalayas. Some of this is familiar – the rise of Islam, the Crusades, the Mongols, Timur Lang – but the beauty of this book is the fine detail that the author adds and the connections he makes between events and places that don’t immediately appear to be connected. I could give dozens of examples, but one striking one is the discovery of Roman coins deep in India. Another is the way Buddhism had to jazz itself up to make itself more appealing to people who wanted temples, rituals and statues. Similarly we hear of a 4th century bishop complaining that Jewish services are far more entertaining than Christian ones because they have music and dancing, tambourines and cymbals, and we’ve got to raise our game if we’re going to compete for market share.
There is another apparent blip when the author switches to Columbus, Portugal and Spain and the “discovery” of the Americas. It seems like a digression till you realise that 1492 did shift the centre of gravity temporarily from central Asia to central America; or in Eurocentric terms from Venice to Lisbon and Seville. It also opened up new trade routes between East and West (and made those terms largely meaningless once the globe had been circumnavigated).
As the book moves closer to the twenty-first century, we get new insights into where we are now, such as the rise of China and Iran’s role as a regional power. For example, I was familiar with British nineteenth century Russophobia and the “great game” which largely involved using Afghanistan as a buffer to prevent the Russians from attacking British-ruled India. However, I was very hazy about British involvement in Persia and this book taught me a lot about why the Iranians are so hostile towards us westerners, especially the US and Britain. Whether you agree with the author’s analysis or not, it seems incontestable that much of our intervention in central Asia over the last two hundred or more years has been a concoction of short-termism and naked self-interest mixed with large doses of hypocrisy and double standards, all served up with a thick white supremacist sauce. For example, consider the games the US played during the first Gulf War between Iraq and Iran. First they backed Saddam Hussein of course; but by the mid-eighties the US was not only supplying conventional weapons to Iran; they were also providing the capability for Iran to develop nuclear weapons – and other western countries were falling over themselves to get a slice of the pie. Seems ironic now that Trump is threatening Iran with World War III. NB the author focuses on the role of one Dick Cheney, both in the 1980s as a supplier of arms and nuclear technology and more recently as someone who wants to see the Iranian nuclear programme – that he enabled – blown to dust.
All in all this is a superb book for understanding the world we live in now and I Iook forward to reading the sequel shortly.