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<b>Book Review:</b> Retracing the Silk Route from 130 BC to 1453 AD

An Oxford historian captures a fascinating world history from an eastern perspective along the 6,400-km-long Silk Road network that connected eastern China and India to the Mediterranean Sea

Book Review: Retracing the Silk Route from 130 BC to 1453 AD

Rajiv Shirali
THE SILK ROADS
A New History of the World
Author: Peter Frankopan
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Pages: 636
Price: Rs 799

Peter Frankopan, a historian at Oxford University — where he is director of the Centre for Byzantine Research — tells a good story. The Silk Roads is about a subject that has fascinated him from boyhood, enabling him to produce a work that is full of enthralling anecdotal detail. Challenging the traditional narrative of history, which is West-centric, he shifts the centre of gravity eastwards — to a swathe of the world running broadly from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea all the way to the Himalayas and beyond.

The book is also well timed, coming as it does when China is vigorously promoting its “One Belt, One Road” (OBOR) initiative, which Frankopan cites in support of his argument that a 21st century avatar of the Silk Roads is rapidly coming into being — the result of a well-planned Chinese strategy.    

The accepted history of civilisation that the author sets out to counter is, in the words of the anthropologist Eric Wolf (quoted by the author), one where “Ancient Greece begat Rome, Rome begat Christian Europe, Christian Europe begat the Renaissance, the Renaissance the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment political democracy and the industrial revolution. Industry crossed with democracy in turn yielded the United States, embodying the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. And counter it he does, for the most part with great panache.   

Frankopan’s research is impeccable. The Silk Roads is based on information from sources in well over a dozen languages. It has a sweeping canvas and covers more than 2,000 years of history, taking in the Greeks, the Romans, the Huns, the Mongols, the Ottomans, the Mughals, the European voyages of discovery in the 15th and 16th centuries and the establishment of colonial empires, Hitler’s invasion of the erstwhile Soviet Union (to gain control over Ukrainian wheat and the oilfields of Baku), the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, the Cold War and its aftermath, and the global war against terror. There are a myriad themes and threads, each a fit subject for a book; such a broad sweep can leave readers not already familiar with world history feeling that they have been on an exhausting yet exhilarating rollercoaster ride.

The 6,400-km-long Silk Road or Silk Route was an ancient network of trade routes that connected eastern China and India to the Mediterranean Sea. It derived its name from the trade in Chinese silk carried on along its length, from 130 BCE, when China officially opened trade with the West, to 1453 CE, when the Ottoman Empire closed the routes after deciding to boycott trade with the West. But the expression “Seidenstrasse” (or silk road) itself was coined only in 1877, by the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen, following extensive travels in China. Among the hundreds of fascinating details Frankopan mentions is that von Richthofen was the uncle of the ‘Red Baron’, the German World War I fighter pilot and first true fighter ace.

Alas for Frankopan, the region he writes about is now a poor advertisement for its glorious past, consisting as it does of failed and failing states ruled by dictators, and afflicted by terrorism and religious fundamentalism. He concedes as much in the book’s conclusion, but claims that “the Silk Roads are rising again”: railway lines have been laid from Shanghai all the way to Duisburg in Germany to transport Chinese goods westwards and bring back imports; oil and gas pipelines are being built to carry Russian gas to China; and the ever-growing Shanghai Cooperation Organisation may well rival the European Union one day.

Frankopan quotes from a speech by Chinese President Xi Jinping to buttress his argument. On a tour of Central Asian countries in 2013, Xi said it was time to improve China’s trade and economic ties with the Central Asian countries, and for a “Silk Road Economic Belt” to be built — “in other words,” writes the author, “a New Silk Road.” For China, which later christened this its OBOR policy, it is a matter of geo-politics and access to energy. Unlike the ancient network of trade routes, the modern version is much more about a super-power-in-the-making ensuring raw materials supplies and markets, and carving out a sphere of influence.

Book Review: Retracing the Silk Route from 130 BC to 1453 AD
  Frankopan believes that the OBOR initiative is a well-crafted strategy by China to cultivate “all-weather” relationships — though he neglects to point out that it has few of these. His view is consistent with the argument put forward by a recent Brookings Institution research paper, which describes the OBOR policy as China’s response to slowing growth and rising excess capacity, and says it is aimed at strengthening infrastructure “on the westward land route from China through Central Asia, and on the southerly maritime routes from China through Southeast Asia and on to South Asia, Africa, and Europe.” However, few other academics and analysts share Frankopan’s optimism on China’s chances of success.

The effort at brevity in a book that covers so much ground has inevitably led to mistakes. The author refers to the Guru Granth Sahib, Sikhism’s central religious text, as “the Great Sage” — almost certainly a mistaken reference to Guru Nanak. Then again, he writes about the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India gas pipeline project in terms that suggest that the deal has been signed, sealed and delivered, when this is far from being the case.

Frankopan writes in the conclusion that “[t]he age of the west is at a crossroads, if not at an end”. Europe’s economic plight — at a time when cities are booming across the Central Asian region and new megalomania-driven projects are coming up — would appear to support this contention, though the United States is holding up better. History is written by victors, and historiography continues to evolve. The author’s east-centric approach to understanding the subject must, therefore, be considered a part of that evolution, though he is not entirely successful in maintaining this approach in his treatment of the modern period.

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First Published: Oct 24 2015 | 12:28 AM IST

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