The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

by Peter Frankopan

Dr. Frankopan was born in the United Kingdom on the 22nd of March, 1971. His father, Louis Nicholas Anthony Doimi Frankopan was forced to flee Yugoslavia in 1951 by the communist government. This was due to the fact that Louis was an aristocrat and the communist government was seizing his lands (I am so spoiled for choice in terms of commentary here. I’ll leave it to the collective imagination.). Mr. Frankopan did manage to land on his feet (Understatement), marrying Ingrid Detter De Frankopan, a Swedish barrister and noted professor of international law (seriously she published almost a dozen books on international law). One of their daughters ended up marrying into the British Royal Family becoming Lady Nicholas Windsor (Damned monarchists). Dr. Frankopan himself attended Eton college (For those of you who don’t know, Eton college is one of the all-boys boarding schools where Rich Fucks send their children to be hazed and turned into Tories. Peak British Aristocracy. More than land on his feet, the exiled Yogoslav aristocrat managed to fall up the unearned privilege ladder if he can send his kid to Eton.) and then went to Jesus College in Cambridge where he met his wife Jessica (she was earning a degree in anthropology) and received a degree in Byzantine History. He went on to Corpus Christi College, Oxford (basically one of the colleges that make up the University of Oxford) where he earned a Ph.D. He is currently Professor of Global History at Oxford, Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College Oxford, Stavros Niarchos Foundation Director of the Oxford Centre of Byzantine Research. He also founded and run a string of hotels with his wife Jessica, they live in Oxford with their children. His first literary work that I can find is a translation of The Alexiad for Penguin books published in 2009. His first history book, The First Crusade The Call from the East was published in 2012. The book we're looking at The Silk Roads was published in 2015, by Vintage Books. Vintage Books is an imprint founded in 1954, it was bought by Random House in 1960 and currently is a division under Penguin Books.

The Silks Roads is an incredibly ambitious book, where Dr. Frankopan seeks to argue for an entirely new look at history placing Iran and Central Asia in the centerpiece as the engine of human history. The title refers to both how and why he believes this region to be so vital to the course of human history. The Silk Road or roads was a network of trade routes that went through central Asia and Iran connecting China and India to the Mediterranean world. The trade that traveled through those routes was staggering even in the ancient world bringing eastern luxuries to the cities of Rome and bringing western goods to Eastern markets. This, argues Dr. Frankopan is where the root cause of many of history's grand moments and turns first came into being. To make this argument, he gives us a broad survey of history starting from the Persian Empire and moving forward from there at a rapid clip. Through the chapters, we see the effect that various groups have had on the Silk Road region and the effects that the Silk Road had on them. To do this Dr. Frankopan takes us on a long journey down the many centuries showing how the trade along the Silk Road or the lack of it affected human civilizations both in Asia and Europe. Interestingly enough from my view, he also makes the argument that everyone benefits when we all calm down and just be cool. For example, there are several periods of peace early in the book where wealth beyond the wildest dreams of avarice flow across the Silk Roads and promotes explosions of scholarly thought and artistic expression but someone always decides that this means they gotta try either expand their power or clamp down on their rivals and everything goes down the drain. This leads to a period where not much is done on the artistic or scholarly front. To be fair, it's hard to research or work on masterpieces if you're just trying to find food or if you need to devote your energy to dodging invading armies. I suppose if there's one theme that unites human history across all times and regions, it's the idea of “Everything was going great and all we had to do was be cool... But we were not cool. We instead decided to wreck up the joint.”

Now the book doesn't entirely focus on the silk road regions, because Dr. Frankopan decides to follow the money in this book. If you do that in world history that means sometime after 1492, you're heading to the Atlantic. Now it's here that I learned a couple of interesting tidbits that I hadn't picked up before. I knew that Christopher Columbus was looking for the eastern coast of Asia when he set off from Spain (And thought the world was smaller than it was, because he couldn’t math.), what I didn't know was that he was fully gripped by the idea that he could convince the Indians to march west to fight the Muslims in alliance with the European Christians. Making him one of those people who just cannot let go of the fact that Christians don't run Jerusalem on top of all of his other flaws and vices (Which were many. Holy Fuck.). It was, however, the Portuguese who would find a sea route to India by going around Africa, something that the Kings of Portugal would take great delight in rubbing in the faces of the monarchs of Spain... Until the New World Treasure ships started rolling in. Dr. Frankopan takes great efforts to map out the effects of the Portuguese trade and the New World's wealth being drained out to Spain had on the Silk Roads. It was one of the factors in a mass collapse of Venetian dominated trade as the Portuguese started undercutting them. They could buy Asian goods at the source and then sail them back to Europe paying no additional duties or taxes on them and the Spanish would simply bury them using mass amounts of New World Silver. New World Silver also fueled the European obsession with Chinese goods. The influx of looted silver was so massive that the price of silver simply crashed in Europe and the Near East but remained stable in China. Which cued up hordes of Europeans looking to take their silver where it had the most purchasing power. This fueled Chinese isolationism because they didn't have to go looking for wealth, it was fighting every obstacle to throw itself at their front door.

Dr. Frankopan traces this silver price crash as part of the reason the Spanish Empire began its collapse, buckling under the strain of bad policy and megalomania (And inbreeding). This lead to a shifting of the center of Europe to the North West, or to be more specific England, while leading to the staggering fall of southern Europe. We don't get very many details of the English Empire, to be fair we don't get to many details in this book as there's just too much to cover. Most of the focus is in the last decades of the English Empire, where Dr. Frankopan advances a different view of the British Empire in the last decades of the 1800s. That of an overextended, overburdened power living in fear of a rising Russia trying to punt the eventual reckoning down the road just a couple of decades in one bad decision after another (Isn’t that kind of the standard view? {Noooo. The standard view is Golden Britannia ruling the waves until the world wars destroyed it} My read of the history of Empire must be a bit closer than standard, then. Because none of this is unfamiliar to me.). Especially in English policy in regards to Persia. It's here where Persia retakes center stage of the book as we examine the establishment of the Anglo-Iranian oil company or as we know it today British Petroleum (A pox be upon it). Persia was the center of a competition between a newly expansionist Russia and the United Kingdom looking for a bulwark against further Russian expansion as the Foreign Office found itself having nightmares of the Russian Armies marching through Afghanistan into India. Meanwhile, they ignored the rising tide of anger and resentment rising in Iran. It's in this context that he presents the decision of the British Empire to pursue an alliance with France and Russia against Germany, another rising power that was wary of Russia. I have to admit this might seem strange to readers who were born after the 1980s and know Russia only as a nearly spent power grimly clinging to relevance due to past successes and nuclear stockpiles but I'll remind such readers that Russia was once a superpower capable of causing panic from Berlin to Washington D.C. Another strange thing is his presentation of the world wars as the beginning of the end for the west, casting the United States as the last vestige of Western Might in some ways as the European Empires fell apart in the aftermath of World War II. It's certainly different than how I was raised to look at events.

The last part of the book looks at the world wars and the rise of the United States and it's being pulled into the Middle East. I say pulled because Dr. Frankopan presents the US moving into Iran and the Middle East out a need for oil and a fear of the Soviet Union despite internal resistance to the idea of entering the world's biggest sucking sandpit (this might be my own bias emerging here, readers). Dr. Frankopan examines US policy and meddling throughout the cold war and the moves of the USSR, although vastly more attention is given to the US than the USSR. To be fair, we did win the cold war which makes our actions the more relevant of the two (Not really. If only because the actions of the US were in opposition to the USSR so both are relevant.), I suppose but the coverage still feels uneven. I'm not sure if this was his intention but the picture of the US that emerges is one of a nation capable of reacting quickly to changing situations and rebound quickly from setbacks but also one of a nation that so damn busy reacting to the situation that no one stops to consider the long-term results of those actions. Just trying to gain short term improvements in positions even if everything is on fire and falling apart. Which was kind of what was happening when the Iranian revolution happened and Saddam decided to break with the Soviet Union to attack Iran. This portrayal isn't super flattering I admit but it's better than the narrative of the US bumbling from one disaster to another that I often run into (Well if the shoe fits…{Except it doesn't Bumbling idiots don’t get to be superpowers. Plus the fact that the post World War II international system is basically an invention of the US State Department is a strong mark against such ideas}). In this read of the situation, the American government moves from one improvisation to another as things keep exploding and it works frantically to stay ahead of the fallout. Another interesting tidbit here is that the Soviet intervention into Afghanistan may have been fueled in part by the rumor being floated around that the leader of Afghanistan was considering throwing in with the Americans. The book ends in the post 911 era, which is full of mistakes galore but also notes a few we avoided; such as Dick Cheney’s constant calling for bombing the Iranian nuclear plants despite being told to his face by the military that this wouldn't work. So it's good to know that there are some bad ideas that we avoided.

I don't feel that the Silk Roads quite makes a convincing case that we should look to the Central Asian area as the ground zero of history. Part of that is because Dr. Frankopan tries to cover just to much history in a single book to make a convincing case. There are worse crimes than ambition for a book to have but here the history is spread too thin for any convincing analysis to be done. Additionally, there are issues of focus as we intensively look at English and American decision making and consideration but not Russian or Chinese ones. I'm going to argue that's looking at half the picture and presents a skewed view of events. To be fair to Dr. Frankopan I think the reasons for that is it is vastly easier for someone like him to get ahold of American and English sources than Russian and Chinese ones (This is true. I have a friend who studies the history of the USSR and she basically has to travel to the archives in Moscow to get the most basic documents. But because of this, I can play six degrees of Joseph Stalin.). To be fair, I'm not sure anyone could get a hold of any Chinese sources except the official party line, which always paints the party's decisions as wise and beneficial ones but that's a target to aim at another time. That said, I do feel the Silk Roads is valuable for the economic view of history it provides and the different narratives of certain historical events, which I don't think are necessarily wrong even if I don't agree with them. To steal from popular culture, sometimes it does depend on your point of view. Overall, however, I'm giving Silk Roads A New World History by Dr. Peter Frankopan a C+. It simply doesn't have the page count to make the case it wants to and cover the massive scale of history it wants to. However, it's still an impressive work for what it is and worth reading in its own right.

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Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders