Not So New, Really

The Silk Roads

A New History of the World

by Peter Frankopan

The fourth star is awarded grudgingly. Mr Frankopan’s subject is so interesting that it would take real effort to to produce a dull book about it. This he has not done, but I think he could have made much more of his material.

His thesis – that Central Asia, the crossroads of the world, is also the place of origin of many of the peoples, events and movements that have shaped history – is one it would be hard to rebut. The author makes his case by giving us the history of the world as a series of transactions between far-flung peoples, transactions that profoundly affect the individuals and cultures that participate in them. This is all quite convincing, but unfortunately Mr Frankopan’s perspective remains very much a Western one, and after we reach the twentieth century (the history of which occupies about half of this thick, square volume) the focus shifts across the Atlantic and the tale becomes mostly about American foreign policy in relation to the Old World rather than about changes taking place in that world itself. In the end we are left with the impression that it is the West, even in decline, that really matters – at least to the author.

There needed to be a lot more Silk Road in this book: a lot more Central Asia, a lot more about the cultures that grew up there and what life was like in the lands that lay along these major international trade routes. Instead, we get far too much about how life changed for Europeans due to the influence of such trade, and far too much about US foreign policy in the twentieth century – a period long after Central Asia had ceased to be any kind of omphalos at all, except perhaps to the energy industry. The author’s account of the history of Iran during this period is valuable; the rest is just the old familiar tale of Cold War woe.

And here we come to the biggest problem of all. To be complete, Mr Frankopan’s thesis must describe and account for the decline and fall of the Russian (later Soviet) Empire in parallel to the decline of the West, especially since he has given us such a lot about the rise of Russia in his book; yet the Bolshevik revolution and the later collapse of the USSR are subjects he barely touches. This, to my mind, is a huge, almost fatal flaw in the work.

Other gaps in the account yawn nearly as wide. This is a ‘history of the world’ that tells us hardly anything about Africa or Latin America; what little there is treats of these continents as mere playgrounds of Western culture. In truth, Mr Frankopan’s supposed rejection of ‘Eurocentricism’ is entirely cosmetic; this is just another history of the West written by a Western historian, though with a slightly different skew than usual.

Taken as such, it’s a three-star read at best. The prose, for instance, is pedestrian. The extra star is awarded merely for the plethora of incidental detail presented by the author – if we get any idea of life on and athwart the Silk Roads from his book, it is through these fragments. Sadly, they weren’t nearly enough to satisfy this reader.