Along the Trail of Trade

According to TLS reviewer David Morgan, Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads is the fruit of teenage dissatisfaction with world history: “Frankopan tells us that as a teenager he became increasingly dissatisfied with the version of history he had been taught: essentially the ‘Rise of the West,’ in which Greece led to Rome, to Christian Europe, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, democracy and the Industrial Revolution: ultimately European and American domination of the civilized world. This worry was reinforced by a treasured childhood possession: a map of the world. Why, he wondered, did we hear little or nothing about the history of most of it?”

Morgan had a similar experience: “it was a map of the Mongol Empire which made this reviewer, as a teenager, puzzle over why no one seemed to know anything about what appeared to have been the largest land empire known to history, except that it was possible to be ‘to the right of Genghis Khan,’ which was not usually intended as a compliment. As the young Frankopan explored further, it became clear to him that the conventional vision of world history had been heavily influenced by a reading back of the rise of Europe from the fifteenth century into earlier periods when what really mattered most was happening in quite other parts of the world. It might here be remarked that even that rise of Europe occurred probably much later than is generally supposed: John Darwin, in his great book After Tamerlane (2007), argued persuasively that Western predominance dates not from the fifteenth century but from well into the eighteenth.”

Rather than focus on Europe, Frankopan sets the center of civilization further east: “for most of history, the centre of the world has been well to the east of Europe. It is principally concerned with what we now think of as the Middle East and Central Asia, the locus of the pre-modern world’s main trade routes as well as its major empires, and the area from which the world’s great religions originated. Frankopan’s approach, appropriately, is strongly economic, placing much emphasis on the importance of trade.”

Trade, and empire: “Earlier empires often receive a much more favourable press [than later ones]: notably those of the Achaemenid Persians and the Abbasids. Treatment of the Mongols reflects the tendency of recent scholarship in suggesting that, after the death and destruction of the initial conquests was over, there are markedly positive aspects to their rule, especially in cultural terms. This fits in well with the book’s emphasis on the ubiquity and significance of generally tradebased cultural transmission; but to enjoy those benefits you first had to survive the Mongol conquests, which a great many did not.”

One possible implication: Perhaps the events of the gospels were not as far in the “backwater” of civilization as our Greco-Roman shaped accounts of history suggest.