The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

“From the beginning of time, the centre of Asia was where empires were made.”

The first words of Chapter 1 set the tone for Frankopan’s book, which seeks to shift the focus of historiography away from Europe and toward Central Asia and Mesopotamia. Frankopan seeks to establish that it was this region, not Europe, that facilitated many of the most important historical developments since antiquity because of its position at the crossroads between East and West.

“We think of globalisation as a uniquely modern phenomenon; yet 2,000 years ago too, it was a fact of life, one that presented opportunities, created problems and prompted technological advance.”

Frankopan recasts globalization as a driving force of world history since ancient times. This project is related to his argument against Eurocentrism, as he refutes the common view that the European “Age of Exploration” initiated globalization. For Frankopan, globalization is rather a phenomenon with its origins in the East, in the silk road and other trade routes that passed through Central Asia and Mesopotamia to connect the Mediterranean and the Pacific.

“It was not only goods that flowed along the arteries that linked the Pacific, Central Asia, India, the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean in antiquity; so did ideas. And among the most powerful ideas were those that concerned the divine.”

Part of Frankopan’s thesis is that commercial networks like the Silk Road were important not only for their economic role but because of their role in spreading ideas and culture. Religion in particular is shown to have been tremendously important in the early history of these trade routes, with Christianity and Islam disseminated along these networks, shaping cultures, kingdoms, and empires.

“Religions had always played off each other in this region, and learnt that they had to compete for attention. The most competitive and successful, however, turned out to be a religion born in the little town of Bethlehem.”

Frankopan places Christianity in the context of the other religions that arose in Central Asia—religions like Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Buddhism, among others. These religions did not emerge in isolation but rather borrowed extensively from one another while also vying for supremacy—and it was Christianity (“a religion born in the little town of Bethlehem”) that Frankopan argues was the “most competitive and successful” as it became the religion of the Roman Empire while also making significant inroads in the East.

“The Islamic conquests created a new world order, an economic giant, bolstered by self-confidence, broad-mindedness and a passionate zeal for progress.”

The early successes of Islam demonstrate how economic prosperity funded technological, cultural, and intellectual advancement Europe had fallen on hard times in the seventh and eighth centuries, with Rome in shambles and with North Africa and even some parts of Western Europe controlled by Muslims. This “new world order” is another example of early globalization initiated in the East.

“But while the Crusade is chiefly remembered as a war of religion, its most important implications were worldly. The first great struggle between the powers of Europe for position, riches and prestige in faraway lands was about to begin, triggered by the realisation of the prizes on offer.”

Frankopan emphasizes that the First Crusade was motivated by religious as well as more “worldly” concerns: As Frankopan’s book illustrates again and again, ideas, commerce, and culture often worked together to bring about historical events. Frankopan also reiterates the importance of the East in relation to the West during this period, when the commercial and cultural significance of the Muslim world far exceeded that of Christian Europe.

“Control of the Silk Roads gave their masters access to information and ideas that could be replicated and deployed thousands of miles away.”

Frankopan reflects on how the Mongols used their command of important commercial networks to adopt military technology employed by the Europeans in the Holy Land, commenting on the importance of the “Silk Roads” in spreading ideas (not just goods) throughout the world. Mastery of these trade routes thus brought great power and wealth if one knew how to take advantage of the opportunities that came with such mastery.

“The Middle Ages in Europe are traditionally seen as the time of Crusades, chivalry and the growing power of the papacy, but all this was little more than a sideshow to the titanic struggles taking place further east. The tribal system had led the Mongols to the brink of global domination, having conquered almost the whole continent of Asia. Europe and North Africa yawned open; it was striking then that the Mongol leadership focused not on the former but on the latter. Put simply, Europe was not the best prize on offer.”

The Mongols’ expansion throughout Asia highlights that, in the 13th century, commercial and cultural power were still concentrated in the East: Europe was still relatively unimportant, and was thus not prioritized by the Mongol conquests. Frankopan highlights that, in contrast to Eurocentric narratives of world history, Europe and European conflicts such as the Crusades were still peripheral to the great cultural clashes and exchanges during this period.

“Suddenly, the continent was no longer the terminus, the end point of a series of Silk Roads; it was about to become the centre of the world.”

To Frankopan, the voyages of Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama at the end of the 15th century mark a shift in the relationship between the East and the West. Whereas Europe had until then been the relatively unimportant “terminus” of the Silk Roads bringing goods and ideas from the East, the opening of new trade routes to the Americas, Africa, and India by Columbus and da Gama would give them a much more central position in global affairs.

“The task now was to reinvent the past. The demise of the old imperial capital presented an unmistakable opportunity for the legacy of ancient Greece and Rome to be claimed by new adoptive heirs—something that was done with gusto. In truth, France, Germany, Austria, Spain, Portugal and England had nothing to do with Athens and the world of the ancient Greeks, and were largely peripheral in the history of Rome from its earliest days to its demise. This was glossed over as artists, writers and architects went to work, borrowing themes, ideas and texts from antiquity to provide a narrative that chose selectively from the past to create a story which over time became not only increasingly plausible but standard. So although scholars have long called this period the Renaissance, this was no rebirth. Rather, it was a Naissance—a birth. For the first time in history, Europe lay at the heart of the world.”

Here, Frankopan traces the Eurocentric worldview of the West as the “center” of the world to the period following the voyages of Columbus and da Gama in the late 15th century. It was at this time that European powers began propagating the narrative that their importance was a legacy directly inherited from the ancient empires of the Greeks and Romans—a narrative with little historical basis—when in reality this was the “first time in history” that Europe commanded a central position in global affairs.

“But it was Europe’s entrenched relationship with violence and militarism that allowed it to place itself at the centre of the world after the great expeditions of the 1490s.”

Frankopan posits that what really made the Europeans successful after their new discoveries in the 15th century had little to do with their Greco-Roman legacy, religion, or exceptionalism but everything to do with Europe’s attitude toward violence. The typically European glorification of violence and militarism, combined with advances in military technology, made the Europeans ruthless when it came to dominating populations abroad.

“It was not a series of unfortunate events and chronic misunderstandings in the corridors of power in London, Berlin, Vienna, Paris and St Petersburg that brought empires to their knees, but tensions over the control of Asia that had been simmering for decades.”

Frankopan characteristically focuses on the (often underappreciated) role that the East played in world history, arguing that even the events leading to the World Wars had more to do with competition for control of Asia than with domestic European affairs. Frankopan goes on to show how increasing Russian prominence in the East led to competition and mounting tensions with other European powers (especially the British Empire), setting the stage for the First World War.

“As the two bullets left the chamber of Princip’s Browning revolver, Europe was a continent of empires. Italy, France, Austro-Hungary, Germany, Russia, Ottoman Turkey, Britain, Portugal, the Netherlands, even tiny Belgium, only formed in 1831, controlled vast territories across the world. At the moment of impact, the process of turning them back into local powers began. Within a matter of years, gone were the emperors who had sailed on each other’s yachts and appointed each other to grand chivalric orders; gone were some colonies and dominions overseas—and others were starting to go in an inexorable progression to independence.”

The First World War would mark the end of European imperialism, as the war’s devastation deprived the European empires of their former power and removed Europe from its tenure at the “center” of the world. Frankopan thus shows that the Eurocentric view of world history arises from what was really a very short period of time—the period between the 1490s and the early 1900s—when Europe “was a continent of empires” with holdings across the world. After the World Wars, as Frankopan will show in subsequent chapters, power passes to different regions.

“The pipeline itself was highly symbolic, for it marked the first strand in what was to become a web of pipelines criss-crossing Asia that gave new form and life to the old Silk Roads.”

For Frankopan, this British oil pipeline marks one of many modern reincarnations of the Silk Road. Like earlier Silk Roads, the oil trade originated in the East and ran from East to West, highlighting the continued importance of the East—and especially Persia—as a crossroads.

“The reality, however, was that the tide had already turned. The power and influence of the West was in decline—and seemed certain to diminish further. There was a price to pay for constant interference in local affairs; there was a price to pay for remodelling the gardens of the embassy; and there was a price to pay for never quite playing with a straight bat. That price was reservation, misgivings and mistrust.”

In this passage, Frankopan reflects on the accelerating decline of Western imperialism as the European hold over Eastern countries proved more and more difficult to maintain. Contributing to the failure of Western imperialism (especially British imperialism) was constant intervention in local affairs that contributed to widespread hatred of the West in Eastern countries such as Persia. The “reservation, misgivings and mistrust” that emerged in the region foreshadow the growing hostility between the West and the Arab world that would come to characterize the second half of the 20th century (discussed by Frankopan in later chapters).

“The problem was that Germany was poorly located geographically to gain access to the Atlantic and to trade with the Americas, Africa and Asia; Hitler therefore set his sights on the east. Behind his decision to reconcile with the Soviet Union was the idea that this would give him access to his very own Silk Road.”

The situation of Germany at the dawn of the Second World War is connected to geography, a major factor in the global history put forward by Frankopan: Because of its less-than-strategic location, Germany could only access the rich resources of the East through the Soviet Union. Hitler’s planned invasion of the Soviet Union was essential if he was to seize the commercial opportunities of the East to build “his very own Silk Road.”

“So began a chain of events whose scale and horror were unprecedented, the shipment of human beings like livestock to holding pens where they could be divided into those who would work as slave labour and those whose lives were deemed to be the price to pay for the survival of others: southern Russia, Ukraine and the western steppe became the cause of genocide. The failure of the land to generate wheat in the anticipated quantities was a direct cause of the Holocaust.”

For Frankopan, the “unprecedented” mass genocide of Jews, Russians, and other populations at the hands of the Germans in the Second World War stemmed from commercial concerns—namely, Hitler’s failure to achieve his goal of securing wheat and ending the German food crisis with his invasion of the Soviet Union. Frankopan thus emphasizes, as he does throughout his book, the interconnection of commerce, politics, and ideology.

“Western corporations that controlled concessions and whose distribution was largely concentrated on Europe and the United States began to funnel cash to the Middle East and, in doing so, started a shift in the world’s centre of gravity. The spider’s web of pipelines that criss-crossed the region and connected East with West marked a new chapter in the history of this region. This time, it was not spices or silks, slaves or silver that traversed the globe, but oil.”

According to Frankopan, the most important commodity of the modern “Silk Roads” is oil, taking the place of the spices, silks, slaves, and precious metals that flowed along these trade routes in earlier periods. Though it was initially the West that controlled the oil trade in this region, this changed in the 20th century as the countries of the East grew wealthy from their oil and began to take control of their own resources. The result is that the East once again assumed its place at the center of the world.

“It was the point where the United States stepped into the breach; it was the point where the United States came into serious contact with the region criss-crossed for centuries by the Silk Roads—and set about trying to control it. But there were dangers ahead. Posturing about democracy on the one hand while being prepared to sanction and even orchestrate regime change on the other made for uncomfortable bedfellows. It could be dangerous to play both sides—not least because in due course there would inevitably be a breakdown in trust and a collapse of credibility.”

With British power rapidly receding in the middle of the 20th century, the United States played an increasingly prominent role in Middle Eastern affairs—but also an increasingly imperial role. The tension between American claims about democracy and their willingness to achieve their goals through unscrupulous means would become a major theme of American policy in the Middle East throughout the second half of the 20th century, as Frankopan illustrates in subsequent chapters.

“For two centuries, the great powers of Europe had struggled and fought each other for control of the region and of the markets that linked the Mediterranean with India and China. The 20th century saw the recoil of western Europe’s position, and the passing of the baton on to the United States.”

After the World Wars, the United States took the place of the old European empires as the dominant power in the East, creating its own “Silk Road.” But retaining control of the region and its vast commercial opportunities would prove a serious challenge, not least because the United States, like its Western predecessors, would often employ policies that failed to inspire trust.

“In truth, the issue was not that the United States and to a lesser extent Britain were reviled for their supposed interference in the affairs of the countries sprawling from the Mediterranean eastwards and for being willing to line the pockets of a corrupt elite. Rather, the rhetoric masked the imperatives of a new reality where a region that had become peripheral over the course of several centuries was re-emerging as a result of the natural resources lying in its soil, the plentiful supply of customers willing to pay for them and rising demand. This fuelled ambitions, and in particular the demand not to be circumscribed by outside interests and influences.”

Though anti-Western sentiment increased in the second half of the 20th century, the meddling and corruption of the United States and Europe were not the only—or even the primary—reasons for the unrest in the Middle East. Rather, as Frankopan argues, the oil-rich countries of the Middle East were “fuelled” by their access to key natural resources and became increasingly aware of their own importance. It was only natural that the region should strive for independence from those who had long controlled them.

“Putting American interests first was not in itself the problem; the issue was that conducting imperial-style foreign policy requires a more careful touch—as well as more thorough thinking about the long-term consequences. In each case, in the late 20th-century struggle for control of the countries of the Silk Roads, the US was cutting deals and making agreements on the hoof, solving today’s problems without worrying about tomorrow’s—and in some cases laying the basis for much more difficult issues.”

Frankopan argues that the US failed in the Middle East not because it pursued an imperialist foreign policy, but because it did so without sufficient tact, thus acquiring a negative reputation for double-dealing and exploitation, making moves that made sense in the short term without thinking about the long term. This pattern of behavior would persist throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, only further undermining American interests in the Middle East.

“[P]rotecting a global order that suits western interests is simply a new chapter in the attempt to maintain position in the ancient crossroads of civilisation. The stakes are too high to do otherwise.”

With the last words of Chapter 25, Frankopan reflects on the extreme lengths to which the United States continues to go to protect its interests in the Middle East, lengths inspired by an awareness of the extreme importance of the region as “the ancient crossroads of civilisation.” Despite the limited success the West has had in recent decades, they have no choice but to continue to try to control the region, as their failure to do so would have significant commercial and political costs.