A fresh look at history

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a very useful history, looking at world events through a lens I had never considered: Central Asia's wealth and the West's efforts to possess it. The author traces the development of trade, empire, war, and colonization in the region that stretches from the Mediterranean to Western China, which was, of course, the location of the original "Silk Road." I found it very eye-opening, and most of it entertaining. (Where I wasn't entertained, I was still informed, which is a different reward.) :)

I especially enjoyed the ancient history part, which is why I started the book, but the modern history was equally informative. It showed how many forces have remained constant for millennia. The main idea is that Central Asia has been a source of great wealth throughout history, and the efforts to obtain that wealth (and guarantee its flow) has been a preoccupation of Western powers for thousands of years. Whether it's silk, silver, horses, spices, opium, rare earths, or petroleum that is capturing the attention of traders and speculators and governments, the effect has been to cause competition and war to obtain it.

One of the ways information is framed in this book is to show how much history is driven by trade and profit. Everything is about the money first, and the politics follow. That seems obvious, and has been pointed out endlessly everywhere, but it really informs every moment of history as it is described in this book, and explains better than anything I've read before the movements of people and growth of cities and spread of ideas, including religions. What struck me was the constant revelation of the great wealth of this city or that one, of this empire or that one, in places that are mostly blank in my understanding or only roughly penciled in. In regions that seem, in my mind, to be a deserted wasteland (metaphorically, since I know so little about them), huge numbers of people have lived and civilizations have thrived, with wealthy populations and advanced societies that included many educated, cosmopolitan people enjoying high levels of sophistication. Think Merv, and Balkh, and Samarkand, and Mosul, and Edessa, and dozens more that may seem familiar or may not.

The middlemen all along the route took their cut, and that explains the dramatic push of poor Westerners to find a way around them. The desire for Central Asia's wealth explains the Age of Exploration. It explains the "Great Game" in Afghanistan and India, and it explains British Petroleum, and the toppling of governments. It explains (sort of) how the United States could first arm Saddam and then attack him, or revile Iran and then arm them. Specific examples of European and American colonization or exploitation explain anti-Western sentiment there far better than explanations I've heard since the 80s or 90s in media or elsewhere.

What the author does so well in this book is put this region of the world in the very center of history. Right or wrong, it changes how you look at events, and how you see life on the periphery. It's a "walk a mile in his shoes" exercise that has given me a great deal of insight into how people in the Middle East might see their history, their place in the world, and the relative trustworthiness of our government and institutions, or our corporations. When Westerners--British East India Company, or Exxon, or Soviet Russia, or Hitler's Germany--want to extract a nation's wealth, and then use that wealth to oppress the people in their own land, and treat those people and their needs as less significant, calling them "backward," or "tribal," and brutally suppress their very natural objection to that treatment... well, it's easy to see why they would consider that unjust. You can see why they would expel the colonizers. Why they would nationalize oilfields and railroads. Why they might still be angry.

There are other ways to look at all of these events, of course, but I found this perspective very useful. While it was sometimes uncomfortable, it was enlightening, and well worth spending the time investigating. In addition, the scholarship was excellent (beyond my ability to judge, that is) and painstaking, with extensive notes for the skeptical. So both for its excellent information and its unique perspective, I must highly recommend the book.

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