The Silk Roads (2015)

Frankopan, Peter. The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. New York: Vintage, 2017. (Hardcover published by Bloomsbury London in 2015.)

"[Pulling] multiple strands together in a single work", Frankopan's The Silk Roads "spans centuries, continents and cultures" ( "Acknowledgements", pp. 508-509). Indeed, very ambitious.

Very solid too, supported by the sheer range of secondary and primary references listed in "Notes" (pp. 511-625): English, German, Russian, Dutch, Italian, French, Persian, Latin, Spanish, Scandinavian, and some more. Plus memorable historical events delivered in an accessible language; there is little wonder about the numerous praises heaped upon the work, such as

"This is deeply researched popular history at its most invigorating, primed to dislodge routine preconceptions and to pour in other light."- New York Review of Books

Remembering Sapiens (2011) and Homo Deus (2013) published just a few years before by another Oxford trained historian, Yuval Noah Harari, I couldn't help but second Oxford may very well be the best place to study and write history, especially the kind of history that encompasses a whole lot.

(source: The Yale Tribune)

Unlike Harari who sees human history as a progression from cognitive, agriculture, scientific, and Humanist revolutions, Frankopan considers the heart of Asia, hence the borrowing of 'the Silk Road', as the fulcrum of the history of the world.

In twenty-five chapters (also twenty-five silk roads), he unravels a world history chronologically from the sixth century BC (the Persians Empire) until the twentieth-first century AD (President Xi Jinping's 'The Belt and Road Initiative', since 2013), ending with 'The Road to Tragedy' and 'The New Silk Road'.

(source: Wikipedia '一帶一路')

Perhaps not dissimilar to Frankopan's ambitious endeavor, Xi's B&R Initiative seems equally bold. 

It ambitiously claims to invest at least 54.5 billion USD by China alone in SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization, since 2001) partners including Pakistan, India, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan; Iran (Persia before 1935) in the Middle East; Southeast Asian states along a maritime Silk Road including Philippines and Indonesia. Both supported as "intercontinental cooperation" (Pakistan) and opposed as "a colonial enterprise" (India), B&R Initiative intends to expand the state's influence forcefully by its economic prowess under the name of 'addressing the region's infrastructure gap'.

Yet, isn't this just old wine in another (not even new) bottle? One thing that Frankopan does not spare his readers in The Silk Roads is exactly how history repeats itself regardless of players. What changes is the form, not the content.

Sogdian traders (sixth century AD) and Jewish merchants (ninth century AD) were the glue connecting oase towns between China and Persia, much like Wangara traders in West Africa. Slave trade, especially notorious in the fifteenth century AD across the Atlantic, had predecessors in Central Asia and Europe. The justification of war in defense of God fills many pages since antiquity until present. Double playing or crossing as well as provisional alliances for the sake of protecting personal (and state) interests of the day is the only card on the table, dealt by every player almost at every occasion. This is a gruesome picture; depressing, too. Does nobody learn from the past anymore?

What draws Frankopan to rewrite world history is, as he said in "Preface", a desire for an alternative from the east that is much ignored and prejudiced due to orientalism. He believes the heart of Asia, pretty much covered by Xi's 'One Belt', is "the very crossroads of civilization", "a world profoundly interconnected", and "the real crucible 'Mediterranean'- the centre of the world" (pp. xv, xvi & xix).

Such sentiment is shared by Japanese Mongol expert Sugiyama Masaaki (b. 1952) who in multiple places of his 遊牧民から見た世界史―民族も國境もこえて (《遊牧民的世界史》tr. 黃美蓉, 新北: 廣場, 2015) fiercely attacks the western narrative of civilization as narcissistic. Hence, to counter-balance the evil effect, he mainly cites Japanese scholars and Chinese primary sources for his reconstruction of pastoral nomads cultures prevailing on Eurasia for two thousand years before Europe ushered the world into a time of guns and sea.

Ironically (another key word in Frankopan), even though The Silk Roads is hailed as "A New History of the World", 遊牧民から見た世界史 is praised as the other neglected half of the world, I can't help but wonder is that all to the world? Of course not. Regions and cultures not directly related to the Silk Road are given only a word (Taiwan, for example) or completely left out. I understand the rhetoric often used to promote a certain idea; however, I don't understand why such rhetoric has to be comprehensive, when in fact the higher hopes are raised, the more likely such promise will fall short.

With all due respect to the author's wonderful performance (his allusions cover a very wide field including the most obvious linguistics and phenology), the first half of The Silk Roads reads like bits and pieces put together from history monographs that "focus on increasingly narrow subject matter over ever shortening timeframes" (p. 508), while the second half stories from contemporary international relations and area studies. I would pick up monographs for the first half and pretty much ignore the second since many of them are mistakes repeated again and again by policy that was created "pragmatically, on the hoof and often with little though about international law and justice" (p. 489).

What's important here to me is the nature of world history. What does it mean? A populist account attempting to cover the world by the most diligent and candid historian of integrity? That is so inhuman, considering the load of the task, and yet so superhumanistic, believing such task can ever be achieved. Interesting irony. Like by laying the foundation of Christianity in Europe, Constantine the Great incidentally "compromised Christianity's future in the east" (p. 44), The Silk Roads may have done just the same with 'world history'. 

It appears to me the continuity and change of an area may not do so well the starting point of a world history as a sweeping phenomenon like plague or climate...