The Silk Roads
The region between east and west, linking Europe with the Pacific Ocean, is the axis on which the globe spins.
Why read it
For centuries we have been taught that history flows from Greece and Rome to Europe and the West, but the true crossroads of the world, where empires, religions, goods, and ideas actually collided and remade civilization, lay far to the east.
Peter Frankopan retells the history of the world by placing the network of trade routes connecting East and West, the Silk Roads, at its center rather than Europe. From the rise of ancient Persia through the spread of religions, the Mongol empire, the plague, and the scramble for oil and power, he argues that the region between the Mediterranean and China has always been, and is becoming again, the axis on which the world turns.
Peter Frankopan, a historian at Oxford, published The Silk Roads in 2015. It became an international bestseller, translated into dozens of languages and especially influential across Asia, and was praised as an ambitious corrective to Eurocentric world history, followed by a sequel, The New Silk Roads.
- 01
Recentering the map
The takeaway is a deliberate shift of history's pivot from Europe to the connective heartland of Asia.
- 02
Networks over nations
Trade routes, not isolated empires, are shown as the true engines of exchange in goods, faith, and disease.
- 03
The flow of religions
The book traces how Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam spread along the same arteries as silk and spice.
- 04
Why it matters now
Frankopan links the ancient routes to modern struggles over oil, resources, and geopolitical power.
The account of how the Black Death traveled along the trade routes, spreading catastrophe from Asia into Europe.
The analysis of the twentieth-century scramble for oil in the Middle East and Central Asia as a new chapter of the same story.
