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Zusammenfassung von The Silk Roads

Name: The Silk Roads
Rating: 4.6 (186 reviews)
Author: Peter Frankopan

Peter Frankopan

A New History of the World

4.6 (186 Bewertungen)

28 Min.

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Der Nahe Osten Internationale Wirtschaft Altertum Asiens Geschichte Wandel & Evolution Geschichte der USA Kriege Europäische Geschichte

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What’s in it for me? Take a journey down the long history of the Silk Roads.

The history of the world is a mighty big topic. When grappling with such an outsized subject, it’s tempting to try to streamline it. Some historians make it seem like an adventure story, zeroing in on kings and politicians and other prominent personalities. Others turn it into a narrative, a sort of epic tale of major events. But history isn’t actually like that. People, even mighty emperors, are tiny pieces in an impossibly complex puzzle.

So what actually is important? Well, to borrow a well-known phrase from Bill Clinton’s campaign team, the economy, stupid!

The network of trade routes that took shape in ancient Mesopotamia has morphed, changed and spread along with our ever-changing world. At the height of its importance, this network acquired a name, the Silk Road, which Marco Polo famously followed on his travels from Italy to China. This road brought the world together, as people from both East and West traded along its many arteries. But the Silk Road was not an isolated historical phenomenon. It’s been added on to and reiterated, and it’s been through many phases. Therefore, it might make more sense to think of it in the plural: the Silk Roads.

As Frankopan’s narrative makes clear, the history of the world can be told as a story of trade. In his view, whoever controls the Silk Roads also controls the globe.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

where the word ‘slave’ comes from;
why the Black Death wasn’t as disastrous as you might assume; and
which trade deal led to the demise of the Persian shahs.

In antiquity, goods and ideas flowed between East and West, creating the Silk Roads in the process.

Thousands of years ago, the expanse of land bracketed by the Euphrates and Tigris rivers was called Mesopotamia. This area, which covered most of what is now Iraq and parts of the surrounding countries, is the cradle of Western civilization. It was here that the first towns, cities, kingdoms and empires emerged.

Of these empires, the greatest was the Persian. By the sixth century BCE, it stretched from Egypt and Greece in the West to the Himalayas in the East. It was an empire built on trade between its cities – trade that was made possible by a network of roads that connected the Mediterranean to the heart of Asia.

These roads were a mighty achievement, but their destiny was to become a constituent part of the Silk Roads, the famous network of routes that eventually linked China with the West.

Under the Han dynasty, between 206 BCE and 220 CE, China began to expand its horizons. It pushed its borders northward and westward as far as the Eurasian steppes, the sweeping grasslands that cover much of modern-day Russia’s southern regions. This expansion linked Persia’s trade routes with China’s own network of roads.

The steppes were a wild place. The Chinese sought to maintain peace in the region by trading with the nomads. Rice, wine and textiles were all favored commodities, but silk was by far the most coveted.

Silk became a symbol of wealth, luxury and power. It was even occasionally used as currency. As trade expanded, it attained a reputation as a luxury good in the West, too. In fact, by the time Rome came to dominate the Mediterranean, in the middle of the first century BCE, silk’s reputation there was secure.

But it wasn’t just goods that flowed between East and West. The routes facilitated the exchange and dissemination of ideas, too.

The most powerful of these were religious. Local cults became increasingly mixed with established belief systems, a process that created a rich melting pot of ideas concerning the divine. For instance, the Greek pantheon of gods headed east, while Buddhist ideas circulated from northern India into China and the rest of Asia.

In fact, these networks partly explain why Christianity was later able to spread so quickly from its humble origins in Palestine through the Mediterranean and across Asia.

The new Muslim world took control of the Silk Roads, causing riches and knowledge to flow across the world.

In the first centuries of the first millennium CE, the eastern fringes of the Roman Empire – and, later, of the Byzantine Empire – constituted a contested zone. Both empires fought bitter campaigns against the Arsacid and Sasanian Persian dynasties for hegemony in the Western world.

By the sixth century, Western Europe had entered a dark age of upheaval and turmoil. In contrast, a new power united by a strong sense of religious identity was forming on the Arabian Peninsula.

A burgeoning slave trade and the conquering of Jerusalem signaled the start of Europe’s rise.

The Muslim empire reached ever-greater heights. And, during this ascent, the demand for slaves grew considerably, too.

Interestingly, a great number of the slaves from eastern Europe were brought to the Muslim world by the Vikings. In fact, the word “slave” is derived from the name that was originally given to this group of people: the Slavs.

Over the course of just two centuries, vast swathes of the globe were ravished, first by the Mongols and then by disease.

In the late eleventh century, the Mongols were just one of many tribes that dwelt in the steppes north of China.

The Mongols were widely viewed with contempt. To outsiders, the Mongols appeared to be a chaotic horde, but they were actually highly strategic and precise planners. These qualities enabled the Mongols to conquer much of Asia and Europe by the end of the thirteenth century, thus establishing the world’s largest contiguous empire.

European expeditions to Africa, the Americas and Asia connected the world, but they also caused terrible suffering.

Even though the death toll caused by the Black Death was astronomical, the feared apocalypse failed to materialize.

Europe after the plague was an altogether different place. The population had fallen dramatically, but this had served to empower the peasantry and to weaken the propertied classes.

New trading routes led to new empires, as different European powers took turns in the imperial limelight.

Thanks to the expeditions of the European seafarers, Europe now sat at the center of the world.

By 1500, Portugal and Spain had become the mightiest powers on the continent. But their reigns were short-lived. In the sixteenth century, Northern Europe came to the fore.

As the twentieth century dawned, Western powers made a beeline for Persian oil reserves.

It had long been known that large oil reserves were buried below Persia. But, before 1900, no one much cared for its black gold. It took a Briton, William Knox D’Arcy, to convince the Shah of Persia to allow access to the reserves.

Back in 1901, the Persian Shah, Mozaffar ad-Din Shah Qajar, signed an agreement that granted Knox D’Arcy the exclusive rights to Persia’s natural gas and petroleum for 60 years. In return, the Shah was to receive ₤20,000 in cash and another ₤20,000 in shares of the newly formed company, as well as 16 percent of its profits each year. This agreement was known as the Knox D’Arcy Concession.

Hitler sought to conquer the fertile soils of southern Russia and the low grain yield may have contributed to the Holocaust.

In August 1939, arch nemeses Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression treaty. But the treaty was built on a secret: Hitler and Stalin had agreed that Poland would be divvied up between the two nations.

And so, on September 1, 1939, the German Wehrmacht invaded and overran its neighbor to the East. The Soviet Union, meanwhile, did nothing.

After the Second World War, the United States tried to extend its influence into Western Asia.

In 1945, the horrors of the Second World War finally came to an end. The power balance in the world had been reestablished. Now, two superpowers were facing off against one another: the Soviet Union and the United States.

Before long, these powers turned their attention to where the history of the Silk Roads began: the 1950s marked the beginning of American dominance in Iran, formerly Persia.

The region that gave us the Silk Roads is in turmoil, but it is reemerging as a power.

The misadventures of the United States and the European powers demonstrate the continued importance of eastern Europe, the Middle East and Western and Central Asia. The regions where the Silk Roads began millennia ago still have a future; that much is clear. After all, these lands connect East and West. But the exact nature of that future is up for debate.

Take Ukraine, for example. Thanks to different national visions for the country, it’s being torn apart by the East and the West alike. Or there's Syria, whose horrendous civil war has pitted conservatives against liberals and freedom fighters against government forces. And then there’s the Caucasus, which is in a near constant state of political instability. Just think of Chechnya and Georgia.

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Worum geht es in The Silk Roads?

The Silk Roads (2015) is a comprehensive history of the world, written with an eye to the networks of trade that shaped it. The networks of trade first established in ancient Persia and later linked with Chinese trade routes created a great network between the East and the West. But these Silk Roads are not relics of the past. They have morphed and changed, and their impact can be felt today, right down to America’s fateful engagement in the region where it all began.

Bestes Zitat aus The Silk Roads

The world of antiquity was very much a precursor of the world as we see it today – vibrant, competitive, efficient and energetic.

—Peter Frankopan

Wer The Silk Roads lesen sollte

Economists looking for historical parallels
Intrigued followers of world events who want to learn about trade
Historians of all stripes

Über den Autor

Peter Frankopan is director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research. He has lectured at Cambridge, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, NYU and other Universities. His other books include The First Crusade: The Call from the East (2012).

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