Brilliant threads

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. By Peter Frankopan. Bloomsbury; 656 pages; £30. To be published in America in February by Knopf.

THIS is, to put it mildly, an ambitious book. The author, a historian at Oxford University, could have crafted a dozen pithy histories of, among other subjects covered: the rise of Persia; the creation of the Silk Roads, the story of long-distance trade across the Eurasian continent; the commercial as well as religious revolution that was Islam; the first global economy in the 17th century, powered by discoveries of South American silver; the 19th-century geopolitical intrigues known as the Great Game; the reasons for Germany’s push east in the second world war (wheat); the Asian dimensions of the cold war and the rise of Islamist extremism.

Yet by spinning all these stories into a single thread, Peter Frankopan attempts something bold: a history of the world that shunts the centre of gravity eastward. “The Silk Roads: A New History of the World” is a counterblast to another ambitious book from an earlier generation, J.M. Roberts’s Western-centric “Penguin History of the World”, which came out in 1976.

Mr Frankopan writes with clarity and memorable detail. When Cyrus the Great, creator in the sixth century BC of the Persian Empire, was killed attempting to subdue the Scythians, his head was carried about in a skin full of blood “so that the thirst for power that had inspired him could now be quenched.” The Huns, destroyers of the Roman Empire, bandaged the heads of their children, applying pressure to flatten the frontal and occipital bones, so causing their heads to grow in a pointed fashion. Spending so much of their lives on horseback, when on the ground “they looked like animals standing on their hind legs”: not only was their behaviour out of the ordinary, “so was the way they looked.”

Where other histories put the Mediterranean at the centre of the story, under Mr Frankopan it is important as the western end of a transcontinental trade with Asia in silks, spices, slaves—and ideas. Here he is at his most original. Particularly striking is the rapid conversion Christianity made in the east—right into modern-day China. Asia and the Near East were noisy with religious competition (not least because new rulers and empire-builders wanted divine authority to underpin their rule). In the early seventh century Christian evangelists tried to win over Buddhists with the case that not only was Christianity compatible with Buddhism, “it was Buddhism.” Religious jostling led to borrowings—think of the halo as a common symbol in Christian, Zoroastrian, Buddhist and Hindu art. It also spurred creativity, in the form of the outpourings of devotional Buddhist art from the Bamiyan carvings in modern Afghanistan to the painted caves of Dunhuang in north-west China.

Mr Frankopan has searched the sources. For evidence that the period after the sack of Rome really was a Dark Age, he turns to pollution measured in Greenland’s polar ice-caps. They imply smelting activity returning to prehistoric levels. The author challenges received notions: the Black Death, carried into Europe in 1348 along the Silk Roads, was not the end of Europe, but its making. Catastrophic depopulation altered the balance of power between authority and labourers, who were now in a position to demand higher wages and more rights. It even saw in northern Europe the birth of a proto-feminism: “Don’t hurtle into marriage too soon,” wrote Anna Bijns in the Low Countries, for “one who earns her board and clothes shouldn’t scurry to suffer a man’s rod”.

The second half of the book turns rather rapidly to 19th-century Western imperialism and its consequences in Asia. The canvas is too broad to be wholly satisfying, while the conclusion, that “new silk roads are rising again,” is not really convincing. Certainly, gaudy palaces for modern potentates are on the rise from Azerbaijan to Kazakhstan. But a crescent of war, violence or brittle autocracy runs from the Middle East to western China. As for the Central Asia that Mr Frankopan cites in his conclusion, the region of fabled entrepots like Samarkand and Bukhara, it certainly has the attention of both Russia and China. But its autocrats are Soviet-era dinosaurs, its democracy a veneer and its cultural life stifled. Far from being at the heart of a new Asia, sullen and misruled Central Asia languishes, for now, on the periphery.