The Silk Roads

The past is the best teacher. To understand where we are today, we have to study what came before. Most of the history books I have read were about the East, and most of them were either written from a Western perspective or focused on one narrow period. When I looked for a broader history book, the suggestion I got most often was Sapiens. But ever since I read it, something felt wrong. The broad brush strokes it paints are often misleading, and for a book about all of human history its view is quite Eurocentric. I wrote about this earlier, but at the time I couldn't find proper sources to show where it went wrong. That changed when I read The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan. It had been on my reading list for a while, and it took me some time to actually get into it.

The Silk Roads is a 20,000-foot view of history from the perspective of trade routes. Frankopan builds a storyline out of existing scholarship rather than adding much of his own on top. This is what I had expected from Sapiens, an even higher, more macroscopic view, and it wasn't.

We are taught about Columbus and Vasco da Gama as explorers, but we are rarely taught what they were actually looking for. Columbus was after gold, and when he couldn't find it he kept promising it anyway. On his later voyages, Frankopan writes, he sent his patrons "parrots, cannibals and castrated males instead to try to conceal the truth". Sapiens presents the explorers as curious, enlightened people. The Silk Roads shows the opposite. They didn't set out to explore, they set out to conquer and to grow their empires, and the slave trade followed them.

The age of empire and the rise of the west were built on the capacity to inflict violence on a major scale.

Frankopan goes further and argues that even the Enlightenment was paid for this way:

The Enlightenment and the Age of Reason, the progression towards democracy, civil liberty and human rights, were not the result of an unseen chain linking back to Athens in antiquity or a natural state of affairs in Europe; they were the fruits of political, military and economic success in faraway continents.

The road to American independence also runs through India. After the Bengal famine of 1770 the East India Company was in deep trouble, and the Tea Act that was meant to rescue it is what the colonists rebelled against in Boston. Today the US [detail: your claim].

It was also interesting to learn how much of Britain's policy in Europe was driven by its fear for India. To keep Russia from threatening India through Persia and Central Asia, London chose Russia over Germany. In 1908 Sir Charles Hardinge at the Foreign Office wrote that "it is far more essential for us to have a good understanding with Russia in Asia and the Near East, than for us to be on good terms with Germany". That choice fed directly into the alliances of the First World War.

We very often ask questions about history and expect black and white answers, which is quite dumb of us. History is complex, layered and nuanced. It is the colonizers who want you to think history is black and white. The less we think about these complexities, the easier it is to split into two camps, because by being selective with evidence you can make an argument for whatever opinion you already hold. The book has a nice example from the Crusades, where newcomers to the Holy Land were shocked that people traded with the "infidel" every day and "took time to realise that in practice things were not as black and white as they had been painted back in Europe". The Mongols got the same treatment from the people who wrote about them later.

Blanket images of the Mongols as barbaric destroyers are wide of the mark, and represent the misleading legacies of the histories written later which emphasised ruin and devastation above all else.

The book is not without gaps though. I was surprised that it does not mention the Bosnian genocide anywhere. Towards the end the focus is also too much on American politics. There is no real mention of India, and China and the steppes get very little space, even though they carry so much of the earlier chapters.