Mr. Frankopan, an Oxford historian and expert on Byzantium, argues in The Silk Roads that neither the West nor China and India offers the best vantage point from which to view humanity’s past. For the author, history as commonly understood in the west — the straight line from Greece to Rome to Christian Europe to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, democracy and the Industrial Revolution — is far too neat. The link between the modern West and ancient Greece is more a romantic concoction of intellectuals and politicians than an authentic connection.
In fact, for most of recorded human history, the vast swath of territory between East and West, connecting Europe with the Pacific Ocean, “was the axis on which the globe spun.” This territory includes not just the Middle East but also Russia, the Caucasus, Afghanistan and Central Asia’s former Soviet republics. It was not until the 19th century that the term Silk Road was used to describe the bundle of trade routes linking Asia to the West. The phrase was coined by the German geologist Ferdinand von Richthofen, uncle of the storied World War I ace known as the Red Baron. Mr. Frankopan shows that what mattered was not a single road but a tangle of routes used over the centuries by conquerors, adventurers and traders alike.
It was no coincidence that Alexander the Great headed east, across Persia and toward India, on his great conquests (he founded both Kandahar and Bagram in Afghanistan along the way.) “When he took the throne in 336 B.C. following the assassination of his father, the brilliant King Philip, there was no question about which direction the young general would head in his search for glory,” Mr. Frankopan writes. “Not for a moment did he look to Europe, which offered nothing at all: no cities, no culture, no prestige, no reward.”
In a similar vein, Mr. Frankopan points out that Christianity has an older pedigree in the East than in the West. The cities of Merv (in Turkmenistan), Gundeshapur (in Iran) and Kashgar (in China) had archbishops long before Canterbury acquired its own in year 597. Samarkand and Bukhara in present-day Uzbekistan housed vibrant Christian communities 1,000 years before the faith was brought to the Americas. The faith’s most important city was Constantinople — not Rome — until 1453, when the Ottomans conquered it.
Or consider Islam, which exploded into life against the backdrop of two great but weakened empires, Persia and Rome. The two were exhausted from fighting each other, and Muhammad’s (PBUH) martial faith quickly powered a sprawling empire of its own. According to Islamic tradition, in 610 Muhammad (PBUH) began receiving a series of revelations from God. A hundred years later — powered by belief and enriched by plunder — Muslim armies had conquered Persia, Egypt and Jerusalem and were perched on the borders of India and Spain.
“Globalisation” may be a new word, but Mr. Frankopan shows that even in ancient times trade and culture bound distant peoples together. Two thousand years ago, rich Carthaginians wore Chinese silks, Indian spices filled Roman kitchens and Afghan buildings carried Greek inscriptions. Over the centuries, great empires quickened trade and cultural exchange by knitting together disparate lands. In this the Greeks, the Arabs, the Mongols and, more recently, the Russians and the British all played a part.
One of Mr. Frankopan’s gifts as a storyteller is the ability to draw unusual connections across his vast canvas. We learn that the Taj Mahal, the great monument to love built by the 17th-century Mughal emperor Shah Jahan in India, was made possible partly thanks to wealth generated by the Spanish plunder of Latin America that began more than a century earlier. “Gold and silver taken from the Americas found its way to Asia; it was this redistribution of wealth that allowed the Taj Mahal to be built.”
Despite the vast amount of ground to cover, from antiquity to the present day, Mr. Frankopan does a fine job of keeping the story ticking along and packs his tale with fascinating trivia. We learn, for example, that the dreaded Mongols — whose 13th-century wrath was felt in places as far apart as Baghdad and Krakow — were called Tatars in a reference to Tartarus, the abyss of torment in classical mythology. The Mongols’ violence can make Game of Thrones seem tame: they formed pyramids of human skulls and sometimes killed enemies by pouring molten gold into their ears.
But the book’s conclusions are less than convincing. It may be romantic to think of the old lands of the Silk Road rising again, but it will take more than massive gas reserves to make Turkmenistan the world’s pivot. Similarly, given the mutual mistrust between Russia and China, it requires a leap of faith to see the Chinese-led Shanghai Cooperation Organisation as “gradually turning into a viable alternative to the European Union.” Still, Mr. Frankopan has written a rare book that makes you question your assumptions about the world. At the very least, you’ll think twice the next time you read a story datelined Damascus, Dushanbe or Delhi.
((A version of this op-ed appeared in print in The Wall Street Journal on March 12, 2016)
The writer is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a columnist for WSJ.com