How silk and sultans shaped the world

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

★★★★

★ Peter Frankopan (Bloomsbury, R480)

AT the age of 12, I did a project on the Great Silk Road that linked the fabled courts of China with Venice. For a white child in a rigidly circumscribed and racist world, the stories of the silk routes opened up alternative histories of cultures fragrant with incense and spices, temples and unfamiliar deities, rich mythologies and complex philosophies.

Oxford historian Peter Frankopan’s wide-ranging and fascinating account of these alternative histories changes the way we see the world. For South Africans pondering the decolonisation movement, it is especially timely. It shifts our perception of the globe from its Northern and Western orientation, and refocuses our attention on the region that was the centre of the world for 2 000 years, which had Persia (modern-day Iran, Iraq and the ’stans) at its heart.

Taught that Western civilisation began around the Mediterranean, we know little about the ferment of evangelism, trade, agricultural innovation and urban development that travelled along a web of trade routes — the “central nervous system of the world” in which amber flowed from the west, furs from the north, silk from the east, spices from the south. These routes also meshed with the ports of the Indian Ocean, networking goods, people and ideas from the Pacific to the Atlantic.

It’s eye-opening to learn that Christianity spread eastwards as far as China before heading West; that Baghdad outshone imperial Rome; that Islam was first considered an offshoot of both Judaism and Christianity. And there are poignant descriptions of Syria as a place of peace and plenty.

History is eerily prescient: the economies that flourished were those that poured tax revenues into infrastructure, with the most savvy rulers investing heavily in protecting and connecting water supplies — something urgently needed in the here and now.

Death and destruction also stalked these routes: they brought both Mongol hordes and the plague to Europe. Frankopan argues that these cataclysms led to some positive social change, with the depopulation during the Black Death transforming labour and gender dynamics.

The trade routes of the Middle and Far East were, however, to prove the downfall of these regions after Europe, long a barbaric backwater, took control of the seas and reshaped global power relations. With bullion pouring in from the Americas, the taste for luxury goods, slaves and spices from the East burgeoned, leading to rapacious looting.

Plunging us into the 20th century, with equally rapacious drives for wheat and oil shaping the geopolitics of the region, Frankopan’s theories become more speculative, and perhaps over-optimistic. But his book is essential in shifting Eurocentric views — and is also a thumping good read. —