Are we living in the Asian century?

A sequel to ‘The Silk Roads’ looks at modern geopolitics through a historian’s lens, discovers Jamie Susskind

sculptures to London’s Marble Arch, the Pantheon of Rome and the Duomo of Siena. In 2014, Saudi interests acquired a controlling share in the Carrara quarries. This meant that the stone used to build New York City’s Freedom Tower was ultimately sourced from the family of Osama bin Laden, who had destroyed the World Trade Center that once occupied the same spot.

This is one of many eye-catching facts in Peter Frankopan’s latest book, The New Silk Roads, and it encapsulates two of his main themes: the global connections that increasingly bind us together, and the rising importance of the region at the “heart of the earth”. Frankopan’s 2015 bestseller The Silk Roads was a work of bold revisionism. It showed how “the region lying between east and west, linking Europe with the Pacific Ocean”, was for millennia “the axis on which the globe spun”. Great empires born there – the Byzantines, the Persians, the Mongols, the Islamic Caliphate, the Ottomans – set the pace of history. Until the late 15th century, Britain was a peripheral player, staggering briefly into world events with the Crusades before sinking back into obscurity.

The term “Silk Roads” describes “the ways in which people, cultures and continents” are “woven together”. This book, like its predecessor, seeks to shift “the centre of focus” away from Europe and the west to “Asia and the east”. Although it describes itself as a “sibling” to The Silk Roads, it is much more limited in scope: not a history, but a “detailed snapshot of contemporary affairs” taken “through a wide lens”. The New Silk Roads is thus a primer on modern geopolitics written from the perspective of a historian – and it makes for a stimulating read.

The book’s central claim is that “it is not possible to make sense of what today and tomorrow have in store” without taking into account “the region lying between the Eastern Mediterranean and the Pacific”. Of the 10 fastest-growing economies in the past 10 years, Frankopan points out, not one is located in the western hemisphere. The world’s fastestgrowing retail market is Pakistan. Iran is “one of the most vibrant centres for tech start-ups in the world”. From 2007 to 2014, almost 10 per cent of all money spent on property in London was Russian. Famous European brands – “from Volvo to London taxis, from Warner Music to construction giant Strabag” – are increasingly owned by foreigners, mainly from the Silk Roads.

Economic progress does not entail political progress: press freedom across the Silk Roads is either stagnating or in decline, “in some cases dramatically”. And there’s a long way to go before the countries of that region attain western levels of consumer wealth. Less than a tenth of south Asian homeowners have a personal computer or a microwave. Just a third own a refrigerator.

Nonetheless, The New Silk Roads convincingly shows that the world is now “spinning in two different directions”. While the west is moving toward “separation, the re-erection of barriers” and “taking back control”, the Silk Roads are host to “increasing connections, improving collaboration and deepening cooperation”, although there’s a long way to go before they approach anything like the unity of the European Union, such as it is.

Frankopan points to the recent agreement struck over the status of the Caspian Sea, which has divided Russia, Iran, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan for decades. The settlement “may well serve to transform oil and gas supplies not just across the region, but for markets around the world”.

China looms throughout as the “catalyst” of global reconfiguration. “All roads used to lead to Rome,” says Frankopan, but today “they lead to Beijing.” Chinese visitors to foreign countries now spend twice as much as Americans, and 500 times more than they did in 1990. The mind-bogglingly ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, described by President Xi as the “project of the century”, is connecting China with more than 80 countries in

Asia and the Middle East, Turkey, eastern Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. Numbering 4.4 billion, those living along the new Silk Roads account for more than 63 per cent of the world’s population.

Chinese soft power takes the form of huge loans and investments that wed the fates of other countries to that of their creditor. And Chinese hard power is best exemplified by its construction of militarised artificial islands in the South China Sea, a vital thoroughfare and the “crossroads of the global economy”.

Frankopan takes a dim view of US foreign policy. While Beijing “has been busy trying to find