This book enthralled and frustrated me in equal measure. In the preface, Peter Frankopan describes how his interest in history was born, and how he soon began to question the accepted version he was taught, which he calls ‘the mantra of the political, cultural and moral triumph of the west’.
The idea that we should broaden our outlook on world history, and look at the past from the viewpoint of others is not new; indeed it has been a growing trend in recent years. And it’s very welcome. However, the trend in itself contains a certain arrogance; it implies that the very history being replaced somehow had a global pre-eminence which, in reality, it never did.
I’m sure that if you looked at the history syllabus in most countries, you would find it concentrates on national history first, and then covers other selected areas of world history; it views history from the eye of the beholder. This is only natural.
Complaints about ‘eurocentric’ versions of world history surely only apply in European countries – and possibly America. In China, I’m sure the syllabus would be ‘Sinocentric’, and so on. Rather than simply writing new works about other areas of the globe, perhaps we could take a little more notice of books written by historians from those areas.
The author sets himself a huge task; namely to tell world history from a new fulcrum, namely an area ‘running broadly from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean to the Himalayas’. For me, he fails honourably in this task; writing a book that is very readable but ultimately falls some way short of achieving it’s goal.
The book falls roughly into four sections. The first covers the ancient world, and explores the development of connections between the Mediterranean cultures and those elsewhere. The second concentrates on the rise of Islam and covers it’s remarkable spread, the crusades and the flowering of cultures in Central Asia. The third looks at the fairly rapid replacement of many old land routes with those at sea, including the growth of European dominance in the East, and in the Americas. The final section examines the last hundred years or so, detailing – largely – the loss of that European dominance.
Each of these sections contains much of interest, and the book is well-written, with an easy, readable style. It is packed with information, a lot of first-hand accounts, and some valuable analysis. I didn’t agree with all of the author’s conclusions, but they are well-argued, and he certainly made me think and question my own assumptions. This, for me, is what good history is all about.
However, certain problems constantly niggled me. Firstly, the title and sub-title; both are erroneous, or at best, misleading. Fairly early in the book, it becomes clear that this is not a book about the Silk Roads as the casual book browser might understand them. The author uses the term as a metaphor for anything he considers a trade route, wherever it may be. Unfortunately this conceit is pushed further by having virtually every chapter entitled ‘the road to…’, which may have seemed a good idea at the planning stage, but reminded me of a sixth form history project.
Secondly, it’s not ‘a new history of the world’ (except in that it is a new book). Partly because there is not very much really new here, and partly because it gives scant coverage to huge areas of the globe, save when they have a direct impact on the author’s story.
The biggest issue for me though, is that the author has simply tried to do too much in one book. His coverage of the ancient world is excellent; he takes a nuanced look at the era, placing Rome, for example, in a wider context. His description of the growth of Islam, and its wide ranging impact, shows a real understanding of the myriad cultures it encountered, and how they either succumbed or resisted it.
Finally, the last section explores what might be termed the slow decline of the European (and latterly American) powers, including the conflicts this caused, and continues to cause. It is probably the best account of this period that I’ve read in a long time, with some telling analysis.
But much of the time, it seemed that there were at least three separate works trying to break free. The level of detail varied significantly between the sections, as if the author had clear ideas about certain periods and events, but then had to join them together, rather than composing a continuous thread. Some parts were too detailed for a general history, and others felt as if they had been cruelly edited to fit into one book.
I know that any one volume work trying to be a history of the world is going to have to be very selective. That is why such books tend to be written in a fairly simple, narrative style, allowing readers new to history to get an overall picture, and perhaps a feel for what might interest them further. Here though, the author is trying not only to achieve that by describing more than two thousand years of history, but also to persuade us to accept his different emphasis on that story.
After I had finished, I couldn’t help wondering what the author’s aim in writing the book had been. It was always unclear to me, and seemed to change several times through the book. He states he wanted to get away from ‘the mantra of the political, cultural and moral triumph of the west’. In some ways he is successful, but he gets perilously close to replacing it with an alternative mantra of trade, trade and more trade, to the exclusion of virtually everything else. Much of it is very enjoyable and there is a lot to hold your interest. But by the end, I felt short changed.
In his acknowledgements, he thanks someone who told him she thought he could pull multiple strands together in a single work, and admits he was dubious. Unfortunately I think he should have listened to his instinct, and been more focussed on what he was attempting. Perhaps it really should have been planned as a two or three book series.
If you are looking for a history of the land trade routes from the Middle East to China, or a narrative one volume history of the world, then this is not that book. If you want a book that will challenge some of your assumptions and introduce you to areas of history that may have passed you by, then I would cautiously recommend it. Like me, you will probably enjoy large parts of it, but be prepared to be frustrated as well.
This is a review of the Bloomsbury 2016 paperback edition.
