Peter Frankopan
The Silk Roads. A New History of the World
The region of the Silk Roads is obscure to many in the West. Yet it is where civilization itself began, where the world’s great religions were born and took root, where goods were exchanged, and where languages, ideas and disease spread. The Silk Roads were no exotic series of connections, but networks that linked continents and oceans together. They were – and still are – the world’s central nervous system. This is where empires were won – and where they were lost. As a new era emerges, the patterns of exchange are mirroring those that have criss-crossed Asia for millennia. The Silk Roads are rising again.
Drawing on a rich series of sources in Greek, Latin, French, Italian, German, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Russian, Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Hebrew, Syriac and Chinese, Frankopan provides a major re-assessment of world history from antiquity to the modern day.
Peter Frankopan is a historian at Oxford University, where he is Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford and Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research. He works on the history of the Mediterranean, Russia, the Middle East, Persia, Central Asia and beyond, and on relations between Christianity and Islam. He also specializes in medieval Greek literature, and translated The Alexiad (2009). Among his publications are The First Crusade: The Call from the East (2012), and most recently the acclaimed The Silk Roads (2015).