The Silk Roads
"Our world was made on and by the Silk Roads. For millennia it was here that East and West encountered each other through trade and conquest, leading to the spread of ideas and cultures, the birth of the world's great religions, the appetites for foreign goods that drove economies and the growth of nations. From the first cities in Mesopotamia to the growth of Greece and Rome to the depredations by the Mongols and the Black Death to the Great Game and the fall of Communism, the fate of the West has always been inextricably linked to the East. The Silk Roads vividly captures the importance of the networks that crisscrossed the spine of Asia and linked the Atlantic with the Pacific, the Mediterranean with India, America with the Persian Gulf. By way of events as disparate as the American Revolution and the horrific world wars of the twentieth century, Peter Frankopan realigns the world, orientating us eastwards, and illuminating how even the rise of the West 500 years ago resulted from its efforts to gain access to and control these Eurasian trading networks. In an increasingly globalized planet, where current events in Asia and the Middle East dominate the world's attention, this magnificent work of history is very much a work of our times"
Stats for nerds
22recommend
39mentions
34people
2017–2026years
67% recommend28% neutral5% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I recommend a book 'Silk Roads' by Peter Frankopan. It’s an attempt to show world’s history as a continuous movement of center of civilizational gravity. It’s not without flaws, but interesting nonetheless.
Frankopan describes most of modern US history as a series of blunders. This approach is maybe a bit harsh, but it shows how difficult it is for a dominant power to stay on top.
I would summarise the book with a sentence „When you reach the top, the seeds of your decline are already planted”. In fact you can look at China or India - future dominant powers, and guess which of their flaws will make them fall.
- They aren’t “evil” but the actions of the West in the Middle East have always been about capital despite being dressed up in the language of freedom and democracy. I would recommend the later parts of The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan for a broad overview of this dichotomy.
- For anyone enjoying this type of content, I just happen to be reading The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan and damn, I never thought I could be so interested in all its cultural and religious context. So much to learn from history... but this time is different hehe ;)
- FTA: “We are studying the past to understand and shape the present and future,” said Wang.
I was of the persuasion that "History is written to say it wasn't our fault" - Sam Phillips, but it may play a more active role than that.
I recently read and enjoyed 'The Silk Roads', Frankopan, which, to oversimplify, takes as its thesis the idea that "...for millennia, it was the region lying between east and west, linking Europe with the Pacific Ocean, that was the axis on which the globe spun." I was persuaded that he has a point.
I'm currently reading 'The New China Playbook', Jin, together with an ideologically-varying friend as a way to base our discussions more on knowledge than opinion.
So I'm particularly interested in what others have found helpful in understanding China's past and present. Any recommendations?
- If you think this is interesting, you'll love the book: The Silk Roads: A New History of the World
- Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan
It kinda feels like an alternate history fantasy novel, but it's actually real. It tells the history of the world, but from a central asian perspective.
Related
The New Silk Roads
2 recommend · 3
The man who loved China
3 recommend · 9
Empire of cotton
6 recommend · 12
The Road to Serfdom
59 recommend · 162
The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate
22 recommend · 33
Golden Road
4 recommend · 6
Dune
193 recommend · 630
