Where Empires Were Made
from The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (2015) by Peter Frankopan
"We think of globalization as a uniquely modern phenomenon; yet 2,000 years ago too, it was a fact of life."
Passage:
From the beginning of time, the centre of Asia was where empires were made.
Standing here opened up new ways to view the past and showed a world that was profoundly interconnected, where what happened on one continent had an impact on another, where the after-shocks of what happened on the steppes of Central Asia could be felt in North Africa, where events in Baghdad resonated in Scandinavia, where discoveries in the Americas altered the prices of goods in China and led to a surge in demand in the horse markets of northern India.
These tremors were carried along a network that fans out in every direction, routes along which pilgrims and warriors, nomads and merchants have travelled, goods and produce have been bought and sold, and ideas exchanged, adapted and refined. They have carried not only prosperity, but also death and violence, disease and disaster. We think of globalisation as a uniquely modern phenomenon; yet 2,000 years ago too, it was a fact of life, one that presented opportunities, created problems and prompted technological advance.
Biography & Abstract
Peter Frankopan (b. 1971) is Professor of Global History at Oxford University and one of the most widely read historians writing today. The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (2015) spent nine months in the UK top ten and has been translated into dozens of languages. Its central argument is a reorientation: that the region stretching from the Eastern Mediterranean through Persia and Central Asia to China was not the periphery of world history but its spine, the place where civilizations met, exchanged, and became more than they were alone.
The passage makes the mechanism visible: prices in China shifted when something happened in the Americas. Demand for horses in northern India responded to discoveries on the other side of the world. The network carried all of it, goods and ideas, prosperity and plagu, because the infrastructure of exchange was already there. Frankopan's argument is that this is not a new condition of the world. The bazaar preceded the nation-state. Exchange preceded empire. The routes were already full before anyone thought to name them.
