Peter Frankopan is a Professor of Global History at Oxford University. At the time of writing he's written one other book: The First Crusade: The Call from the East.
The Wikipedia entry for this book is, by the way, awful. The criticisms expressed there are valid, but someone needs to add a better synopsis and revise the Reception section. I'd do it, but hey, I'm doing this!
So what's The Silk Roads about? Put in simple terms, it claims to be "a new history of the world" in which the middle east is repositioned at the center of world history and politics. This of course makes a certain amount of sense if you venture far enough back into Antiquity, into the time when Greece and Rome contended with the might of the Persian Empire. It even makes a certain amount of sense if you move forward from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, and from there to the years just after the First World War, when countries were scrambling to secure supplies of oil. But I'm not sure if it works for every time period, especially considering how various empires and caliphates in the region inevitably crumbled over time.
I'm also not sure that it works for the modern era, given the state that some middle eastern countries are in today. Then there's the fact that the author adds and subtracts China from his equations in the most arbitrary manner. He's very positive in how he views China's role on the world stage (when it suits his arguments), but the picture he paints of that country is extremely selective. The closing chapter of this book is also, to put it charitably, wildly optimistic in how it views what seemed like a middle eastern resurgence in 2015. Things in China aren't looking so rosy now, Israel's bombing the hell out of Palestine, and Russia's still mired in its invasion of the Ukraine, so... what were we talking about again?
It's a decent survey of the region's history, but it's funny how even the author can't seem to stick to his own topic. At certain moments he can't help but jump into the history of Europe and North America, a fact which undermines his argument that what was happening in the middle east, during the same time period, was what was most important.
There's not much in The Silk Roads that you won't remember from any survey of World History class, but I did learn a few interesting tidbits. I doubt I'll read the author's other book, but this book, given its size, was fairly easy to get through.
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