The world's story runs through the middle

Most histories of the world are written as if Western Europe is the main event and everything else a supporting cast. Peter Frankopan's The Silk Roads is a deliberate and well-armed correction. He argues that for most of recorded history, the real axis of power, trade, and cultural exchange ran through Persia, the Central Asian steppes, and the cities connecting the Mediterranean to China — not through London, Paris, or Rome.

The Silk Roads were never a single route. They were a shifting network of paths along which silk, spices, glass, precious metals, and eventually ideas moved between civilisations that were otherwise largely unknown to each other. Religions travelled these roads — Buddhism, Christianity, Islam — along with mathematical systems, artistic styles, and, eventually, plague. The Black Death that devastated medieval Europe almost certainly arrived along these routes from Central Asia.

Frankopan shows how the wealth generated along these networks financed the great empires of the ancient and medieval worlds over many centuries. The cities that sat astride the major routes — Samarkand, Baghdad, Constantinople — were for long periods the richest and most cosmopolitan places on earth, drawing traders, scholars, and religious teachers from thousands of miles away. The European age of exploration, far from being an expression of innate European curiosity, was partly a response to being cut off from the profits of these established networks by the Ottoman expansion and the political instability it created.

One of his most striking arguments is that the rise of the West was less a matter of innate dynamism than of geography becoming temporarily disadvantageous for the East. When sea routes bypassed the overland roads, the cities that had grown rich on transit trade lost their structural advantage. The centre of gravity shifted, but the shift was contingent rather than inevitable, and Frankopan implies it is already beginning to reverse.

The book covers an enormous historical span — from Alexander the Great to the twentieth-century struggle for Central Asian oil and gas — and Frankopan writes with real urgency throughout. He argues that this history is not merely academic; new infrastructure projects are recreating ancient patterns of connectivity across the same territories, with comparable implications for the distribution of power and wealth.

Reading The Silk Roads is a productive disorientation that recalibrates what you think you know about which societies mattered and when. Familiar events — the Crusades, the Mongol conquests, the age of exploration — look quite different when observed from Samarkand rather than from London or Rome. That shift of perspective is the book's most lasting offering to its readers. Frankopan is not merely correcting a bias; he is showing how that bias has shaped which questions historians thought worth asking, and which answers therefore got written down and remembered as the story of civilisation. Frankopan is not merely correcting a bias; he is showing how that bias shaped which questions historians thought worth asking, and which answers therefore got written down and remembered as the story of civilisation.