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The Silk Roads
Cover of The Silk Roads
The Silk Roads
A New History of the World
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The No. 1 Sunday Times and international bestseller | A Sunday Times Book of the Decade
'Many books have been written which claim to be "A New History of the World". This one fully deserves the title' The Times
A major reassessment of world history in light of the economic and political renaissance in the re-emerging east.
For centuries, fame and fortune were to be found in the west – in the New World of the Americas. Today, it is the east which calls out to those in search of riches and adventure. Sweeping right across Central Asia and deep into China and India, a region that once took centre stage is again rising to dominate global politics, commerce and culture.
The Silk Roads is a dazzling exploration of the forces that have driven the rise and fall of empires, determined the flow of ideas and goods and are now heralding a new dawn in international affairs.
The No. 1 Sunday Times and international bestseller | A Sunday Times Book of the Decade
'Many books have been written which claim to be "A New History of the World". This one fully deserves the title' The Times
A major reassessment of world history in light of the economic and political renaissance in the re-emerging east.
For centuries, fame and fortune were to be found in the west – in the New World of the Americas. Today, it is the east which calls out to those in search of riches and adventure. Sweeping right across Central Asia and deep into China and India, a region that once took centre stage is again rising to dominate global politics, commerce and culture.
The Silk Roads is a dazzling exploration of the forces that have driven the rise and fall of empires, determined the flow of ideas and goods and are now heralding a new dawn in international affairs.
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About the Author-
  • Peter Frankopan is Professor of Global History at Oxford University and Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford. The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, published by Bloomsbury in 2015, was a No. 1 Sunday Times bestseller and remained in the top 10 for nine months after publication. It was named one of the 'Books of the Decade' 2010–2020 by the Sunday Times. The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World was published by Bloomsbury in 2018 and won the Human Sciences prize of the Carical Foundation in 2019.
Reviews-
  • Publisher's Weekly

    Starred review from December 21, 2015
    Upending the traditional narrative of Western enlightenment and world domination as the inevitable descendants of Greek and Roman intellectual ferment, Oxford historian Frankopan (The First Crusade) places the silk roads—the long, remote Central Asian trading routes linking Europe and China—at the center of human history. The silk roads served as conduits for goods and ideas as well as plagues and marauding armies, and their location at the nexus of Europe and Asia continues to drive world events today. Frankopan casts his net widely in this work of dizzying breadth and ambition. Casual readers may struggle to follow all the threads; those opening to any page will find fascinating insights that illuminate elusive connections across time and place. Frankopan’s thoughts on Islam, for instance, begin with newly discovered “wisps of text” that are reshaping understanding of Muhammad’s life and stretch across centuries to the modern luxuries of the “oil-soaked” Middle East. The Black Plague—carried west by the Mongols—devastated Europe and the Middle East, but “the plague turned out to be the catalyst for social and economic change that was so profound that far from marking the death of Europe, it served as its making.” Frankopan approaches his craft with an acerbic wit, and his epochal perspective throws the foibles of the modern age into sharp relief.

  • Sunday Times The axis of history writing seemed to shift east with Frankopan's sweeping history, which placed the Silk Road at the very centre of world events
  • Sunday Times A book that roves as widely as the geography it describes, encompassing worlds as far removed as those of Herodotus and Saddam Hussein, Hammurabi and Hitler . . . It is a tribute to Frankopan's scholarship and mastery of sources in multiple languages that he is as sure-footed on the ancient world as he is on the medieval and modern
  • Times Literary Supplement The most illuminating book of the year . . . A healthy antidote to Eurocentric accounts of history
  • Daily Telegraph Splendid . . . tightly researched . . . invigorating and profound with enough storytelling to excite the reader and enough fresh scholarship to satisfy the intellect . . . charismatic and essential
  • Wall Street Journal A rare book that makes you question your assumptions about the world
  • Evening Standard Dazzlingly good
  • Independent Based on astonishingly wide and deep reading and in all areas draws on the latest research . . . It is full of vivid and recondite details
  • Open (Weekly) With extraordinary erudition and a vivid style, he takes us on a dazzling tour of these parts from the rise of the first empires right through to the present
  • History Today Beautifully constructed, a terrific and exhilarating read and a new perspective on world history
  • Svenska Dagbladet As well-written, entertaining, disturbing and exciting as a detective story
  • South China Morning Post A dazzling piece of historical writing
  • Irish Left Review This book lives up to its claim to be a new history of the world because of its geopolitical paradigm shift . . . He is a Herodotus of the twenty first century
  • Vanity Fair Monumental . . . prodigious . . . astonishing. Frankopan is an exhilarating companion for the journey along the routes which conveyed silk, slaves, ideas, religion, and disease, and around which today may hang the destiny of the world
  • Dallas Morning News An exceptional storyteller . . . Frankopan does a superb job of explaining the history that has led to this modern era of new Silk Roads running across "the spine of Asia." . . . Frankopan's book will be indispensable to anyone who wants to make sense of this union of past and present
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