The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan

Peter Frankopan · 8 min read

How Eurasia's networks of trade, faith, conquest, and energy reshape the history of world power, from ancient Persia to the modern Middle East.

Illustration for The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan

World history through the connections across Eurasia

What changes when a history of the world starts in Persia instead of Greece? Familiar events gain different causes. Places often treated as distant margins become centers of wealth, learning, and political struggle.

Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, first published in 2015, makes this change of viewpoint its central task. His subject is the broad region connecting the Mediterranean, the Middle East, Central Asia, India, and China. He argues that its networks of exchange helped shape world history, including the rise of European power. The author’s account of the book stresses connections across continents and oceans, rather than a self-contained history of Western civilization.

This is the original historical survey, not the later The New Silk Roads. Its central question is how the movement of goods, people, beliefs, and resources changes who holds power.

Many routes, many kinds of exchange

The Silk Roads were not one highway from China to Europe. They were overlapping connections running in several directions. Different routes mattered at different times. The familiar name came much later than the exchanges it describes.

Frankopan uses the term broadly. It includes land routes, maritime connections, and the political relationships that made movement possible. A road can carry merchants, soldiers, pilgrims, and infection. Its effects cannot be measured only by the value of its cargo.

His publisher-hosted introduction explains the larger challenge to conventional history. Cities such as Baghdad, Bukhara, and Samarkand were important centers of intellectual life. They were places where people learned from others and developed new ideas. Treating them only as stages on a European traveler’s journey hides their importance.

The unit of explanation therefore changes. Instead of asking what one civilization achieved alone, the reader asks what became possible through contact.

Ancient wealth drew attention eastward

Frankopan begins with the Persian world and the attraction of its wealth. In his account, Alexander’s ambitions make more sense when viewed through the prosperous territories to his east. Europe was not the obvious destination for a ruler seeking the greatest prizes.

In a later interview reflecting on the original book, Frankopan explains that he follows exchanges and resources rather than fixed regional labels. His geographical center is deliberately broad. It connects places that modern histories often place in separate compartments.

The implication is significant: later European dominance should not determine how we explain every earlier period. Knowing the outcome can make it look inevitable. Starting elsewhere reveals that rulers and merchants once faced a different distribution of opportunity.

Goods could also buy security

Silk was more than an expensive fabric. Frankopan describes its use in payments and political relationships. A portable, desirable material could help reward service or manage relations with neighboring powers.

Horses show the exchange from another direction. Chinese demand for Central Asian horses made the steppe important to settled states. Nomadic peoples supplied something valuable; they were participants in economic systems as well as potential military opponents.

These examples appear in Frankopan’s Getty interview about the book. They show why trade and security belong in the same account. The value of a commodity depended partly on what it enabled people to do.

Faith traveled with people

Buddhism spread from India through Central Asia toward China. Christianity also developed substantial communities east of the Roman world. These histories complicate the habit of assigning each religion to one modern cultural region.

Frankopan emphasizes encounters between beliefs, including competition and borrowing. Religious exchange could change images and practices as well as move doctrines between places. His Getty discussion uses shared religious imagery to make this point concrete.

The rise of Islam also reorganized connections. Frankopan links the wealth of the expanding Muslim world with the resources available for learning. Baghdad became a major beneficiary. His Getty discussion describes patronage for scholars across religious boundaries. Knowledge developed through translation, exchange, and support for skilled people.

Contact did not produce permanent tolerance. A society could welcome useful outsiders while excluding others. The important historical question is what conditions permitted exchange, and what changed when rulers or communities withdrew that permission.

Connection also carried coercion and catastrophe

The book resists a comfortable picture of trade as peaceful contact between willing partners. Enslaved people moved through the same systems as other valuable cargo. In his NPR interview, reproduced by WNYC, Frankopan highlights the medieval trafficking of people from Europe eastward in exchange for silver.

That example changes the meaning of a prosperous trading connection. Revenue for a merchant or ruler could depend on the loss of another person’s freedom. Counting exchange alone tells us little about how its benefits and harms were distributed.

The Mongols present a related tension. Frankopan examines both destructive conquest and the management of large territories that supported movement afterward. As he explains in the Getty interview, military terror and political accommodation could operate together. Explaining that combination does not justify the killings that helped establish it.

Disease exposed another danger. Frankopan links the spread of the Black Death to the connections that carried people and goods across Eurasia. The same openness that brought valuable supplies could expose communities to disaster. This makes connectivity a source of vulnerability as well as strength.

Europe’s rise changed the network

Frankopan treats European maritime expansion as an attempt to reach existing sources of wealth. Columbus sought access to Asia. Vasco da Gama’s voyage opened a sea connection around Africa to the Indian Ocean. Their significance lies partly in how they changed access to established commercial worlds.

The publisher’s introduction presents these voyages as a major shift in Europe’s position. They helped place Western Europe between Atlantic and Asian exchanges. European expansion then involved force and struggles to command trade, rather than simply joining it on equal terms.

Yet a shift in power did not make older connections disappear. In a Caspian Policy Center interview, Frankopan challenges the idea that Atlantic trade simply ended the Silk Roads. Asian empires and markets remained active participants in the changing world economy.

The useful distinction is between losing relative importance and becoming irrelevant. A new route can redirect wealth while also creating demand elsewhere.

Oil gives the modern story its focus

The later narrative follows imperial rivalry and intervention into the modern Middle East and surrounding regions. Oil becomes a central prize. Access to supplies and control over their movement help explain why distant governments became deeply involved in local politics.

In his 2015 MoneyWeek interview, Frankopan connects the earlier movement of valuable goods with the modern movement of oil. The commodity changes, but questions about access and control remain.

This perspective makes pipelines, concessions, and alliances part of a connected history. It also encourages scrutiny of policies described mainly in moral or ideological terms. Material interests can coexist with stated principles.

That is a question to investigate, rather than a rule that oil explains every conflict. Local political movements, institutions, and decisions still require attention. The book’s historical comparisons help identify interests; they cannot establish every actor’s motive by themselves.

What this approach helps readers notice

The practical value of this history is a better set of questions:

These are applications of the book’s approach, rather than a framework formally proposed by Frankopan. They can improve the reading of historical accounts and present-day arguments alike.

Where the argument needs limits

A broad corrective can create its own imbalance. In her review for Global Histories, Alexandra Leonzini argues that Frankopan sometimes judges European and Eurasian violence unevenly. She also questions whether the book fully escapes Europe as its central reference point.

There is a wider problem with any claim to locate the center of world history. The answer depends on the question and period. Commercial importance, intellectual influence, military reach, and ordinary people’s welfare are different measures. They need not point to the same place.

This is best read as a connected history of Eurasian power with global consequences. It is not an equally detailed account of every region or social group. Its closing argument about renewed eastern importance also belongs to its publication context. It should not be treated as proof of an inevitable future.

The book’s strongest contribution survives these limits. Historical societies did not develop in isolation. Following the people and resources between them reveals causes that national stories often leave out—and shows how prosperity, dependence, and violence can grow from the same connections.

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