Europeans and Americans are taught a world history (to the
extent that they are taught history at all) that largely ignores the East,
beyond a footnote about China and perhaps a lurid tale or two about the Mongolian
hordes. Peter Frankopan, Professor of Global History at Oxford University, Senior
Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford and Director of the Oxford Center
for Byzantine Research, sets out to correct that oversight with his 2015 book The
Silk Roads: A New History of the World.
In truth until the Spanish began importing vast wealth from the
Americas, Europe was a backwater and the real action and progress in the world was
all in the Middle East and Far East.
The reader will learn two things from this eminently readable
history. First, that a very great deal of significance was going on in the
Middle East and Far East during what Europeans think of as primitive times or
the dark ages. Second, that the history of European and then later American involvement
in the East, right up to the present day, is a sordid tale of greed, arrogance,
incompetence and betrayal on both sides. It is not a pretty picture.
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