For millennia it was on the Silk Roads that East and West encountered each other through trade and conquest, leading to the spread of ideas and cultures, the birth of the world's great religions, and the appetites for foreign goods that drove economies and the growth of nations. The Silk Roads vividly captures the importance of the networks that crisscrossed the spine of Asia and linked the Atlantic with the Pacific, the Mediterranean with India, America with the Persian Gulf. By way of events as disparate as the American Revolution and the horrific world wars of the twentieth century, Peter Frankopan orients us eastwards, and illuminates how even the rise of the West 500 years ago resulted from its efforts to gain access to and control Eurasian trading networks.
|
