PDF Summary:The Silk Roads, by Peter Frankopan

In The Silk Roads, historian Peter Frankopan identifies Central and Western Asia as the crossroads of human civilization, the birthplace of the world’s major religions, the battleground where the great empires of history rose and fell, and the garden from which today’s global economy first sprouted. He argues that understanding the East is crucial to our understanding of the world—particularly for Westerners who have lost this global perspective.

In ancient times, trade routes known as the Silk Roads first brought European merchants to the luxury markets of the East, enabling the flow of both material goods and ideas from East to West. According to Frankopan, the Silk Roads have always been history’s crucial connection point, spreading not just luxury goods like silk and spices, but also technology, religion, languages, cultures, ideologies, and even conflicts and diseases. In this guide, we explore Frankopan’s history of the Silk Roads, while also incorporating insights and feedback from other scholars to supplement his analysis.

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Said argues that Europeans saw Islam as a bastardization or perversion of the true religion of Christianity, with the prophet Muhammad as the fraudulent Muslim analogue to Christ—to Europeans, Said writes, the “Oriental” mind was only capable of producing an inferior facsimile of the superior Western original.

Part 3: The Emergence of Europe

With the Christian West’s emergence onto the world stage in the wake of the Crusades, Frankopan writes that new European powers began to assert their dominance in Asia and the Middle East as the Middle Ages gave way to the early modern period.

The Bubonic Plague

As Frankopan notes, the Silk Roads didn’t just bring new luxury goods from the East to the West. The new trading networks also brought terrifying diseases like the bubonic plague from their endemic home on the Central Asian steppes into Europe and the Middle East—unleashing a pandemic that would kill tens of millions of people in the mid-14th century. (An estimated 30 to 60% of the population of Europe perished.)

The Origins of the Plague in Kyrgyzstan

Recent scholarship has tracked down the precise origins of the 1347 bubonic plague outbreak. In 2017, researchers began studying a medieval cemetery in the Tian Shan mountains in what is today Kyrgyzstan. There, they found that a disproportionate share of the gravestones bore inscriptions that told of the deceased dying from an unknown “pestilence”—and that nearly all these people had died in just two years: 1338 and 1339, just a few years before the major European outbreak. After exhuming some of the bodies and extracting genetic material from the bones and teeth of the deceased, the researchers discovered that these people had indeed been killed by the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis.

Further, they found that the bacterium inside these victims was the most recent direct ancestor of the bacterium responsible for the 1347 outbreak. These researchers claim that this proves the plague victims found in that graveyard in Kyrgyzstan represent the origin point of the pandemic strain of plague that ravaged Europe in the 14th century and other strains of plague that still circulate today.

According to Frankopan, the depopulation in Europe also resulted in a major shock to the labor supply—the sudden scarcity of labor boosted wages and bargaining power for those who managed to survive the plague, forcing landlords to lower rents and reduce many of the repressive and onerous restrictions of the feudal economy. This gave European peasants and artisans new disposable income, boosting demand for goods, and, according to Frankopan, beginning Europe’s global economic dominance.

The Bubonic Plague and the Post-Covid Great Resignation

Some commentators have noted that the labor market scarcity in Europe in the wake of the bubonic plague has some parallels with the “Great Resignation” in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. Although the death toll from Covid-19 was far lower than that of the Black Death, the Covid-19 pandemic did spark a massive voluntary resignation from the workforce—creating a significant labor shortage that boosted the wages of workers who were willing and able to remain in the workforce, similar to the economic gains plague survivors enjoyed in the 14th century.

Over 38 million people quit their jobs in 2021, citing a desire for greater work-life balance, less potential exposure to the coronavirus, and, like their 14th-century predecessors, higher pay. One historian argues that shocks to the labor supply—and the social unrest that ensues—have consistently followed deadly pandemics as the working class seeks to use its increased bargaining power to assert greater control over the economy.

Covid-19 has so far proven to be no exception, as wages have soared in previously low-wage sectors of the economy, with the accommodation and food services sector seeing wage hikes of over 18% since the start of the pandemic.

The Decline of Spain and the Rise of England

Frankopan writes that one European power, in particular, emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries: England. Before this period, England was a second-rate commercial and naval power next to the Iberian kingdoms of Spain and Portugal. These countries (Spain especially) dominated the European political scene in the 16th and early 17th centuries, thanks to their early discovery, conquest, and exploitation of Central and South America, which brought unprecedented stores of gold and silver bullion into their treasuries.

But while this influx of money financed Spain’s lavish military campaigns across Europe, it also sparked massive inflation. These economic woes led Spain to repeatedly default on its foreign loans, precipitating its decline as a world power.

The Failure of the Mercantilist System

Part of the reason for Spain’s poor economic management of its gold and silver reserves was its adherence to the theory of mercantilism. Mercantilism saw national wealth in purely zero-sum terms: The country that accumulated the greatest supply of precious metals like gold and silver was the wealthiest.

This economic theory saw the global economy as a competition between European states for who could extract the most revenue from the rest of the world. Under the logic of the mercantilist system, rival countries sought to boost their supplies of gold and silver by exporting more than they imported (to earn more gold and silver) and establishing overseas colonies whose sole economic purpose was to serve as markets with demand for manufactured goods and supplies of raw materials to ship back to the mother country.

However, mercantilism proved a counterproductive strategy for the nations that made it their commercial policy. Even as early as 1752, writers like the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume were arguing that mercantilism produced gross distortionary effects on a nation’s economy: Hume wrote that increasing a nation’s money supply through mercantilist policies would decrease the value of that money, leading to runaway inflation.

This, historians argue today, was a major culprit in the decline of the Spanish Empire. As gold and silver from the New World poured in, inflation skyrocketed in Spain, making the nation’s exports uncompetitive in international markets. Meanwhile, the Spanish Crown failed to adjust the level of taxation to account for the growing money supply, meaning that the treasury was actually collecting a smaller share of national wealth as time went on. To cover the difference, the Crown took on new debts to cover the old ones, leading to a centuries-long cycle of ever-accumulating debt.

The decline of Spain, argues Frankopan, opened the door for the economic center of Europe to shift north and west to the British Isles by the 17th century. The English seized the opportunity to modernize and professionalize their Royal Navy, enabling them to secure new trading outposts on the Indian subcontinent in Madras, Calcutta, and Bombay (the British East India Company would eventually seize India as a colony in 1757), as well as establish burgeoning colonies on the Atlantic coast of North America. This was the germ of the soon-to-be mighty British Empire.

How Did Britain Become a World Power?

Scholars have debated what precisely made the British Isles—previously on the periphery of European politics—such a global force beginning in the 17th century. English historian Simon Schama argues in The Wars of the British (Volume 2 of his A History of Britain series) that the unification of the once-distinct kingdoms of England and Scotland under the same crown in 1603 was a pivotal moment in the creation of the modern British state—and, ultimately the British Empire. Schama writes that Scots played a powerful role in the founding, settlement, and governance of the burgeoning empire, providing crucial manpower as they fanned out across Asia, Africa, and the Americas as soldiers, merchants, and settler-farmers.

Other historians note that Britain, as an island on Europe’s Atlantic seaboard, was naturally in a prime position to tap into the new wealth of the rising transatlantic economy, especially once technological advances in shipbuilding in the 15th and 16th centuries made transoceanic voyages more feasible.

New Great Powers Clash in the East

As the centuries wore on, Europe’s power and influence over the rest of the world grew, with that power particularly concentrated in the hands of a few major players—Great Britain, France, Germany, and Russia. But the center of conflict between these great European powers old and new would remain where it had been for centuries—in the East.

Frankopan writes that, with the rise of the expansive Russian Empire beginning in the early 19th century, Russian influence would extend into Central Asia, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, and Persia—dangerously close to India, now the crown jewel of the British Empire. He argues that, as the 19th century gave way to the early 20th century, British imperial policy became vitally concerned with boxing in Russia and establishing a buffer between Russian possessions and British interests in India, China, and Oceania. The British settled on a policy of accommodating Russian ambitions in Central and Eastern Europe—effectively giving the Russians a freer hand in their competing territorial claims with Germany in exchange for Russia limiting its expansionist aims in Asia.

(Shortform note: Some historians have likened this economic, political, diplomatic, and military rivalry between Britain and Russia over control of India and Central Asia to the later US-Soviet Cold War of the 20th century. However, other scholars have downplayed the strategic significance and ideological underpinnings of the earlier rivalry, arguing that it bore little resemblance to the ideological clash between capitalism and communism that marked the Cold War. They argue instead that Russia was never capable of seriously threatening the British position in India—and that the whole conflict was rooted in the paranoia and mistrust of a relative handful of ultra-nationalist British politicians, military officers, and journalists.)

Britain’s strategy to appease Russia would come at the expense of souring British relations with the rising and powerful German Empire. Frankopan argues that this maneuvering by the British played a decisive role in marching Europe and the world toward World War I—all to protect British interests in Asia.

(Shortform note: Frankopan attributes the outbreak of World War I to British scheming in an effort to maintain the balance of power in Europe and protect its overseas empire. However, other scholars have taken a different view of the origins of the conflict. German historian Fritz Fischer argues in his 1961 book Germany's Aims in the First World War that Germany deliberately engineered the war in service of an expansionist foreign policy that sought to expand German influence in Eastern Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Fischer cites documents showing that the German government had planned to annex the Low Countries, parts of France, and a large swath of the Russian Empire had it been victorious in the war.)

Part 4: Into the Modern Era

World War I would forever alter the international order, according to Frankopan. The old colonial empires of Britain and France, although victorious in the war, emerged greatly weakened, while the old multinational empires of Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottomans collapsed altogether. Out of the ashes of the devastating conflict would arise new international economic, political, and military rivalries that still dominate our world today. But the root of these power struggles would remain where it had been for centuries—in the East.

(Shortform note: Scholars agree with Frankopan that the war’s legacy can be seen most clearly in the complex power politics that define the modern Middle East. They trace these conflicts to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which had ruled over much of the region from the late 13th century to the end of World War I in 1918. In particular, the end of Ottoman imperial rule created a new political space for the rise of nationalism and movements for self-determination in the multiethnic region. The creation of new nationalist governments in Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, and elsewhere out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire—often quasi-puppet states with European backing—created a new set of nationalist and sectarian rivalries that lives with us today.)

Oil Politics

We’ve already seen Frankopan make the case that from ancient times, Persia had been coveted by the great powers of East and West due to its material wealth and strategic location. But the discovery of oil there in the 19th century would once again make Persia the center stage of global politics. Where once spices, silks, and slaves had been the most valued resources of the East, oil would now become the commodity upon which the rapidly industrializing world turned. The Silk Roads had become the Oil Roads.

(Shortform note: Persia’s centrality to geopolitical strategy continues to the present day—and not just because of its oil reserves. Today, Iran is the centerpiece of China’s “One Belt, One Road” project to invest $1 trillion in infrastructure development—bridges, rails, ports, and energy—across dozens of countries in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Because of its location at the nexus of Europe and Asia, Iran offers ready access to nearby markets that the Chinese government wishes to tap into. China is using these infrastructure investments to bring Tehran closer to Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Turkey, Europe—and, ultimately, Beijing.)

Frankopan writes that in the early 20th century, the British secured exclusive access to Persian oil resources, largely through lavish bribes conferred upon the corrupt ruling dynasty. This would prove decisive to British victory in World War I, as the Royal Navy’s access to oil reserves enabled its fleet to navigate more quickly and stay at sea longer than its enemies. To protect their access to oil, which they saw as the lifeblood of the empire, the British after World War I set up puppet governments and figurehead leaders all across the Middle East, redrawing national boundaries to get the pliant political arrangements they desired. These moves fueled nationalist and religious resentments that would boil over in the decades to come.

Unintended Tragedies of British Rule in the Post-WWI Middle East

These moves in the Middle East by the British government would have unintended—and tragic—consequences. To protect their access to oil and preserve the geopolitical balance of power in the volatile region, the British needed to make competing promises and concessions to opposing groups. During World War I, the British had promised to establish a Jewish national home in Palestine, largely to secure the support of the Jewish community in Palestine for the war effort against the Ottomans. However, in the late 1930s, the Palestinian Arabs in British Mandatory Palestine staged a revolt against British rule, largely fueled by opposition to the British policy of allowing open-ended Jewish immigration to Palestine.

In response to the revolt and to appease Arab resentments, the British in 1939 issued a White Paper that, among other provisions, restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine to 75,000 for the next five years and made that immigration contingent on Arab consent. With the simultaneous rise of Adolf Hitler’s murderously antisemitic regime in Germany, the new British policy had the effect of closing one of the few escape routes for Jews seeking to flee Europe on the eve of the Holocaust.

World War II

The instability of the post-World War I world enabled the rise of aggressive totalitarian regimes in Europe—most notably, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. According to Frankopan, the East would once again prove to be the hinge upon which global politics swung. Aggressively expansionist, the Nazis sought to conquer the rich agricultural lands of Eastern Europe and the oil-producing regions of Western Asia and the Caucasus to fulfill their dreams of a great land empire colonized by ethnic Germans and depopulated of those they deemed racial inferiors—chiefly Jews and Slavs. These ambitions were the seeds of the Nazi campaign of extermination that would culminate in the Holocaust.

Generalplan Ost: Nazi Ambitions in Eastern Europe

The Holocaust, which saw the systematic murder of six million Jews across Europe (two-thirds of Europe’s pre-war Jewish population), was only the starting point of the Nazis’ genocidal aims.

The General Plan for the East (Generalplan Ost) was the Nazi vision for the racial reordering of Eastern Europe. Had the Germans won the war on the Eastern Front in 1941-42 and defeated the Soviet Union, the General Plan called for the extermination of 10-20 million Slavic people outright and the enslavement of millions of others. Through deliberate starvation and death by forced labor, the native Slavic population of Eastern Europe would be all but eliminated, enabling new German immigrants to settle on and exploit the rich agricultural lands and use the surviving Slavs as a slave labor force.

Nazi agents and industrialists had made important technological, economic, and political inroads in the Middle East and Western Asia during the 1930s, with much of the population seeing Germany as a trusted friend and counterweight to British influence—aided in no small part by shared antisemitism between the Nazi operatives and local Islamic elites.

(Shortform note: These mutual sympathies between Nazis and some of the more extreme elements of the Arab nationalist leadership can be seen in the disproportionate number of ex-Nazis who managed to escape prosecution for war crimes after World War II by settling in Arab countries. These figures included Alois Brunner, who settled in Damascus; death camp commandant Franz Stangl, who likewise made his home in Damascus; and Düsseldorf Gestapo leader Joachim Daumling, who settled in Cairo and helped establish the Egyptian secret service under president Gamal Abdel Nasser.)

The US and the Postwar World

While the combined military and economic might of the US, the British Empire, and (by far most importantly) the Soviet Union brought about the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, the human and economic toll of the war would significantly reshape the postwar political order.

In particular, Frankopan writes, Britain emerged from the conflict economically, militarily, and politically exhausted. In the postwar world, it was clear that there would be a new chief power in the West—the United States.

(Shortform note: Some historians have used the term Pax Americana to describe the era of US economic and military hegemony that began in 1945 after the end of World War II. The term is a reference to the earlier Pax Romana and Pax Britannica—Roman Peace and British Peace respectively—when these earlier superpowers oversaw an era of relative global peace and stability. Some scholars point to the enactment of the Marshall Plan, a 1948 US initiative to provide massive foreign aid to rebuild and modernize Western Europe after the war, as the beginning of the Pax Americana.)

After the war, the US and the Soviet Union would emerge as the world’s two rival superpowers, engaging in a decades-long economic, military, political, and ideological conflict known as the Cold War. But while the participants in this new game of global power might be different, the stakes and setting of the conflict would be where they had been for millennia—the rich and strategically vital heartland of the Middle East and Asia. Both superpowers jockeyed with one another for position in countries like Iran and sought to curry favor with the local ruling elite in these countries, usually by helping to fund lavish military and infrastructure projects.

(Shortform note: Although Frankopan and other historians of the Cold War describe the period in terms of a bi-polar world split between the capitalist West led by the US and the communist Eastern bloc led by the Soviets, the real picture is more nuanced. Some scholars argue that the 1950s Sino-Soviet split—the severing of relations between the two chief communist powers, the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, over ideological disagreements about Marxist-Leninist principles—created a tri-polar world, in which the Americans, Soviets, and Chinese formed distinct and competing spheres of influence.)

Cold War Politics

Frankopan writes that, for the US, protecting what it saw as its vital strategic interests in Asia against Soviet encroachment trumped any high-minded ideals about democracy or human rights. The Americans financially and militarily supported pro-US—but corrupt and autocratic—regimes across the Middle East, Central and Western Asia, and the Pacific, such as Iran, Iraq, Indonesia, and Cambodia.

The US established and supported these governments to safeguard its own interests, with access to oil being perhaps the most important. The military support these regimes received from both the Americans and Soviets was staggering, with the Middle East accounting for half of global arms purchases and nuclear technology transfers by the mid-1970s.

(Shortform note: The diplomatic school of thought described by Frankopan here is sometimes known as Realpolitik—designing foreign policy solely on pragmatic grounds and downplaying any commitment to ideology or moral and ethical principles. In this respect, it shares aspects of its philosophical approach with those of realism and pragmatism. Prominent American figures associated with the Realpolitik school of thought during the Cold War include President Richard Nixon, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski.)

Part 5: The Decline of the West and the Resurgence of the East

Although the US and Soviet Union emerged from World War II as the world’s superpowers, the East would begin to reassert its political centrality and chart its own destiny in the latter third of the 20th century and into the 21st.

Oil Shocks of the 1970s

America’s willingness to engage in risky political maneuvering for control of Middle Eastern oil resources showed that, for all its economic and military might, the country was highly vulnerable to oil supply shocks. Indeed, Frankopan notes that this was true of nearly all Western economies. In 1973, the Arab members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) imposed an oil embargo on all the countries that had supported Israel in the just-concluded Yom Kippur War. This led to massive oil price hikes and inflation in the United States and Western Europe. For the first time in decades, people in the West saw how vulnerable their governments and economies were to geopolitical developments on the other side of the world.

(Shortform note: Some commentators argue that the oil embargo actually produced long-term benefits for the US and other industrialized countries. In response to the crisis, the US introduced new auto standards that raised domestic cars’ efficiency—enabling them to use about 20% less fuel to drive the same distances—while new regulations similarly boosted the efficient energy usage of buildings, factories, and appliances. Because of these new efficiency standards, the US economy grew 27% from 1977-1985 while total oil imports fell 50% and imports from the Persian Gulf fell by a whopping 87%.)

Western Meddling Backfires

The political meddling by the United States and other Western powers in the Middle East and Asia during the 20th century would come back to haunt them in the 21st century. For example, in the 1980s, the US supported militant Islamic jihadists (known as mujahidin) in Afghanistan in their fight against the Soviet invasion of that country. Frankopan explains that this would prove shortsighted when these former militants, having repelled the Soviets, became the Taliban and took over the country in 1996.

Under Taliban rule, Afghanistan would become a safe haven and training ground for militant jihadist organizations. These organizations—most notoriously, Al Qaeda—supported terrorist attacks against the US and other Western powers, as part of what they saw as a holy war against the West for its support of Israel and its stationing of troops in Saudi Arabia, home of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

(Shortform note: In intelligence circles, “blowback” is the term for the unintended consequences of overseas covert operations like the US support for the mujahidin Islamists in Afghanistan during the 1980s. There were figures at the time who warned about the risks of arming and financing Islamist militants—in the 1980s, Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto told then-Vice President George H.W. Bush that the US was “creating a Frankenstein” with the Afghan mujahidin—but these warnings went unheeded. By the end of the effort in Afghanistan (codenamed Operation Cyclone), the US had funneled nearly $10 billion in direct aid and weapons sales to the mujahidin.)

The 9/11 Attacks and the War on Terror

On September 11, 2001, Al Qaeda operatives dealt a devastating blow to the United States when they hijacked commercial airliners and crashed them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C. (a fourth airliner crashed into a field in rural Pennsylvania before it could reach its intended target). Frankopan writes that history had truly come full circle, as Al Qaeda invoked the legacy of the Crusades and Western/Christian meddling in Asia as a justification for its violent anti-Western ideology and tactics.

The attacks killed nearly 3,000 people and ushered in a new era of aggressive American militarism, as the US sought revenge and began a project to entrench US military and political dominance in Asia and the Middle East once more. As part of its declared “War on Terror,” the US launched costly and protracted military engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq in an attempt to force regime change in these countries and install more pliant, pro-Western governments. Frankopan argues that these wars produced little of value for the US and its allies, with hundreds of thousands of military and civilian deaths and trillions of dollars wasted.

Barack Obama’s Attempts to Redefine the War on Terror

In his memoir A Promised Land, former president Barack Obama writes that the dominant foreign policy issue at the start of his administration was the fight against international terrorism. While there was broad agreement in the administration that the US needed to dismantle and destroy Al Qaeda’s overseas networks, there was also agreement that the George W. Bush administration’s approach had been ill-conceived, ineffective, and contrary to American values.

Obama writes that he wanted to prosecute the War on Terror in line with America’s democratic and Constitutional values, rejecting Bush-era policies of unilateral war, torture, and disregard for the Constitution. He believed this would not only be more just but also more effective in the long run, by restoring American moral authority and making it easier to secure the much-needed cooperation of partners in the Muslim world.

This was why his administration focused on winding down the Bush-era torture program, from its efforts to close extrajudicial detention facility Guantanamo Bay (which was ultimately unsuccessful); codify counterterrorism practices under a legal framework in line with the Constitution; and initiate diplomatic, political, and cultural outreach to the broader Muslim world.

Power Shifts East Once Again

Frankopan argues that these recent developments show that history is reverting to its old norm—the fulcrum of global power is moving from West to East once again, after its relatively brief historical aberration over the last few centuries. Asia and the Middle East, he observes, are the center of gravity of the world’s rising population and most valuable natural resources. Any instability in this crucial region upsets the world order. The goods being traded and the resources being contested may be different from those in ancient times, but the strategic location would not have been unfamiliar to Alexander the Great—because they are the Silk Roads of old.

The Pivot to Asia

Some Western political leaders have argued that the rise of Asia—and, in particular, the growing economic, cultural, and military power of China—is a sign that the US and Europe should shift their primary geopolitical focus eastward toward Asia. Notably, in 2011, President Barack Obama declared that the US was a Pacific power and that it intended to engage more closely with Asia.

The administration dubbed this the “Pivot to Asia,” and the Biden administration has taken up its mantle in the 2020s—by disentangling the US from the War of Afghanistan; seeking inclusion in the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal; and strengthening the informal strategic security dialogue between the US, Japan, Australia, and India known as “the Quad,” to act as a counterweight to China.