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The Silk Roads

a New History of the World
Sep 11, 2018wyenotgo rated this title 3 out of 5 stars
My rating of 3 stars pertains only to the first 10 chapters, which deals with an era and a part of the world that has otherwise been poorly covered and inadequately studied in most of our popular histories, which have been overly Eurocentric. Once Frankopan comes to the voyages of discovery of the late 15th century, the focus of civilization shifted from looking to the east-facing to west-facing; at that point, the book also loses its uniqueness. The literary device of investigating a series of "roads", when carried forward into the modern era no longer works. I quickly lost interest from that point onward. That said, the first half of the book has great merit and makes for fascinating reading, particularly in its investigation of the complex economic relationships that evolved as trade routes shifted, complicated by the successive waves of religious change along with the rise and decay of empires.