RE-CENTERING THE WORLD ALONG THE SILK ROADS

Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (New York: Knopf, 2016) ("Today much attention is devoted to assessing the likely impact of rapid economic growth in China, where demand for luxury goods is forecast to quadruple in the next decade, or to considering social change in India, where more people have access to a mobile phone than to a flushing toilet. But neither offers the best vantage point to view the world's past and present. In fact, for millennia, it was the region lying between east and west, linking Europe with the Pacific Ocean, that was the axis on which the globe spun." "The halfway point between east and west, running broadly from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea to the Himalayas, might seem an unpromising position from which to assess the world. This is a region that is now home to states that evoke the exotic and peripheral, like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and the countries of the Caucasus; it is a region associated with regimes that are unstable, violent and a threat to international security, like Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Syria, or ill versed in he best practices of democracy, like Russia and Azerbaijan. Overall, it appears to be a region that is home to a series of failed or failing states, led by dictators who win impossibly large majorities in national elections and whose families and friends control sprawling business interests, own vast assets and wield political power. They are places with poor records on human rights, where freedom of expression in matters of faith, conscience and secularity is limited, and where control of the media dictates what does and what does not appear in the press." "While such countries may seem wild to us, these are no backwaters, no obscure wastelands. In fact the bridge between east and west is the very crossroads of civilization. Far form being on the fringe of global affairs, these countries lie at its very centre--as they have done since the beginning of history. It was here that Civilization was born, and where many believed Mankind had been created--in the Garden of Eden, 'planted by the Lord God' with 'every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food,' which was widely thought to be located in the rich fields between the Tigris and Euphrates. . . ."  "This region is where the world's great religions burst into life . . . It is the cauldron where language groups competed, where Indo-European, Semitic and Sino-Tibetan tongues wagged alongside those speaking Altaic, Turkic and Caucasian. This is where great empress rose  and fell, where the after-effects of clashes between cultures and rivals were felt thousands of miles away. . . . " Id. at xiv-xvi. Two major takeaway points: First, the West (or the United States) is not the center of the world. Second, those wanting to understand the global dynamics (or just the West) have to know the history of the Silk Roads.).