Almost
every year there is a book that
changes the way we think about something
important. For example the Piketty
book Capital
in the Twenty-First
Century that I read in 2014 updated and
corrected Karl Marx’s Das
Capital and showed us, inter alia,
how the rich few are getting richer in western
countries. My book for 2018 is
Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads: A New History of the
World,
Vintage Books, New
York, March 2017.
The
story of Constantinople, of
Baghdad, of the beginnings of China and of the
flow of silk to the west is
somewhat known. Yet this book tells world
history from the new perspective of
the centre of the world. For the book that is
Central Asia: Iraq (Mesopotamia),
Iran (Persia), Afghanistan, and Northern
India. The Black Sea and Caspian Sea
are to the north. China is to the east and
Greece and Egypt are to the west.
This is where civilization began, where the
first major empires ruled and where
world religions developed and interacted.
After two millennia the region remains
a centre in world affairs.
The
book tells stories about trade,
items traded, routes, and the cities on them.
There are stories new to me about
the peoples involved. There were Vikings known
as the Rus that traded furs and
slaves down the waterways to the Black Sea.
Over time their stopping points
became trading posts, now Novgorod and Kiev,
that became the beginnings of Russia.
The early days of Venice were helped by this
early slave trade.
World
religions spread and interacted
along the silk roads in the first centuries of
the common era: Judaism,
Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Islam.
Empires spread along these
roads. A Muslim empire spread around 800 CE.
Western knights played a role in
North Africa and Palestine for almost two
centuries after capturing Jerusalem
in 1099. The Moguls swept down from the
steppes and the north of China to carve
out a huge empire passing through Russia to
Poland and Hungary. The Black Death
also spread along these trade routes.
The
book tells of gold taken from the
new world in the 15th century, of a new trade
route to the Americas and the
impact of gold on Spain and on trading on the
silk roads. The book tells of the
Portuguese establishing trading posts around
Africa and their discovery of
India around the Cape. Protestant Elizabeth
developed a navy as defense from
Catholic Spain. Holland rebelled against Spain
and developed its own sea trade
routes with trading posts. It also developed
ways of financing trips by
assembling investments from many. It
flourished in the 17th century.
The
book tells how the British trading
companies assembled trading posts and became
rulers in India. Western countries
developed trading “concessions” in China –
Hong Kong, Macau, and within Shanghai.
Silver as currency played an important role in
trade, especially for China. The
Spanish trading centre of Manila, Philippines,
on Spain’s direct trade route to
the Americas, evolved into a cosmopolitan
city.
The
book’s perspective gives new insights
into WWI. The 19th century saw mounting
tension between a British Empire and a Russia
slowly expanding east and south through former
territory of the Ottoman Empire.
Britain was concerned about protecting its
colonial India. Central Asia, in
particular Afghanistan, passed between the
two. Moreover, by WWI the British were
“trading” oil out of Iran as fuel for their
navy in the Mediterranean. Russia’s
early 20th century railways offered new trade
routes to the east and China,
taking trade from Britain. The British aimed
to keep Russia engaged in Europe
and away from India. Britain entered treaties
with Russia in addition to that
with France. When Russia entered WWI to
support Serbia, Britain had to follow.
The
book shows that In World War II Central
Asia again had a significant role. After 1941
the Nazi-Soviet treaty was
breached by the Nazi invasion of Russia. The
US agreed to supply Russia, and
Iran was a channel. The British invaded Iran
to establish one of the supply
lines with Russia for US shipments. The
invasion also aimed to protect the Iranian
oil supply to Britain. North
of Iran in
Russia is Stalingrad, the city where Nazi
advances towards Russian food and oil
supplies were finally stopped – a turning
point in the war.
Central
Asia was a centre of Cold War
activity. Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Egypt,
Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia all took more
control over their resources in the 60s – oil
and the Suez Canal. The oil
producing nations formed OPEC. Former colonial
powers Britain and France invaded
the Canal Zone to control the canal.
They were forced to withdraw as the US
took diplomatic lead. The US heavily
funded the Shah of Persia. The Shah was
toppled by a popular revolution. The US
embassy in Iran was overrun. Iraq declared war
on Iran. Russia invaded Afghanistan.
The US and China encouraged Muslims to join
the Mujahedeen
resisting the Soviet occupation –
something I suspect both now regret.
Central
Asia has been a centre of
world attention after the Cold War. Iraq
invaded Kuwait and the US invaded to
liberate Kuwait. After 2001 terrorist attacks
on New York, Afghanistan would
not hand over Osama bin Laden who had run
terrorist training camps there. NATO
invaded Afghanistan. The US subsequently led
an invasion of Iraq in 2003. The
region is still engulfed in violence in Iraq
and Afghanistan with huge proxy wars
in Syria and Yemen.
For
me, the tragedy in the southern
part of Central Asia is that as countries took
more control of their oil and
other resources and asked for better payment,
the payment money was taken back
by selling armaments to them on a huge scale.
The west’s oil is from selling
arms. The west is addicted to an arms
industry. In addition, both the west and
Russia began nuclear facilities in several of
these countries during the Cold
War that they now regret.
By
2018 regions north of the old Silk
Road are part of a new Silk Road. There are
huge oil deposits under the Caspian
Sea and in Kurdistan. A vast natural gas field
lies on the border between
Kazakhstan and Russia, natural gas lies in
Turkmenistan. There is gold under
Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Beryllium,
dysprosium and other rare earths found in
Kazakhstan are needed to manufacture mobile
phones. The south Russian and
Ukrainian grain fields are remarkably
productive. Afghanistan was once famous
for orange trees and then for tulips. It is
now known for poppies and heroin.
Yes,
this is also a region where
presidents are elected with 86 - 96% of the
votes cast. One of them denies the
Holocaust. Another has a young child that owns
properties in Dubai. Yet these
places have always been important to human
history. Today, the area’s cities
are booming with new airports, hotels and
elegant landmark buildings. In the
last 20 years major new urban centres have
been founded, including a new
capital – Astana - in Kazakhstan. There are
new routes and connections including
oil and gas pipelines leading to Europe and to
China. Transcontinental railway
lines have opened up, for example one running
from China to Germany. And
China’s western provinces, with lower manpower
costs, are receiving new
investments and for example the relocation of
Ford and Apple from Shanghai. New
intellectual centres are emerging across the
area with guidance from people at
Harvard and Yale.
The
book claims that the age of the
west is at a crossroads – if not at an end –
as the heart of a new world takes
shape. New institutions and organizations are
being born – like the Shanghai
Co-operation Organization. Chinese President
Xi Jinping noted, “It is a foreign
policy priority … for China to develop
friendly co-operative relations with
Central Asian countries.” He called for a
“Silk Road Economic Belt.” The Silk
Roads are rising again.
The
insights from its perspective make
this book my book for 2018. Yet on reflection
the perspective has limits.
The
book aims to take a different
perspective from that of our western high
school history classes – and it
certainly does. At the same time the idea that
there was and is only one centre
of the world may push things a bit far. For
me, after the 17th century, Europe
has had time on the world stage that compares
with the early days when Baghdad
in Central Asia was the centre of things.
Central Asia has influenced the
action in our shared world. But London, Paris,
New York, Los Angeles were, and still
are magnets for youthful dreamers. The
flourishing of the arts, architecture
and literature - the novel - have been amazing
European contributions to global
culture. The scientific revolution and the
advances in medicine taking place
outside Central Asia surely compare with first
millennium Muslim scholarship. The
American Revolution gave us new political
insights and the French Revolution
and Napoleon gave us the litre and the kilo.
Human rights are a joint creation
of the gathering of a western creation – the
concept of a nation. All this was
not in Central Asia even though that region
has continued to play a big role in
our world.
The
Silk
Roads
teaches us
to look at our world with a perspective that
is more inclusive of other
perspectives than that from our own living
room, or from the perspective of our
own national academics and our own media. Our
history has been and remains a
shared history and our perspective on it must
be shared.