Frankopan's The Silk Roads

Before you say it, yes I am aware that Peter Frankopan's The Silk Roads was published in 2015; in my defence, the tome is 645 pages long and I've been reading it on and off since February.
The Silk Roads is a rich, enthralling attempt to reconfigure Western views of 'world history'. Frankopan argues, with varying success, that many major world events have their origins and pivotal moments in the distant lands of central Asia, from the eponymous Silk Roads (I prefer the term Silk Routes, since roads are much more formal and generally paved) to the recent, ongoing / seemingly neverending 'War on Terrorism'.

The old and new at Bairam Ali, near ancient Merv on the Silk Routes in Turkmenistan (2000)

Some of the events and themes Frankopan adopts and weaves as threads through centuries of world history are obvious - religions, trade, the Mongol hordes, 'black gold'. Even with the familiar, however, Frankopan's detailed historical research brings fresh, fascinating insights to the general reader as well as those who have travelled along parts of the Silk Roads and know it relatively well - I'd forgotten the key role Israel played in building Iran's nuclear capabilities in the 1980s, as a counter-poise to Saddam's Iraq. The irony of expediency through a historical lens...
Historians with the benefit of hindsight, however, need to be careful not to write of historical trajectories as if they are self-evident and inevitable. In reality, events often could have turned out quite differently, were it not for key individuals, crucial decisions (good or bad), and chance - what the Annales historian Ferdinand Braudel perhaps prematurely dismissed as événements, against the slow-moving, constraining, formative la longue durée. I suspect Frankopan could have quoted numerous other sources who predicted radically alternative outcomes, if events had turned out differently.
The breadth of Frankopan's study is huge and impressive, although it inevitably includes a few somewhat incongruous gaps. The well-established prehistory of the Silk Roads is largely overlooked, as he chooses to start with the times of Alexander the Great. He ignores the Anglo-Afghan wars of the mid-eighteenth / early-nineteenth which in so many ways foreshadowed more recent debacles and external interventions in Afghanistan - see for example David Loyn's excellent "Butcher and Bolt – 200 years of foreign engagement in Afghanistan".

Abandoned Soviet tank on the way to the Salang Pass, Afghanistan (2003)

More critically, the latter part of Frankopan's book understandably focusses on the nefarious rush by the West to exploit (in many ways) the emerging oil reserves of Persia and Mesopotamia, but he completely loses sight of the rest of the region. The collapse of the Soviet Union, and emergence of the resource-rich 'Stans', and the remarkable transformation and economic rise of China are glossed over, although perhaps given more prominence in the more recent The New Silk Roads. In this regard, I cannot help feeling that indigenous histories are required if you truly want to counter western / euro-centric biases, as Amin Maalouf's The Crusades through Arab Eyes did.
A key theme in the latter part of The Silk Roads is how badly the West has treated the region. Given recent, largely American, interventions, it would be easy to overlook the British imperial record which is both duplicitous and horrendous, as detailed in William Dalyrmple's recent The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company. And equally, it is remarkable how forgiving the peoples of central Asia have been, and welcoming towards Western visitors.

Lunch with General Nur, Chaghcharan, Afghanistan (2005 - photo: Alison Gascoigne)

But, ultimately, what is most significant about Frankopan's book is that it successfully challenges us to reflect on, and perhaps re-position, our Western-centric views of world history, in a highly interesting and engaging way.