*The Silk Roads* is an ambitious, genuinely readable attempt to reorient world history away from its traditional European centre of gravity — a project that mostly succeeds, though not without real blind spots that curious readers should know about before they begin. For anyone who has felt that the standard Western-centric narrative of civilisation is incomplete, this book makes for a stimulating, if imperfect, corrective.
About the Book
Published in 2015, *The Silk Roads: A New History of the World* is the work of Peter Frankopan, a professor of global history at Worcester College, Oxford, and the Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research. Frankopan also holds a professorship in Silk Roads studies at the University of Cambridge and serves as associate director of the UNESCO Silk Roads programme — credentials that give him unusually strong institutional grounding for exactly this kind of project. The book runs to twenty-five chapters and, at approximately 650 pages, constitutes a sweeping narrative from antiquity to the contemporary era, organised around the trade routes connecting East and West across Central Asia, the Middle East, and beyond. An abridged illustrated edition, with artwork by Neil Packer, has since been published for younger or more general readers.
*The Silk Roads* was Frankopan’s second book. His first, *The First Crusade: The Call from the East* (2012), established his interest in recovering a perspective on medieval history that takes the Islamic world and Byzantium seriously as protagonists rather than backdrop. *The Silk Roads* expanded that revisionist impulse into a full-scale history of the world. Frankopan followed it with *The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World* in 2018 and, in 2023, with *The Earth Transformed: An Untold History*, a global environmental history — suggesting an ongoing and productive commitment to writing expansive, non-Eurocentric history for general audiences. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2020.
What It Does Well
The book’s most obvious strength is its sheer narrative ambition. Frankopan places the regions of Central Asia, Persia, and the broader Islamic world at the centre of the story rather than at its margins. This is not a trivial intervention. For readers accustomed to histories in which Rome falls and then Europe eventually produces Columbus, the Reformation, and industrialisation, the effect of reading *The Silk Roads* can be genuinely disorienting in the best sense — a reminder that for long stretches of human history, the action was happening elsewhere.
Frankopan’s archival instincts are notable. Reviewers in outlets including *The Guardian*, *The Independent*, *The Times*, *The Telegraph*, and *The New York Review of Books* responded positively to the book’s scholarly depth, and the *New York Times* described it approvingly as “an old-fashioned good book.” The anthropologist Nikolay Kradin observed that Frankopan balances historical rigour with accessibility, making the material approachable for readers who may not come in with specialist knowledge. The chapter headings, Kradin noted, are unusually compelling — a small detail that matters in a book of this length, where the reader’s sense of momentum is everything.
There is also genuine intellectual range on display. By tracing the Silk Roads through the rise of Islam, the Mongol conquests, the Black Death (which travelled these same routes), the early modern spice trade, and on into the petroleum age and the Cold War, Frankopan constructs a throughline that feels coherent rather than merely encyclopaedic. The book rewards readers who want to understand how the world’s economic and political centre of gravity has shifted — and may be shifting again.
Where It Falls Short
Balanced assessment requires acknowledging that *The Silk Roads* has attracted substantive criticism, and that criticism deserves to be taken seriously. Reviewer Alexandra Leonzini identified a troubling asymmetry in the book’s moral accounting: Frankopan is pointed in documenting European depredations while applying a softer lens to equivalent atrocities carried out within Eurasia — including the demand for enslaved people in Central Asian and Middle Eastern markets. This selective framing sits in tension with the book’s stated goal of escaping Eurocentrism; replacing one set of distortions with another is not quite the corrective the project promises.
The historian Ramachandra Guha raised a structural concern that will resonate with many readers: after a strong start, the book’s focus dissipates as it moves into the modern period. More fundamentally, Guha noted that poor people and women are largely absent from the narrative. This is a real limitation. A history that reorients the map geographically while continuing to centre elite male actors has only partly escaped the limitations of the tradition it is critiquing. As the critic Marcal Sanmartà put it, the book functions better as an anti-Eurocentric polemic than as a comprehensive tool for understanding world history — which is fair, provided readers enter with that expectation rather than expecting full coverage.
Specific factual accuracy has also been questioned. Sanmartà found minor errors scattered through the text, and *The Guardian*’s Anthony Sattin described the book as “let down by factual errors” even while praising its ambition. At 650 pages, some imprecision may be inevitable, but it is worth knowing that specialist readers have flagged problems. India’s historical trajectory, for instance, receives treatment that researchers have found underweights factors like population growth and economic inequality that the Silk Road framework cannot easily explain.
Who Should Read It
*The Silk Roads* is well suited to general readers with an existing interest in world history who feel the standard European narrative has left too much out, and who want a single large-scale book to begin broadening that picture. It works particularly well for readers approaching the history of the Islamic world, Central Asia, or Byzantium for the first time, since Frankopan makes these regions feel central rather than exotic.
Readers who are already versed in post-colonial historiography or non-Western history may find the revisionism less startling than advertised, and they will likely be more sensitive to the gaps identified by critics. Anyone expecting rigorous coverage of social history — the lives of ordinary people, women, the poor — should look elsewhere or supplement this book with other sources. Those who want a focused deep-dive into any single region or period will find the broad sweep somewhat frustrating, though that is the nature of the genre Frankopan has chosen.
For Canadian readers in particular, there is something genuinely useful in a book that consistently frames the Atlantic as a sideshow and the landmasses of Asia and the Middle East as the main event. It is a useful habit of mind to cultivate, even if this particular guide to cultivating it is not without its flaws.
Where to Buy
*The Silk Roads: A New History of the World* is widely available in Canada in hardcover, paperback, and digital formats. Canadian readers can find it conveniently on Amazon.ca, often at competitive prices, with the illustrated abridged edition also available for those wanting a more accessible entry point.