Jason Furman's Reviews > Silk Roads

This was a sweeping world history that covers roughly from 500 BC to the present. It puts attempts to put the “center” of Asia (which he sometimes calls the center of the world) at the center of the story, with the plurality of this “center” being about Persia but also Turkey, the Arabian peninsula, Afghanistan, the former USSR stans, and a bit of China as well. I say “attempts” because most of the events it covers are the same that a standard history of the world would cover (the Roman Empire, the rise of Christianity, its collapse, the “dark ages”, European discovery and conquest of the Americas, the renaissance, World War I, World War II, etc.) but it covers all of them from a slightly different angle, with the role of or impact on Central Asia being an important part of the story. But rarely does it tell much of the history of Central Asia beyond the way in which it is affected by or affects the more standard histories.

The different angle can be fascinating, from the ways in which Christianity was really defined and developed in the East not the West to a better understanding of the role that places like Crimea and Afghanistan have played in the global game from the 19th century through today.

Overall I quite liked the book and am glad I read it. But I found a number of aspects irritating, all of which are getting more space in this review than is representative of my feeling about the book.

Naturally, I read the last part of the book last so I will dive in there. The conclusion is all about the rise of Central Asia with the assertion, “We are seeing the signs of the world’s centre of gravity shifting—back to where it lay for millennia.” He then treats us to a whirlwind tour of the huge monuments, museums, airport, luxury hotels and mines of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and more. (He includes a dig at economists who he believes have focused insufficiently on these countries and instead been distracted by overstating the importance of emerging markets like Brazil, China, and India.)

This conclusion bizarrely asserts that China’s belt and road is the equivalent of the British Empire (“As late as the middle of the twentieth century, it was possible to sail from Southampton, London or Liverpool to the other side of the world without leaving British territory, putting in at Gibraltar and then Malta before Port Said; from there to Aden, Bombay and Colombo, pausing in the Malay peninsula and finally reaching Hong Kong. Today, it is the Chinese who can do something similar.”). Also that the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is the equivalent of the European Union (“Originally set up to facilitate political, economic and military collaboration between Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and China, the Shanghai Co-Operation Organisation (SCO) is becoming increasingly influential and gradually turning into a viable alternative to the European Union.”)

But what was particularly jarring, and I think emblematic of one of the issues with the book, was that after the concluding chapter which stated “New intellectual centres of excellence are also emerging in a region that at one time produced the world’s most outstanding scholars. Campuses have been springing up across the Persian Gulf that have been endowed by local rulers and magnates” the acknowledgments begin with "There is no finer place in the world for a historian to work than Oxford” and go on to also thank the British government archives, Cambridge University and the U.S. National Security Archives—with the only reference to anything global being “travels across Britain, Europe, Asia and Africa have helped refine good ideas, and sometimes prompted bad ones to be discarded.”

This was emblematic of three of the issues I had with the book:

1. It is dripping with contempt for the West (e.g., “Rome had long cast a greedy eye over Egypt”). The loaded, pejorative terms for anything the Romans do, describing its ruthless expropriation with language that is not repeated even in describing the vast conquests of the rise of Islam—which are treated as a benign force for standardizing rules, Ghenghis Khan or any other empire or conquerers that came from Central Asia.

2. Although the book ostensibly is trying to center the history around Central Asia, it often feels as if the author is denying their agency, at least in the last 500 years or so. The Romans, the Europeans, the United States all have agency—they make decisions and execute on them. The Central Asians just react, and anything bad they do is because they were reacting to whatever the West did (e.g., bin Laden’s attack on the World Trade Center was not his agency but just his reacting to the way the United States treated him). In that way it really does seem more like the view from Oxford than the view from Baku.

3. The allocation of attention in the history is very unbalanced. The rise of the empires in Central Asia to Alexander in 336 BC gets 3 pages. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars get 19 pages. Not only is that overly chronocentric and US centric, it was also a little disappointing because it meant more pages on something I already knew a lot about it.

Overall I’m glad I read the book. Most of the issues I had with it were about the last quarter of so of the book, although those issues showed through—both as I read and in retrospect—in the earlier parts as well. I would recommend you read it, just not uncriticially.