For centuries, fame and fortune was to be found in the west – in the New World of the Americas. Today, it is the east which calls out to those in search of adventure and riches. The region stretching from eastern Europe and sweeping right across Central Asia deep into China and India, is taking centre stage in international politics, commerce and culture – and is shaping the modern world. This region, the true centre of the earth, is obscure to many in the English-speaking world. Yet this is where civilization itself began, where the world's great religions were born and took root. The Silk Roads were no exotic series of connections, but networks that linked continents and oceans together. Along them flowed ideas, goods, disease and death. This was where empires were won – and where they were lost. As a new era emerges, the patterns of exchange are mirroring those that have criss-crossed Asia for millennia. The Silk Roads are rising again.
A major reassessment of world history, The Silk Roads is an important account of the forces that have shaped the global economy and the political renaissance in the re-emerging east.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-silk-roads-9781408839973/
Peter Frankopan is Professor of Global History, Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research and Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College. He is an Advisory Committee Member for the Oxford Centre for Global History. He specialises in the history of the Byzantine Empire in the 11th Century, and in the history of Asia Minor, Russia and the Balkans. He works on medieval Greek literature and rhetoric, and on diplomatic and cultrual exchange between Constantinople and the islamic world, western Europe and the principalities of southern Russia.
27 AUG 2015 | 656 PAGES | HARDBACK | BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING
ISBN: 9781408839973
1 JUN 2016 | 656 PAGES | PAPERBACK | BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING
ISBN: 9781408839997
