The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (Paperback)

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 ofadventure and riches. The region stretching from eastern Europe and sweepingright across Central Asia deep into China and India, is taking centre stage ininternational politics, commerce and culture – and is shaping the modern world.

This region, the true centre of the earth, is obscure tomany in the English-speaking world. Yet this is where civilization itselfbegan, where the world’s great religions were born and took root.

The Silk Roads were no exotic series of connections, butnetworks that linked continents and oceans together. Along them flowed ideas,goods, disease and death. This was where empires were won – and where they werelost.

As a new era emerges, the patterns of exchange are mirroringthose that have criss-crossed Asia for millennia.

The Silk Roads are rising again.

A major reassessment of world history, The Silk Roads is animportant account of the forces that have shaped the global economy and thepolitical renaissance in the re-emerging east.

About the Author

Peter Frankopan is Professor of Global History at theUniversity of Oxford and Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford.He is also UNESCO Professor of Silk Roads Studies at King’s College,Cambridge.

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, publishedby Bloomsbury in 2015, has been a global bestseller topping charts around theworld.It was No. 1Sunday Timesbestseller andremained in the top 10 for nine months after publication.

It was named one of the ‘Books of the Decade’ 2010-2020 bytheSunday Times.The New Silk Roads: The Present andFuture of the Worldwas published by Bloomsbury in 2018 and won theHuman Sciences prize of the Carical Foundation in 2019.

The Earth Transformed: An Untold Historywaspublished by Bloomsbury in 2023. NamedThe TimesHistory Bookof the Year, it was also aFinancial Times,Guardian,Observer, Sunday Times, Independent, New Yorkerand Le PointBook ofthe Year.