Brilliant threads

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. By Peter Frankopan. Bloomsbury; 656 pages; £30. To be published in America in February by Knopf.

THIS is, to put it mildly, an ambitious book. The author, a historian at Oxford University, could have crafted a dozen pithy histories of, among other subjects covered: the rise of Persia; the creation of the Silk Roads, the story of long-distance trade across the Eurasian continent; the commercial as well as religious revolution that was Islam; the first global economy in the 17th century, powered by discoveries of South American silver; the 19th-century geopolitical intrigues known as the Great Game; the reasons for Germany’s push east in the second world war (wheat); the Asian dimensions of the cold war and the rise of Islamist extremism.

Yet by spinning all these stories into a single thread, Peter Frankopan attempts something bold: a history of the world that shunts the centre of gravity eastward. “The Silk Roads: A New History of the World” is a counterblast to another ambitious book from an earlier generation, J.M. Roberts’s Western-centric “Penguin History of the World”, which came out in 1976.

Mr Frankopan writes with clarity and memorable detail. When Cyrus the Great, creator in the sixth century BC of the Persian Empire, was killed attempting to subdue the Scythians, his...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1hsucRD