The Silk Roads

This history recentres the story of the Old World on the land and sea routes that linked China, Central Asia, Persia, the Levant, and the Mediterranean. Frankopan follows the exchange of goods, religions, diseases, and armies from antiquity through the rise of Islam, the Mongol empire, and the later contest of Ottoman, European, and Russian powers. He treats Europe as a peninsula at the edge of a wider system rather than as the engine of all change. Later chapters bring the argument into the twentieth century and the modern struggle for energy and influence in the same regions. It is a consecutive geopolitical narrative, not a catalogue of caravans.

Bound in white cloth with mauve spine, cover colour printed and blocked with a diagram. Orange slipcase with title blocked on front in mauve. Signed on a bookplate by Peter Frankopan.