Review : The Silk Roads

Well ! Here is that rarest of things : a short review of a long book.

Peter Frankopan's The Silk Roads : A New History Of The World is a pretty dreadful, and as such not much need be said about it. I've already mentioned his absurd comment about the EU; the book as a whole is generally better than that - but not much more.

There's little enough silk in this book, even less about roads, and as a "world" history it's limited in the extreme. Ostensibly it's about those countries between Europe and the Far East, but actually it's about nothing of the sort. Although in the first half he does make a half-hearted stab at this, in the second half (which is pretty much entirely about the 20th century, and it's extremely clear that this is the part he really wanted to write) it's very specifically about Western interference in the Middle East. Not the Middle Eastern countries themselves, or the European countries themselves, but very specifically their meddling interference.

To be fair, this is an important topic. But his only real conclusion, "Western imperialism was a bad thing" could easily have been described in some considerable and persuasive detail in ten pages or less. Not two hundred and fifty. Even I could be more concise than that. That length is just plain depressing.

And as a format, this simply doesn't work. Everything is incredibly superficial, shallow, and utterly soulless. Characters appear and disappear as and when needed, frequently appearing for no more than a paragraph or two. Even the most important people who ever lived are reduced to bland, meaningless footnotes. This is exemplified by an incident he describes in which American hostages were being held by Iranians, wherein Frankopan doesn't feel the need to tell us anything so mundane as, oh, I don't know... whether they were ever frickin' released.

Aarrrgh.

The whole thing is profoundly disjointed, unfocused, and incoherent. After raging against imperialism in the Middle East, his conclusion chapter jumps abruptly into the stans of Central Asia. They're barely mentioned in the rest of the book at all, but suddenly we're told repeatedly how wonderfully well they're doing, often repeating the phrase, "the Silk Roads are rising again" (which is anyway a strange turn of phrase and not the eloquent rhetorical flourish the author thinks it is) without justification. Frankopan is clearly unaware of his own point.

And his audience too. It's not at all obvious who the target should be here. It's far too cynical to persuade any modern-day Western nationalists of its main message, so it's not for them. Nor is it for anyone from the Middle East, reducing the entire region to the status of permanent victimhood, with no life or agency of its own. Nor is it for anyone from India, China, South America or Africa - all of which are barely mentioned. Nor does it have anything much to say about ideologies, being materialistic and resource-oriented in the extreme. The only real target audience I can think of are people who want to know about the reasons for fluctuating oil prices in the twentieth century. In terms of everything else, it's remarkably uninformative for a 500-page tome.

While other reviews have said that all Frankopan does is shift the focus from Europe to the East, this is simply not the case. That would have been very welcome. No, it's an excessively cynical view of imperialistic meddling and nothing else : everyone is either an avaricious imperialist or a luckless victim suffering at the hands of said imperialist. Not a single decent thing has, according to this heartless diatribe, ever happened to a single person in all of history ever. Literally. I don't have a good word to say about it because this book doesn't have a good word to say about anything.

It's like he's cherry picking, except he's only picking the rotten cherries and none of the good ones. It's just as fallacious as picking the nice ones, only much more miserable.

There isn't even any kind of interesting new perspective here. Frankopan makes a laudable effort to connect the Great Game to WWI, but shoots himself in the foot. First, he stresses how important India was to the British, but neglects any explanation as to why it was apparently left so badly defended - why so much focus on distracting Russia in central Asia instead of defending India directly ? Then, he downplays the Anglo-Germanic rivalry to a point where Britain siding with Russia simply doesn't make any sense : having spent entire chapters on describing how badly Britain wanted to thwart Russian expansion, for them to suddenly band together against Germany comes completely out of the blue. I'm not saying it's wholly without merit - it's a a potentially interesting connection between disparate world even - just that Frankopan wastes all his efforts and it left me feeling completely unconvinced.

In short, this book is soulless, plodding, dull, uninformative, materialistic and cynical to an absurd extreme, and basically a complete waste of everyone's time. I'm only going to give it 2/10 just so I don't feel completely swindled.