"The Silk Roads: A New History of the World" by Peter Frankopan - audiobook review

I read this book with some trepidation. The last time I read Peter Frankopan (The Earth Transformed), my big brother Gregory died and I didn't want to feel responsible. Thankfully, my father-in-law Tom's scan didn't live up to my worst fears. My reading got lighter after that! As with The Earth Transformed, it took me a while to get into this as Frankopan worked his way through ancient history towards the present. I let the rise and fall of empires and civilizations wash over me. As we approached the early modern period, I became more familiar with the outline of the histories being told. It really is a fantastic book: refocusing the history of human life on earth around the Middle East and Asia and the network of "silk roads" that map its trading patterns, migrations, and networks of knowledge. As the documentation grows, the pace slows. It really put things into perspective: the British empire was just one of many, no better or worse than those that came before: all of them brutal, selfish, short-sighted, exploitative, and finite. But Frankopan is nevertheless excoriating about the incompetence and venality of British diplomacy.

Frankopan does a few interesting things that I think will stay with me. He argues that the motivation behind the First and Second World Wars was really about oil in the Middle East: the fuel of modern empires and their armies. Most of the problems in that region today stem from the meddlings of our government and their rivals for the black gold. I was also startled at the insight that one of the reasons for the Holocaust was a lack of food, caused by Germany's rapid over-expansion and its invasion of Russia. With too many mouths to feed, the Nazis chose to let the Jewish and Russian people starve and then proceeded to mass slaughter. The Final Solution in this light is less premeditated than I had thought; it was more a tactic of war and resource scarcity. But no less of an atrocity.

I wish all our political leaders read this book to get more perspective on the conflicts and interrelations between people, land, and sea. It also makes me realize the myopic nature of our media that focuses on Western Europe and the US. The power (and natural resource wealth) has shifted east.