The sun is setting on the Western world. Slowly but indisputably, the direction in which the world spins has reversed: where for the last five centuries the globe turned westwards on its axis, it now turns to the east.
For centuries, fame and fortune used to be to be found in the west in the New World of the Americas. As of late, it’s the east which calls out to those on the lookout for adventure and riches. The region stretching from eastern Europe and sweeping right across Central Asia deep into China and India, is taking centre stage in international politics, commerce and culture and is shaping the up to date world.
This region, the real centre of the earth, is difficult to understand to many in the English-speaking world. Yet this is where civilization itself started, where the world’s great religions were born and took root. The Silk Roads were no exotic series of connections, but networks that linked continents and oceans together. Along them flowed ideas, goods, disease and death. This used to be where empires were won and where they were lost. As a new era emerges, the patterns of exchange are mirroring those that have criss-crossed Asia for millennia. The Silk Roads are rising again.
A major reassessment of world history, The Silk Roads is crucial account of the forces that have shaped the global economy and the political renaissance in the re-emerging east.