Bloomsbury, £30
How can we define the centre of the world—and its history? For medieval Europeans with a theological mindset, it was the Holy Land, as testified by the Hereford Mappa Mundi, where the whole world stretches out from Jerusalem. Later, Gerardus Mercator projected a globe—standard to this day—in which Europe floated in the middle, stressing its political predominance since early modern times.
But the maps that fascinated Oxford historian Peter Frankopan as a child were the charts of Arab geographers that put the Caspian Sea at the world’s centre, or a Turkish map that oriented itself around the now unknown Kyrgyz town, Balasagun. They suggested to Frankopan a different thread running through world history. It is popularly held that, starting with ancient Greece as the supposed birthplace of civilisation and, especially enhanced since industrialisation, Europe and its New World progeny has been the dynamo generating the forward progress of human history. But for Frankopan, the centripetal force of history lies further to the east, in the caravanserais of central Asia that constituted the Silk Roads.
Frankopan’s emphasis on the intellectual and cultural significance of central Asia—rather than merely an economic argument about central Asia as a trading entrepot—is the most original aspect of this book. Championing the region as arguably the birthplace of Buddhism (only when encountering Hellenic civilisation there did the Buddha’s image take its famous form) as well as that of Islamic scientists such as Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Frankopan gives the best account of central Asia’s intellectual legacy we have.
Even if his contemporary argument about the region’s geopolitical centrality in an age of rising China and Turkey is less convincing, Frankopan has written a magnificent book to reorient our maps—and our minds.
Purchase the book here on Amazon
How can we define the centre of the world—and its history? For medieval Europeans with a theological mindset, it was the Holy Land, as testified by the Hereford Mappa Mundi, where the whole world stretches out from Jerusalem. Later, Gerardus Mercator projected a globe—standard to this day—in which Europe floated in the middle, stressing its political predominance since early modern times.
But the maps that fascinated Oxford historian Peter Frankopan as a child were the charts of Arab geographers that put the Caspian Sea at the world’s centre, or a Turkish map that oriented itself around the now unknown Kyrgyz town, Balasagun. They suggested to Frankopan a different thread running through world history. It is popularly held that, starting with ancient Greece as the supposed birthplace of civilisation and, especially enhanced since industrialisation, Europe and its New World progeny has been the dynamo generating the forward progress of human history. But for Frankopan, the centripetal force of history lies further to the east, in the caravanserais of central Asia that constituted the Silk Roads.
Frankopan’s emphasis on the intellectual and cultural significance of central Asia—rather than merely an economic argument about central Asia as a trading entrepot—is the most original aspect of this book. Championing the region as arguably the birthplace of Buddhism (only when encountering Hellenic civilisation there did the Buddha’s image take its famous form) as well as that of Islamic scientists such as Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Frankopan gives the best account of central Asia’s intellectual legacy we have.
Even if his contemporary argument about the region’s geopolitical centrality in an age of rising China and Turkey is less convincing, Frankopan has written a magnificent book to reorient our maps—and our minds.
Purchase the book here on Amazon
