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The Silk Roads: A New History of the World Audiobook
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“This is history on a grand scale, with a sweep and ambition that is rare… A proper historical epic of dazzling range and achievement.” —William Dalrymple, The Guardian The epic history of the crossroads of the world—the meeting place of East and West and the birthplace of civilization It was on the Silk Roads that East and West first encountered each other through trade and conquest, leading to the spread of ideas, cultures and religions. From the rise and fall of empires to the spread of Buddhism and the advent of Christianity and Islam, right up to the great wars of the twentieth century—this book shows how the fate of the West has always been inextricably linked to the East. Peter Frankopan realigns our understanding of the world, pointing us eastward. He vividly re-creates the emergence of the first cities in Mesopotamia and the birth of empires in Persia, Rome and Constantinople, as well as the depredations by the Mongols, the transmission of the Black Death and the violent struggles over Western imperialism. Throughout the millennia, it was the appetite for foreign goods that brought East and West together, driving economies and the growth of nations. From the Middle East and its political instability to China and its economic rise, the vast region stretching eastward from the Balkans across the steppe and South Asia has been thrust into the global spotlight in recent years. Frankopan teaches us that to understand what is at stake for the cities and nations built on these intricate trade routes, we must first understand their astounding pasts. Far more than a history of the Silk Roads, this book is truly a revelatory new history of the world, promising to destabilize notions of where we come from and where we are headed next.
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The Silk Roads Listener Reviews
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" Whatever Frankopan's true motives, this is a form of revisionist history. His attitude is of an author who is making a necessary correction of the record, which is clever but not very convincing. This is an Islamist Apologia. Not overt propaganda but subtle by omission. The narration is extremely clear, despite many strange pronunciations as if a case of ESL. The book includes a concise history of the vast regions between the Levant and China, not usually discovered in casual historic exploration, with a peculiar focus upon THE ASIAN TRADE ROUTES. To be blunt, much of the narrative is a cover for banditry and Islamist terror in the region. However there are even worse critical omissions such almost no explication of the first historically documented Ethnic-Religious mass genocide, and subsequent enslavement and economic impoverishment of millions on the scale of Stalin/Mao which took place in India under the Islamic Mughals (early 16th to the mid-18th century). Three centuries of horro "
— William, 1/16/2020
About Peter Frankopan
Peter Frankopan is a historian based at Oxford University. He is the author of The First Crusade: The Call from the East and The Silk Roads. He is a senior research fellow at Worcester College, Oxford, and the director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research at Oxford University. His revised translation of The Alexiad was published in the United States in 2009.
About Laurence Kennedy
Laurence Kennedy is a voice talent and audiobook narrator.