The Silk Road in World History

Xinru Liu

Jul 2010 · Oxford University Press

About this ebook

The Silk Road was the contemporary name for a complex of ancient trade routes linking East Asia with Central Asia, South Asia, and the Mediterranean world. This network of exchange emerged along the borders between agricultural China and the steppe nomads during the Han Dynasty (206BCE-220CE), in consequence of the inter-dependence and the conflicts of these two distinctive societies. In their quest for horses, fragrances, spices, gems, glassware, and other exotics from the lands to their west, the Han Empire extended its dominion over the oases around the Takla Makan Desert and sent silk all the way to the Mediterranean, either through the land routes leading to the caravan city of Palmyra in Syria desert, or by way of northwest India, the Arabian Sea and the Red Sea, landing at Alexandria. The Silk Road survived the turmoil of the demise of the Han and Roman Empires, reached its golden age during the early middle age, when the Byzantine Empire and the Tang Empire became centers of silk culture and established the models for high culture of the Eurasian world. The coming of Islam extended silk culture to an even larger area and paved the way for an expanded market for textiles and other commodities. By the 11th century, however, the Silk Road was in decline because of intense competition from the sea routes of the Indian Ocean. Using supply and demand as the framework for analyzing the formation and development of the Silk Road, the book examines the dynamics of the interactions of the nomadic pastoralists with sedentary agriculturalists, and the spread of new ideas, religions, and values into the world of commerce, thus illustrating the cultural forces underlying material transactions. This effort at tracing the interconnections of the diverse participants in the transcontinental Silk Road exchange will demonstrate that the world had been linked through economic and ideological forces long before the modern era.

Ratings and reviews

Sad that such a scholarly attempt should miss the obvious, available even on Google search.Strabo, the Roman historian writes, with apparent disdain for laymen, 'Concerning the merchants who sail from Egypt..even to the Ganges, they are only private citizens, and know nothing about the history of the places the visit. Why else would merchants sail to the Ganges, which early maps clearly mark, accuraytely, in not, as 'The eriplus of the Erithraen Sea', published about 50AD, su ggests that the Ganges is where 'raw silk, from an inland city called Thina, may be acquired'. So many writers, jumping on the Silk Road bandwagon, ignore the obvious, that if the roadways of the ancient world were water, the Soouthwest Silk Road..Sichuan, Yunnan, Myanmar, Assam, Brahmaputra River, with variations, was the shortest land route to the headwaters of Yangtze River, and Chinese coast, proably from at least the middle of 1st Millennium BCE. The ganges basin civilisation from 2nd Millennium BCE wa one of the earliest centres in the world of manufacturing and trade, and the Ganges Delta would have been agreat centre of trade from earliest times. So what can one say of such poor research and investigation?

About the author

Xinru Liu teaches in the Department of History at The College of New Jersey and was formerly Senior Researcher at the Institute of World History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.