Book Review: Peter Frankopan's "The Silk Roads"

What was your history class like? Was there any world history? If there was, chances are that it was relegated to the periphery of the largely Euro-centric story told of the rise of the West, or left out to be taught in another non-mandatory elective. Professor of global history at Oxford University, Peter Frankopan, seeks to rectify these historical gaps in his 2016 bestseller The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, and in the process maybe change Western perceptions of a region today commonly seen to be backwards and reactionary.

Frankopan tells the interconnected story of the world by examining the civilizations along the ancient trading routes of the Silk Roads that spanned from Africa to the Mediterranean to East Asia that connect the West to the East, from the distant past to the present, giving readers a new perspective on major historical events, like the fall of the Roman Empire to the later fall of the European colonial powers. It is the epic story of conquests, wars, and the constant trade of goods, people, ideas, and religions, a globalization that started and has never completely stopped, but seemingly has increased in intensity in the present moment.

So rather than follow the traditional route of historical analyses in expounding heavily on our inheritance of the Greco-Roman legacy, a path Frankopan sees as neglecting a nuanced tale of vibrant East-West exchange, Frankopan starts with the rise of the Persian Empire in the 6th century BCE in competition to the Romans as one of the first defining moments of antiquity. Within this hotbed of exchange, major religions and economic conventions became fairly mainstream, from common trade currencies to religions whose success depended on emphasizing common elements of these doctrines with local traditions. Christianity moved this way east and Buddhism west, attracting large sects of competing followers and helping to ensure their statuses among major world religions.

There was a healthy inter-mixing and borrowing (and relative tolerance) of ideas that, by-and-large, enabled the East to flourish in a varying succession of great empires, a condition that has endured for a majority of humanity's existence. The West caught up and eventually surpassed the East in large part through the exploitation of the bountiful natural and human resources of conquered lands, from the gold and slaves brought back from North and South America, Africa, and Asia, to the spices, precious stones, and eventually oil, of the Middle and Far East. Conquest and suffering went hand-in-hand with prosperity at home, allowing Western Europe and later America to beef up their militaries while simultaneously raising their political, cultural, and economic stars worldwide in the form of various colonial empires. When those empires fell, the powers-that-be turned to short-term deals with strongmen to safeguard their interests in the region (think oil). (Of course, we know today how that's gone.)

As a result of the latter policies, the exploitation of the East by the West left mixed-bag legacies that continue to resonate today, from the powder keg of the largely autocratic Middle East to the economic dynamism of East and South-East Asia. This is where it becomes especially helpful to know the other side of the story, how imperial legacies set the countries of the Silk Roads back in the modern era, with arbitrarily designed national boundaries and centuries of economic exploitation (think oil) resulting in autocracy, income inequality, and a bevy of other declines on various social indices for many living in the region.

But, there seem to be major changes underway today that are serving to revitalize the ancient corridors of commerce, people, and ideas, and with it lift up the peoples of the area. While uneven progress has been made in the center of the world towards climbing back upwards, the exhaustion of the West in the wake of huge military expenditures in the region in combination with increased political infighting over the globalization opening up new avenues in the East seems to show that the Silk Roads may be reclaiming their historical top-dog status once again. For one, China is investing heavily in Africa and in its ambitious New Silk Roads initiative to build up the transportation and economic infrastructure of the region. New centers for the arts and learning are popping up again in the Middle East and Asia. Many Western foreign policies are beginning to shift their focus Eastward.

In any case, in an era of transition, much uncertainty remains. While The Silk Roads prescribes no solutions that will avert potential conflict between a seemingly peaking West and rising East, it provides helpful context, a roadmap of the past leading to the present. Whatever we choose to do next, it seems clear that Western foreign policy should be geared towards peacefully guiding the rising powers upwards and securing a prosperous multipolar world for the many. Peace would seem to depend on that.

Works Cited:

Frankopan, Peter. (2016). The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. New York: Vintage Books.

Book Review: Laurie Halse Anderson's "Shout"

In the era of #MeToo, many women in the United States and around the world have found their voices to speak out against a persistently misogynistic cultural, economic, political and social system. A shot heard round the world, from the United States to Bollywood. Sure, it was much worse in the past, the usual narrative goes. But now women have achieved voting rights and a degree of social mobility. Now, with #MeToo, it seems the power imbalances have been thrust into the light, and no abuser is safe. Yay, progress!? Well...not so much.

Like much else, recent history is a mixed bag, with many benefits of movements that shake the powerful and go viral on mainstream news outlets around the world not necessarily trickling down to the masses or affecting change on the underlying structural issues and social attitudes that cause the problems in the first place. This is frustrating and demoralizing for women across the world, who, silenced by the stigmas surrounding sexual violence and assault, may judge it not worth the social costs to come forward, to agitate for change. If they do, they may face scorn and even death threats (see the case of Christine Blasey Ford, who received death threats after her testimony at the hearing for now Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh). One of many giving voice to this despair and rage felt by many women is author Laurie Halse Anderson, first through her 1999 novel Speak, and in her latest, Shout: A Poetry Memoir (2019).

From the get-go, Shout issues a siren call for a new wave of activism in a searing work of poetic prose that is half unflinchingly personal autobiography and half advocacy treatise. Like protagonist Melinda from Speak, Laurie Halse Anderson was sexually assaulted as a teenager, when she was thirteen years old. Of course, this assault having occurred in the 70s meant that Anderson, like other girls and women (and yes, boys and men), were counseled that to stay safe from predatory men (and women), they must dress conservatively, make themselves blend in to the wallpaper, to be seen, not heard. If they were assaulted, it was their fault for dressing provocatively, for drinking, being out at night alone. As for having candid conversations about sex, healthy relationships, consent and menstruation? Out of the question. Talking about sex was taboo, and when non-consensual intercourse happened, it was also taboo to speak up about it.

What makes it even worse is that in addition to the latter smothering cultural mores, Anderson's home life also had another toxic layer of drug and emotional abuse, as a result of her father's PTSD and her mother's powerlessness to change the family situation. After her rape, Anderson fell into a similar spiral, driven by her shame and anger at having to deal with her continuing trauma.

It wasn't until she spent 13 months in Denmark as a foreign exchange student that Anderson was able to gain the clarity she needed to begin healing, something she was unable to do living under her parents' toxic roof. Upon her return home, this clarity began to crystallize into an awareness of the pervasiveness of her situation, as she attended college at Georgetown and dealt with handsy professors, and as a reporter witnessed a defense attorney engaging in the brutal character assassination of a rape survivor. She channeled this awareness and dawning rage at the trauma she faced into fiction writing, first in Speak. When Speak broke into the mainstream, she used her newfound platform to tour schools and speak against sexual violence, empowering students to address these issues openly in their schools to everyone's benefit, while not flinching away from the hard path of recovery those who've dealt with sexual violence must take in order to heal. It is in this unflinching address to readers where Anderson's prose is at its most powerful, a dagger to pierce through layers of ignorance and trauma alike to let the light in.

While we've come a long way from the 70s, there still is much work to be done, as seen by the push back of school administrators against teaching sex-ed sans abstinence, school librarians worried about losing their jobs for ordering Speak, and even one revealing episode in which the fire alarm was pulled by a principal to stop Anderson's talk. But not talking about it will not make the problems go away. Instead, they fester, and the cycle of sexual violence and misogyny continues.

The laws may have changed so that women are able to vote and speak their minds publicly, but social and cultural norms must evolve alongside the laws for a truly lasting change to take hold, to break the cycle. Shout's brutal honesty makes this abundantly clear, and clears the way for other similar much-needed stories to be told, to remind us that the fight is not over. There's still much more work to do.


Works Cited:

Anderson, Laurie Halse. (2019). Shout: A Poetry Memoir. New York: Penguin Random House LLC.

Taub, Amanda. (2019, February 11). #MeToo Paradox: Movement Topples the Powerful, Not the Ordinary. Retrieved March 31, 2019, from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/11/world/americas/metoo-ocar-arias.html.