Peter Frankopan

Peter Frankopan is a British historian whose book The Silk Roads recenters world history away from Western Europe toward the trade routes connecting Asia, the Middle East, and Europe across millennia.

Peter Frankopan is a senior research fellow at Worcester College, Oxford, and director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research. The Silk Roads: A New History, published in 2015, argues that the heartland of world history — the zone of exchange and connection that determined the course of civilizations, from antiquity to the present — runs through Central Asia and the Middle East rather than Western Europe. Beginning with the ancient Near East and proceeding through the Roman world, the rise of Islam, the Mongol Empire, the Ottoman period, and into the twentieth century, Frankopan shows how trade, religion, and geopolitical pressure flowed along the overland and maritime routes connecting east and west.

Frankopan writes with narrative fluency, and his command of the primary sources across multiple civilizations is impressive. The book succeeds in its central corrective aim: by the time a reader has followed his argument through several chapters, the Eurocentric assumptions embedded in standard Western historical education become visibly arbitrary. The Silk Roads is at its best in its pre-modern sections, where Frankopan’s scholarship is deepest.

The book’s final chapters, addressing the contemporary Middle East and Central Asia in geopolitical terms, move more quickly and argue more selectively, and some specialists have noted gaps or simplifications in individual chapters. These are real limitations in a book of this scope. As a reorienting overview for general readers, however, The Silk Roads is ambitious, readable, and genuinely perspective-shifting — one of the more consequential popular history books of its decade.