Hello, today I'm going to be talking about the Silk Roads by Peter Franko-Pam. This came out in 2015 and it is a broad history of the area of the world that the silk roads occupy. So that's kind of central Asia and the Middle East. It talks about Empire and Trade and the spread of religion. I feel like the contents of this book could be summarized by me just reading all of the chapter titles to you because they're all like the road to wherever, but I'll just pick out a few road to revolution, road of furs, road of hell, road of silver, crisis war, black gold, the wheat road genocide, called warfare, catastrophe tragedy. So I really felt like this was a book of two halves. It's 521 pages long. I would almost rather it be two separate books. The first half kind of takes the kind of antiquity period up until the industrial revolution and I found it so fascinating. It was an area of history that I knew very little about. Hearing about the rich culture of Persia and the kind of like ebb and flows of these different peoples and wealth and and you know technological progress and just so interesting to read about. The second half was more modern history. So one thing I found really interesting was about the oil trade, something I don't really know about besides which countries are rich because they have a lot of it, but the kind of setting up of that industry and it kind of goes through both of the world wars. I didn't realize that Hitler invaded the Soviet Union and killed all of the Jews because he just couldn't feed them. This is news to me and also maybe maybe seeks to how this is kind of like a very select narrative on how history has unfolded because it is really focusing on his relationship with the Middle East and Central Asia. But I found it especially towards the end it gave me so much more context on like recent wars and international relations which I just didn't know about. Like growing up in the 90s and early 2000s it's just like bin Laden was bad and Saddam Hussein was bad. I didn't know why I didn't know how they were related. Just having the context of like their relationship to the UK and the US and other countries and and how there's just this grand web of national interests and it's why we keep fucking with people in other countries is because they have resources that we need and we can't let the Russians have them and all of that. I just feel like I understand so much more now because it's connected all of these bits of history that I do know about with this kind of wider context. In that way it makes a lot of sense. It's all one big book because the first half definitely gives you context for the second half but it's kind of a shame that it ends it ends in 2015 and with like recent developments in around the last couple of years I wish it had ended this year you know and it's one of those things that even though the kind of earlier topics were sort of perennial in nature because it's kind of actually about the present time recent history with the context of the past rather than just about the past. I don't think it's going to age really well which is quite sad. It would be interesting if you like republish this every 10 years and just kind of added to it because I would find that really interesting. The main problem with a book about the entire history of a large geographical area is that you obviously can't tell the entire history so that he very much weaves a narrative thread that works mostly chronologically but then it's kind of in some areas it's very unsatisfying when he's like introduced this new group of people and then you actually never hear what happened to them or all areas that you're like aware were a really big part of like Western history like the slave trade. While that's definitely detailed in here it doesn't have like the depth and all of the context that you would need to properly understand how it related to the subjects in the book. I actually didn't realise when I started reading it this was for a book club that it went into modern history. I thought it was all sort of ancient history. I expected it to kind of like end circa 1900 and it got to 1900 like there and I don't think in the introduction he really explained that that premise of it's kind of like about the present and then weaving back all of the current situations in the present to to their historical origins and you're fleshing out bits along the way because I really thought it was just like about history and then was like slightly unsatisfied when I didn't get when it was it was so focused on the narrative that it didn't get give me all of the facts of the places that stopped along the way. I think my main takeaway from this besides all of just like the facts is this concept that I think a lot of us believe that we're kind of at and at and at the totes of like human progress. Technology has like boomed over recent decades so has like the population of the world and it's very easy to just kind of think that these historical like rivalries between different factions and stuff doesn't really matter or we've kind of evolved past it but when you see it all being laid out linearly like this it's just very clear that the the the global powers that present are still shifting they still develop in the same way that they've always developed and alongside that our like national feelings towards certain groups of people or other countries are just so dictated by our relationship to them in the past to a degree that's like not taught to us at all but is ingrained in us. It's so easy to grow up in the 21st century and think oh all Muslims must be extremists because of like these four things that have happened because we declare war in Iraq and whatever and not understand the context of any of that and to be honest it's a bit scary knowing that we're all just kind of like part of this system and how it kind of ramps up towards like the cold war and the high it's much higher stakes because like our means of destroying each other have really grown and we just have to kind of like blindly put faith in our political structures that's kind of scary but it's also kind of it makes it feel much more like there's going to be another thousand years when you see these kind of like shifting sands than when you think about how much has changed in the last 100 years. So this has been a video on the Silk Road by Peter Frankapan I didn't mention but it has a bunch of really fun maps which is always great for a nonfiction book and I found it really interesting and it's just made me want to travel again. I want to travel again someday soon soon. I want to get a train from Istanbul to Tashkent but can you go through Iran at the moment? I don't even know because it stopped in 2015. I hope you've enjoyed this leave your comments down below I look for trading them and I'll see you in the next one. Bye.