Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present [ペーパーバック]

I don't know where to start in reviewing this book. Perhaps the beginning is a good place. This book starts off well. The prologue concerning the hero myths and the origin of the comitatus seems curious at first but makes sense as the book goes on. The first chapter on the Hittites and the origin of the chariot I found fascinating. The second chapter was not quite as good, but the musings on the origins of philosophical thought and its possible diffusion via the Silk Road between China, India, and Greece was good food for thought. Which brought us up to about 500 b.c., at which point ...

The book just seemed to fall off a cliff. For the next two thousand years, the time period the majority of us are probably most interested in, all we get is a seemingly endless succession of names and dates, which tribal leader raided which tribal group, tra la tra la, with no maps and little indication of what is important out of all of this and what is not. One small example should suffice. On page 168 we encounter the sentence: "There Alp Arslan resoundingly defeated an army of the Byzantine emperor Romanus at the Battle of Mantzikert in 1071." That's it. No further reference.

Hello!!! Wasn't that the battle that initiated the papal call for the first Crusade, one of those seminal events in world history whose repercussions are still affecting the societies of Central Asia and indeed the whole world even today, almost a thousand years later? (Afghanistan, anyone?) You would think this might be a ripe field for discussion, but in fact there is not one single mention that the Crusades even happened. The Battle of the Bulge is in this book. Pearl Harbor is in this book. But not one single mention of the Crusades. Umm, wasn't that minor Central Asian group the Turks involved?

And historical personages. What we learn about Attila the Hun is that he must have had his reasons. Oh, really? (Or as my daughter would say: "No duh!") Of course he had his reasons! Hitler had his reasons as well. The question is: what were those reasons? And were those reasons good reasons? You won't find out here.

Tamerlane. Now there's a person I'd like to learn more about. Didn't he rule during some sort of golden age in Central Asian history? I've often heard about him over the years, but never truly learned much in detail. And now I can honestly say that I still haven't. After one quick paragraph outlining all his major and minor victories and defeats, we are given this:"The legacy of Tamerlane and the Timurids was to be in patronage of the arts." That's it? Yep, that's it.

The book does get interesting again in chapter 9, when he gets into a discussion of the littoral system and how the newly opened up European sea trade to the Far East affected the Silk Road economies, but then ...

The book falls right off the cliff again, and is a jumble right through to the end. I won't go into his extended rant against Modernism because other reviewers have already done that. He has some valid points, but mostly he just sets up straw men and tears them down as easy targets, rarely focusing on the larger picture. His prescription seems to be that if only the central Asian countries could unite and form some kind of European Union-type organization, and reinstitute a Victorian Era-style noble aristocracy based on the comitatus system (see, we did get back to it in the end), then the world might suddenly find itself living in peace and harmony.

Yeah, right.

A good book deserves to be written about the empires of the Silk Road. Unfortunately, this is not it.

I purchased this book thinking I had found a Central Eurasian companion to Norman Davies' magisterial "Europe." Alas, "Empires of the Silk Road" is too strange to fit comfortably on the same shelf.

Though Beckwith makes many interesting points, particularly at the beginning of the book (the sections on national founding myths and the comitatus are worth a glance), one senses trouble on the horizon when Central Eurasia is defined, not geographically, but rather as any place where the "Central Eurasian culture complex" took root. Though there are doubtless merits to this approach, the result is that, instead of a history of the "Empires of the Silk Road," Beckwith has attempted to write a history of the entirety of Eurasia.

This approach becomes particularly problematic in the last third of the book, when Beckwith more or less abandons his supposed topic for meager summaries of 20th century events. Casting the 20th century in terms of the rise of "Modernism," the reader is given 1-2 page summaries of the Great Depression, First and Second World Wars, and Communist takeovers of Russia and China. Presumably, anyone interested in purchasing this book will have at least a passing interest in world history and therefore possess considerably deeper knowledge of these subjects than is presented; one is therefore left to conclude that these sections were included to allow the author space to snipe at Modernism, a movement that Beckwith never bothers to define but that he clearly loathes.

Furthermore, many of these summaries are risible. For instance, the Iranian revolution is cast as the overthrow of an innocent and benevolent monarch ("the young shah gradually began a wide-ranging liberalization and modernization of Iran...[leading to] prosperity, stability, and... growth"). Though Khomeini and his ilk deserve only contempt, to let the noxious Iranian monarchy off so lightly is a disservice to the reader.

In summary, the better parts of "Empires of the Silk Road" provide a useful and perhaps necessary corrective to Eurocentric bookstore shelves. The book will doubtless appeal to those interested in a quick overview of the Scythians, Sogdians, Tamerlane, and other fascinating cultures and notables. However, the peculiar final chapters will be off-putting to many, and make it difficult to recommend this uneven title.

Somewhere along the path to writing a history of the so-called Silk Road, Christopher Beckwith got lost in a diatribe about "Modernism" and all the accoutrements that accompany it. I'm not sure what the point was, other than to rail about the injustice of it all. That aside, there's much to commend here. Beckwith's mastery of the linguistics and philology of the Central Eurasia is impressive. Certainly his passion for the subject leaps off the page. And one can admire his efforts to rescue the peoples of Eurasia from obscurity and myth. The prologue and epilogue are worth reading in their own right. It's the detours into invective and moralizing that lead his caravan astray.