In American and
British-based history studies and teaching, a dominant paradigm for teaching
World History is the Silk Roads or Silk Routes that arose from late Antiquity between
Western Asia and extended across Central Asia, Northern India and to and from
China. An alternative to this American-British globalist approach is still
needed and scholars versed in Russian, Egyptian and Ottoman, South Asian and Chinese history are providing
ways to move beyond the global market approach to history. See for example,
Nelly Hanna’s Ottoman Egypt and the Emergence of the Modern World 1500-1800 (Hanna 2014) . The overwhelming
emphasis on using the Silk Roads is to establish a model for late 20th century
and early 21st century ideas of globalization. An example of this approach is
seen in Peter Frankopan's The Silk
Roads: A New History of the World (Frankopan
2015) .
His emphasis on commerce and empire
crosses with the rise of competing religious based empires, Byzantine, Islamic,
Russian, Ming and Qing, etc. (Perdue 2010) , and British. Frankopan provides a long view of the Silk
Roads by updating the imposition of Central Asian geographical and political
maneuvering up through the age of American imperialism and Superpower rivalries
of the late 20th and beginning of the 21st century. A comparative approach to economic history
between early modern China and early modern Europe is found in the formative
and continuing projects of Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence (2001)
and Bin Wong (Wong 2000) . An emphasis on South Asian and Indian Ocean
based commercial and cultural development is seen in Andre Wink (Wink 2004) .
A conventional and chronological
periodization with a trade-based approach to Silk Road history is found in Xinru
Liu, and his discussion of the Kushan and Han Empires (800 BCE to 100 CE) (Liu 2010) . We have unique written travel account of Chinese monks who travel
along the Silk Routes in search for the origins of the Buddha: these include Faxian
(337?-422?), Xuanzang (600?-664), and Yijing (635-713). Several studies of the extent of Muslim
merchant communities that were established within China have been made
including, M. Pearson (Pearson 2010) and Benite (Benite 2010) . We still look for a fuller analysis along the lines of
Joseph Needham’s multivolume history of Chinese Civilization (Needham
1954-2015) .
A longer and more detailed analysis of the West-interconnections has yet to be
fully developed but the following approaches help. A useful attempt to
summarize the contributions of Central Asia to areas of science, philosophy and
technology is found in S. Frederick Starr, Lost Enlightenment: Central
Asia's Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane (Frederick
Starr 2015) . A short comparative civilization approach is
found in The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization (Hobson 2004) .
Bibliography
Benite, Zvi Ben-Dor. 2010. Follow the white camel:
Islam in China to 1800. Vol. 3, in New Cambridge History of
islam: The Eastern Islamic World Eleventh to Eighteenth Century ,
edited by D. O Morgan and A Reid, 400-26. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge
University Press.
Frankopan, Peter. 2015. The Silk Roads: A New
History of the World. London: Bloomsbury.
Frederick Starr, S. 2015. Lost Enlightenment:
Central Asia's Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane . Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Hanna, Nelly. 2014. Ottoman Egypt and the
Emergence of the Modern World 1500-1800. Cairo: The American University in
Cairo Press.
Hobson, John M. 2004. The Eastern Origins of
Western Civilisation. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
Liu, Xinru. 2010. The Silk Road in World History.
Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press.
Needham, Joseph. 1954-2015. Science and Technology
in China. 19 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pearson, M. 2010. Islamic trade, shipping,
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centuries. Vol. 3, in Islam: The Eastern Islamic World
Eleventh to Eighteenth Century , edited by D. O. Morgan and A.
Reid, 317-365. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
Perdue, Peter. 2010. China Marches West: The Qing
Conquest of Central Eurasia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Pollock, Sheldon. 2009. The Language of the Gods
in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Pomeranz, Kenneth. 2001. The Great Divergence:
China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Rypka, Jan. 1968. History of Iranian Literature.
Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Company.
Wink, Andre. 2004. Al-Hind, the making of the
Indo-Islamic world: Indo-Islamic society, 14th-15th centuries. Vol. 3.
Leiden: E.J. Brill.
Wong, Bin. 2000. China Transformed: Historical
Change and the Limits of European Experience. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press.
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