This is a lengthy book, though not a struggle to read, and each chapter turns to a separate topic, many of which are of significant interest in their own right; it could be regarded as a collection of essays - generally lively and often provocative - on a common theme, which is not really the history of the world - it omits too many topics to merit that title - but the pivotal importance to world history of a region we in the west fail to regard with sufficient understanding - a blank space or a puzzling gap seeming to rest in between regions of interest - Europe of course, the Mediterranean, Russia and its former empire, India, China, …
Yet a map of the area between the Mediterranean and China not only reveals just how vast it really is, but also how complex and how much it is criss-crossed with tracks and lines of communication, often of great antiquity but evolving into modern pipelines that carry oil and gas, or railroads on which mile-long trains now carry sophisticated products in every direction on routes as much as 7,000 miles from end to end, not only to the familiar destinations - to Moscow and Warsaw, to Beijing or to Delhi - , but to an increasing array of nodes within this space - Baku (capital of Azerbaijan), Ashgabat in Turkmenistan, Erbil the main city in Iraqi Kurdistan, Astana in Kazakhstan. Ancient cities like Tehran or Samarkand are not in the middle of nowhere, but at crucial junctions on immensely important, long distance trade routes.
From a Western perspective - in Europe or the USA - these locations are exotic and obscure, and could even be considered unimportant. This is nothing new. When ancient Greece was making its first tentative steps towards civilisation, it was able to draw on the accumulated learning of existing, longstanding civilisations, notably Persian and Egyptian. Alexander the Great did not turn west but east for his conquests, to the wealthy and civilised lands of Syria, Egypt, Persia, Afghanistan, India. The Roman Empire not only overcame the Greeks, but also Carthage and Egypt, but failed to master the Persians. When the Roman empire became too large to sustain, it was its western half that was abandoned, having little to offer in comparison with the wealth of the east. When Islam emerged in the Sixth Century, it established dominance across North Africa, Egypt, Syria and then across the vast region to Persia and beyond to the borders of China. If the muslim expansion west stopped in Spain, it was not particularly because it was prevented by Martel so much as because there was not enough to fight for beyond. Other empires and kingdoms emerged, of which the Mongols were especially successful not for a brief period but for centuries. The Mongols never invaded western Europe because there was nothing there for them to justify the effort, though they arguably established the basis for Russia's development.
The great wealth of Venice, Genoa and other Italian city states came from their access to the vast trading networks that stretched from the Mediterranean to the Pacific coast, from Russia to India. There was never any question about the great centres of civilisation lying anywhere to the west of Constantinople before the Seventeenth Century. If Europe rediscovered the Greeks in the Renaissance and entered a lively period of intellectual and scientific discovery, this was often in the service of Europe’s real distinction: the ceaseless violence and warfare, the evolution of ever better offensive weapons and defensive systems, with the banking systems required to fund and gamble on their incessant warmaking. No region - certainly none of the great empires - has ever failed to produce the most remarkable violence in their turns, but typically - even for the dreaded Mongols - this was accompanied by long periods of stability, wise administration and peaceful trade. Europe, by contrast, never achieved the cohesion necessary to overcome its violent rivalries and competitive drive. It has simply the most persistently and extremely violent history on the planet.
This violence marked European behaviours when the mastery of the oceans and navigation enabled them to open up entirely new trade routes to the old centres of civilisation and introduce the staggering wealth in gold and silver that was taken from central and southern America. Europe’s technology of warfare made possible the most extreme and ruthless exploitation of other peoples, the total destruction of some, the brutalisation of others. This behaviour was bolstered by a selective history which imagines the emergence of European civilisation virtually from the mud in ancient Greece and which discounts utterly the achievements and the legacies of other regions.
This highly polished mythology of Western superiority has not diminished in the modern world, despite talk of globalisation, and Western policies towards the entire region east of the Mediterranean have been built on ignorance, racism and exploitation. The result, which is documented in detail by this book, has been a serious of policy disasters which has brought Europe and especially the USA to a deeply unsustainable situation in which, today, they are using increasing levels of force in the hope of imposing yet more regimes acceptable to the west but which are inherently undemocratic and tyrannical, and which inevitably incite escalating levels of hatred and resistance towards the West. The public-relations claims of promoting human rights, democracy and freedom simply fly in the face of the disgusting evidence, some of which is well presented here. The delusion on which western policy rests is that the countries and the peoples of Asia can only prosper by trading with and servicing the appetites of the west. The reality is very different - arguably it is the opposite. The few centuries of western dominance may indeed be approaching the end.
At the end of a long read, the short final chapter is entitled “conclusions,” and I was tempted to speed read past its potentially tedious lists of cities, natural resources, communication links and emerging associations. What stopped me was a remark that Turkey, after a long and frustrated campaign to join the European Union, may prefer now to join the SCO, a far more promising prospect in which Turkey can expect to enjoy respect as an equal partner and not be patronised as inherently inferior. The SCO - Shanghai Cooperation Organisation - is a Eurasian political, economic and military organisation which was founded in 2001 in Shanghai by the leaders of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. India and Pakistan are expected to join by 2016.
I suddenly recalled the abiding principle that history is always a history of the present. If the moral case set out by Edward Said in Orientalism is not enough to shift Western policy makers, and it is not, then maybe economic self interest will come into play and enforce a sharp change before it is too late. In fact, it seems that many leading corporations are already shifting their operations into the SOC zone, a much wider space than China alone, and factories are falling idle in western cities as a result. As it stands, Europe and the USA are barking up entirely the wrong tree. Before anything can really change, attitudes must change, and this book will hopefully contribute to that long overdue transformation.
“For all their apparent ‘otherness’, however, these lands have always been of pivotal importance in global history one way or another, linking east and west, serving as a melting pot where ideas, customs and languages have jostled with each other from antiquity to today. And today the Silk Roads are rising again - unobserved and overlooked by many. Economists have yet to turn their attention to the riches that lie in or under the soil, beneath the waters or buried in the mountains of the belt linking the Black sea, Asia Minor and the Levant with the Himalayas. Instead they have focused on groups of countries with no historical connections but superficially similar measurable data, like the BRICS (Brazil, russia, India, China and South Africa), often now voguishly replaced by MIST countries (Malaysia, Indonesia, South Korea and Turkey). In fact, it is the true ‘Mediterranean’ - the centre of the world - to which we should be looking. This is no Wild West, no New World waiting to be discovered - but a region and a series of connections re-emerging in front of our eyes.” [p515]
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