The Silk Roads: A New History of the World
Peter Frankopan in conversation with David McWilliams
For centuries, fame and fortune was to be found in the west, in the New World of the Americas. Today, the east is taking centre stage in international politics, commerce and culture, shaping the modern world. This region, the true centre of the earth, is obscure to many in the west and yet this is where civilization itself began, where the world’s great religions were born and took root. The Silk Roads linked continents and oceans together. Along them flowed ideas, goods, disease and death. This was where empires were won – and where they were lost. As a new era emerges, the patterns of exchange are mirroring those that have criss-crossed Asia for millennia. The Silk Roads are rising again.
Dr. Peter Frankopan is Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford and Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research. David McWilliams is an economist, author and broadcaster.
Recorded at Printworks, Dublin Castle on 26 September 2015.