A Silk Road Renaissance
archaeology.org
archaeology.org
In the latest news on the Silk Road, Azerbaijan, after its victorious war over Armenia, secured a direct land transport corridor through Armenian territory to its enclave of Nakhchivan and further to Turkey. https://menafn.com/1101103191/Another-important-issue-is-tha...
Compare that to shipping costs for Amazon from China. Chinese prices are usually 10x lower than European prices. E.g to make a good ebike you spend €250 on Aliexpress (€50 without battery), whilst in Europe you spend €2500 for a bad ebike.
Both Europe and China have spent tons into improved shipping infrastructure, eg. the new specialized Leipzig airport, Shenzhen, Shanghai.
That's the new Silk Road, not some ship or train lines, which need weeks. Shipping is also important of course. But land corridors are slow, insecure and limited.
I slogged through Raoul McLaughlin's "The Roman Empire & the Silk Routes" because it's online reviews were glowing for silk road history told with decent story telling. I still found it startlingly dry, it felt like a demonstration of how much research he did rather than a real narrative arc.
Tangentially I read half of it aloud to my little kids for bedtime, they loved the crazy names of faraway fantastical sounding places - it's about all that really redeemed it experientially. YMMV, apparently.
Prof. Frankopan definitely gives a shout-out to the Sogdians, though he doesn't spend much time on it.
I knew about these folks, but really only as boring names in a history book.
This adds a lot more color to their story.
It's interesting to think that these documents were written long before paper even arrived in Europe.