Review | History of the Silk Road in bite-sized pieces, lavishly illustrated, has its pros and cons, but the whole is at least the sum of its parts

Silk Roads: People, Cultures, Landscapes is a wonderful addition to the literature on what is a huge subject – and rather like an old-fashioned encyclopaedia

Some of its many short essays cover too much ground in too few words, however tantalising they may be. Overall, this a book to experience rather than read

Reading Time:3 minutes

Silk Roads: Peoples, Cultures, Landscapes is a thorough look at what connected people and places along the famous trade routes through Central Asia. Photo: Thames and Hudson

Published: 12:00pm, 7 Dec 2019Updated: 5:23pm, 8 Dec 2019

Silk Roads: Peoples, Cultures, Landscapes by Susan Whitfield, Thames and Hudson/University of California Press, 4/5 stars

Silk Roads is encyclopedic in scope and structure, and made up of several dozen short essays by almost as many different authors – each lavishly illustrated with indescribable photos of objects and places.

The Silk Road is, as a term, a modern (late 19th-century) construction. Like the Holy Roman Empire – which was famously neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire – the Silk Road was not a road, not unitary and not confined to (or even focused on) silk.

Editor Susan Whitfield, who has passed this way before, uses (as do others) the plural, which is somewhat less inaccurate – if not just as vague.

A spread from the Silk Roads book. Photo: Thames and Hudson

However, like other such anachronistic terms like the “Middle Ages” and “Byzantine Empire”, the Silk Road(s) has proven useful. It is usually clear what is being referred to – the places between classical civilisations and a focus on what connects, rather than what separates.