The New Silk Roads - Peter Frankopan - #108

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Oh, hello, beautiful people of Podcastland. Welcome back to Modern Wisdom. I have some good news. We are rapidly closing in on 1 million total downloads. That will be pretty soon, I think. So we will be doing a couple of special edition videos and potentially some episodes around that as well. I think video guy Dean is planning on putting a bloopers reel out of all the times that we've messed up. Thanks for that, Dean. But on to today's episode, I'm joined by Peter Frankopan, who is the best selling author of The Silk Roads and his new book, The New Silk Roads is the topic of today's discussion, talking about all things Asia. I have been delving in a lot of politics and history and stuff recently, but it's really opening my eyes to how narrow and insulated my world view is and that of a lot of people who are in the West. We just believe that what's going on with us is most important and everybody else is equally bothered by it. But as Peter explains today, the fact that Brexit is a little bit of a mess and our parliament's not really too sure about what's going on probably doesn't matter that much if you live in Shanghai or Cape Town. So yeah, hopefully these podcasts will give you a little bit more perspective and maybe allow you to feel less embroiled and less concerned about exactly what's going on. You have a little bit more of a global view of things you realise that we're all heading in the right direction. For now, please welcome Peter Frankopan.
I am joined by Professor of Global History at Oxford and Director at the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research, Peter Frankopan. Peter, welcome to the show.

**Peter Frankopan** (2:11)
Hi there.

**Chris Williamson** (2:12)
Very good to have you here. I am holding a copy of The New Silk Roads. Many of the listeners will be familiar with your first book, Sunday Times Best Seller. And we got a new one now, talking to all things China and Asia and stuff in an area of the world that we never really know much about.

**Peter Frankopan** (2:28)
Well, I wrote a first book about, I mean, I'm interested in all parts of history. I'm interested in looking as far and as wide as possible. But when I was a young boy at school, I got fed the same stuff year after year after year. I got told about Henry VIII and his wives, and about the First World War and the awfulness of the trenches, and about how bad Hitler was, and all of that is important that we learn about. But I never learned about anything else. Apart from that, I never heard the words Ottoman Empire or Byzantines. I heard a little bit about Russia, but not a great deal about the Russian Revolution, but I couldn't understand why. I'm not older than you, Chris. I couldn't understand why people were trying to point nuclear weapons at us. We had drills once a month at my school on a Friday at two o'clock to hide under our desks. I watched the news growing up, and I heard about the war on genocide in Cambodia, about China changing, and then Tiananmen Square when I was 18
I was very interested about why was it that these parts of the world, like as you just said, we never spent any time talking about. I guess there are two different questions, two different reasons for the subjects I'm interested in. It's first, well, what is interesting in these countries? What did happen that was important and interesting? What are the stories that are important and interesting for people my age or younger than me, older than me in other countries? But also, how have we managed to write our own history about current affairs too, where the only thing that matters is ourselves?
Today, we're talking on a day where we had lots of dramatic developments about our political system here in Britain, about prorogation, the very unusual word about Parliament being pushed to one side. I understand that really matters, what happens in Britain and how we get our relationship with Europe right. But for 99 percent of the world's population, it really doesn't matter. If you're in downtown Shanghai tonight, or in Mumbai, or in Cape Town, or in Sao Paolo, or Mexico City, or in Lagos, the irrelevance of what a bunch of men and women are doing in Parliament in London, it's important to remind ourselves of that because we are living in a world that's changing very fast. I sometimes think that we have this very imperial way of looking at our own importance. I suppose it's fair to say, any country, you look at yourself first. Of course, you study your own heroes, your own history, your own problems about politics and economy and so on. But in that big picture, 100 years ago, it mattered a lot to the rest of the world. A quarter of the world's population in 1914 owned their allegiance or notional allegiance, I should say, to the King of England. That world, unless I missed something, really has gone. We've got great footballers, we've got lots of stuff in this country that we should be proud of, our business, our museums, our scholarship and so on. But it's that age where men and women in London shape the world is over. And in a way, today, having been out on the road and driving, being in the car and listening to the radio, hour after hour after hour, the only thing that's been spoken about has been about Brexit and about Westminster politics. And I just think that sometimes you could be so worried about what's going on in your own life that you can forget about the bigger picture. And so my books, I try to put context into how things have happened in the past, what's going on in the future, and trying to signal in this new book about a little bit more what's coming towards us too.