Spectator Books: geopolitics and the falcon-shaped airport in Turkmenistan
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The Spectator
4.4 • 785 Ratings
🗓️ 21 November 2018
⏱️ 37 minutes
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Summary
In this week's books podcast Sam talks to Oxford's Professor of Global History Peter Frankopan about his follow-up to his bestselling history The Silk Roads. In The New Silk Roads, Peter brings his story up to date, and argues that with our Trump and Brexit obsessions, and a divided and fissiparous West still obsessed with itself, we are missing the bigger picture of what's going on in the world today. Once again, the Silk Roads -- those lines of connection between East and West running through what he calls the "heart of the world" -- are where the action is. In our conversation we look at the rise of China and asks what its vast "Belt and Road" programme means for the future shape of the world, at the deeply complex relations between the Gulf states and the nations with interests in them, at the forces at work in India, Pakistan and Iran -- and why our school curricula need to go a bit beyond the old diet of Black Death, Mary Seacole and the Second World War. Plus, Peter's (almost) diplomatic about the enduring madness of Turkmenistan.
Presented by Sam Leith.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Spectator Radio and you're listening to The Books Podcast with Sam Leith. |
| 0:11.0 | Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Books podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor for The Spectator and this week I'm joined by Oxford's Global Professor of History, Peter Frankapan, who a couple of years ago published |
| 0:22.1 | the Silk Roads, which was a whole global history. And he's now published a sort of companion |
| 0:28.7 | volume called The New Silk Roads. Now, Peter, apart from the fact that your first book sold |
| 0:33.2 | you know gazillions of copies, which obviously provides a very good reason for providing a follow-up. |
| 0:38.7 | There must have been other reasons you wanted to provide a follow-up for that book. |
| 0:42.3 | I think it's the other way around. I think my instinct was having Silk Rose done so well. |
| 0:47.3 | I sort of constantly still feel that my job is to go and sit in the corner somewhere and let somebody else sing the songs. |
| 0:54.1 | But I think it's an amazing thing being a historian. sit in the corner somewhere and let somebody else sing the songs. |
| 1:00.4 | But I think it's an amazing thing being a historian where suddenly a book catches a wave. |
| 1:04.5 | And I was very lucky when Silk Wards came out first that it was very generously reviewed. |
| 1:11.6 | But then people are really engaged, I think, at the moment in the world of today of trying to work out what's happening in this time of transition, where there are so many different strands with Brexit and Trump, |
| 1:16.1 | the rise of China, what's going with Russia, Iran and so on. And so I had been perfectly happy |
| 1:21.6 | minding my own business. I've got to, you know, trying to work on a big future project. Then I |
| 1:26.0 | was speaking to my editor about bringing the Silk |
| 1:29.1 | Rhodes up to date and having a new last chapter. And so the original plan had been to write |
| 1:33.0 | sort of another 10 pages that you could, we stick on the end, that explained what's happened |
| 1:38.3 | in the last three or four years. And the problem with that, I suppose, was on the first hand. |
| 1:43.2 | I didn't feel it was quite right that people who had already bought a copy the Silk Roads |
| 1:46.4 | would have to buy another one to just find out another 2,000 or 3,000 words. |
| 1:51.6 | But there's also quite a lot that's been going on in the last, well, 5, 10, 15, 20 years |
| 1:56.3 | that writing something longer and an extended essay I thought was worthwhile doing. |
... |
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