The Silk Road: A New History with Documents

The first edition of this book (without documents) was already a five-star work, so this should get ten or fifteen. It is a really excellent work of history. Dr. Hansen has an incredible level of expertise. I never understand how some people can learn so much in one lifetime--a Buddhist would say she is the reincarnation of an old Silk Road traveler. She also writes very well, making this a "good read" to rival the old accounts by Hedin and Stein that got many of us interested in the Silk Road in the first place. The documents are a fascinating lot, most familiar to Asianists but some rarely published.The book appears to be written to combat a widespread idea that the Silk Road was enormously heavily trafficked, with huge trade directly from China to Rome. I have not encountered this idea (except, more or less, in older popular literature). I'm not sure why it was so worth combatting (no expert has seriously argued the Rome connection for decades), but Dr. Hansen knows far more about such issues than I do. She emphasizes in every chapter that the Silk Road was little trafficked, until I am reminded of John and Charles Wesley's cynical description of the path of wisdom: "a narrow path with here and there a traveler." Admittedly, we are not to imagine their path of error either--"thousands throng together there." But Hansen's book shows that there was in fact quite extensive trade. I think there is a matter of comparison-set here. She seems to be comparing the Silk Road with the I-5 at rush hour. I would tend to compare it with other long-distance trade routes of the same time period. By that comparison, the Silk Road looks pretty good--I expect it was far more traveled than the road from Teotihuacan to Tikal, or from Tiahuanaco to Nazca, or even from Rome to Paris. The point is: an awful lot of stuff, including huge amounts of information, got over that road. Dr. Hansen says rather little about the spread of foods, medicines and medical knowledge, falcons and hunting knowledge, and much else that indicates a fair amount of traffic. That said, this is a great work that every historian should read. It is more thorough and balanced than other recent works.

Beautifully illustrated, including with documents from various peoples and periods along the Silk Road. Will be excellent resource for my courses on Asian history. For use at college as well as HS world history levels. The seller, Medium Rare Books, also packaged this well and came promptly according to my shipping instructions.

Great book. Listen to the podcast on Getty Art and Ideas. Well done.

Excellent scholarship, but not exactly "The Silk Road"; most of it deals specifically with Sinkiang, and leaves out the rest of the route. If you want to know a lot about this one area, this is the book for you.

Bought for a World History class - it was fluid and offered new perspectives.

great

I ordered this for a class and it would've been great if the last 30+ pages weren't missing. This made it impossible to follow along for a good bit of discussion and caused some embarrassment. >:(