One of my favourite maps of medieval Asia traces the routes taken by three travellers — Giovanni da Pian del Carpini, William of Rubruck and Marco Polo — in the 13th century. Printed in William Shepherd’s historical atlas, originally published in the 1920s, it captures the spirit of an interconnected world as travellers and traders made their way from Muscovy (Moscow) to Peking (Beijing) via Turkestan (an area that included what is now Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan), roaming from Aden via Gujarat and Calicut to Cambodia and Japan too.
For years, that history of confluences and conversations between east and west seemed to be half-forgotten; it was certainly under-represented on bookshelves and in academic circles, particularly in Europe and North America. But that’s changing as a clutch of writers and popular historians argue that the ancient and medieval world were more closely linked than we used to think.
Taken together, these books are bringing Asia to the centre of the map of global history. The epigraph to Sathnam Sanghera’s recent Empireworld comes from Whiskey Sisodia, a character in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses : “The trouble with the Engenglish is that their hiss hiss history happened overseas, so they dodo don’t know what it means.” As is often pointed out, Asia has 30 per cent of the world’s land area and roughly 60 per cent of its population.
The Golden Road , a new book by William Dalrymple coming out in September, focuses on the ancient maritime highway linking the Roman empire and India in the 1st and 2nd century CE through the Red Sea. He sees the Golden Road as an early example of how cultural influence and soft power spread from “the Indosphere” to Eurasia, via monks, merchants, artists, astronomers and scientists, creating “an empire of ideas”.
Joya Chatterji’s Shadows at Noon , which last month joined the inaugural Women’s Prize non-fiction longlist, charts the subcontinent’s fortunes from the days of the British Raj through independence, Partition and beyond, mapping deep connections between the modern nations of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, despite their political differences. In the introduction, Chatterji explains why she uses the phrase “the South Asian twentieth century” — because this era is more than “the American century”, no matter how much we may be used to that phrase.
If, as Rudyard Kipling wrote, ‘East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet’, these books disrupt that view, pointing us to a more intermingled world
And the classical archaeologist Naoíse Mac Sweeney argues in her 2023 book, The West: A New History Of An Old Idea , that many now accept the cross-fertilisation of “western” and “non-Western” cultures happened throughout human history. If, as Rudyard Kipling wrote, “East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet” — a common belief at the time — these books disrupt that view, pointing us to a more intermingled world.
A few weeks back, I had the pleasure of listening to Peter Frankopan, British historian and author of The Silk Roads and The Earth Transformed . He told an overflowing crowd at Adelaide Writers’ Week about the situation in UK and North American academia three decades ago, when, in his estimation, about 90 per cent of history faculties focused only on the west, or on western encounters with other countries — “a lack of curiosities”, in his striking phrase. That indifference has a high cost. As Frankopan has noted elsewhere, “people’s voices remain unheard, their stories untold”.
For the many readers like me who grew up in former colonies, much of this elicits a wry smile — we were taught Shakespeare alongside Kalidasa and Wole Soyinka, and history forced us to learn about the west, as Chatterji notes, even if this was not reciprocal.
Over the past decade, many scholars and universities in the UK and US have acknowledged the need to decolonise history. Often unfairly derided as a tedious exercise in political correctness, it can lead to so much more — an expansion of our understanding of ancient and modern human history that reveals links between countries within and beyond Asia, as well as exchanges between great civilisations in pre-colonial times. Reading this fresh wave of histories feels like opening a door to a much richer sense of the past.
Perhaps this spate of historical books will also embrace Africa in time — few books have done justice to its rich, influential and ancient history. If a lack of curiosities, to borrow Frankopan’s phrase, has narrowed our worldview, then a shift in attention could give us a far more substantial sense of our shared past.
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This column has been amended to explain that Turkestan was a territory that covered modern-day Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and not Turkey as originally stated