First, in wiki checking a few things, I have stumbled across the
Silk Road Foundation Journal... Seems not to have published anything since 2017, but looks like it might have a lot of interesting material.
So. Frankopan. Hmm. I've started listening again and will probably try to do so to the end, but yeah... It's reminding me of a few things. The first problem is that the key bit of the title is 'A new history of the world'... It's central conceit isn't so much that it's a history of the silk roads, but that it's history from the perspective of the silk roads. The second problem is that it fails to even be that.
Currently I'm listening to Arabs, by Tim Mackintosh-Smith. He goes into quite a lot of detail about pre-Islamic Arabs, about the coalescing of different groups, about social change. He talks a lot about language and poetry, and the evolution of Arabic and the strange position of that language as Islam spreads. And he does it using extensive quotes from contemporary Arabic/regional sources. Frankopan in contrast writes broad strokes history. He mentions places and things, he talks about the rise of X king or the fall of Y. He talks about movements of people, but in quite an abstracted sense... Sure, he gives detail sometimes, a quote here and there, but it just feels like he's adding colour.
This leads on to the book's biggest failing. It does the exact thing it's supposedly trying to address. Frankopan is a Byzan... Bytantiumist? Byzantist? His specialism is Byzantium. And by fuck does it show. In the first 4 chapters (which is where I am now) he probably talks about Rome, or the influence of Rome more than he does anything else. He frames it in a way that tries to cling to his idea, e.g expounding the influence of Persia and India on the development of Christianity. But fundamentally he's talking about the development of Christianity. He does, of course, talk about other religions, though I'm finding it hard to recall much detail.
Essentially this is a book about Persia and Byzantium (I haven't got to the bit where Byzantium collapses yet), with a side order of India, a smattering of China and a distinct lack of Turks. He has so far pretty much ignored the Turkic people around the silk road... It may be that I haven't got there yet, but we're on the rise of Islam, so the Gokturks should be around. He also makes the fairly major factual error of lumping the Xiongnu (maybe Turkic, maybe not) in with the Huns... There are reasonable arguments that they're the same, or linked, but everywhere else I've read about this link, the author is cautious. He just flat out says they're the same. Read around a bit and there are other basic errors I wouldn't have noticed, I just picked up on that because I'm interested in the various steppe Empires/people at the moment.
Finally, browsing the odd review, I'm reminded it gets more focussed on western impacts on the Middle East as the timeline progresses. Important history no doubt, but told better by other authors, and making the scope of his work far too wide to deliver something with genuine insights.
So... Maybe as a general history, though it's also imo just not a great book... But I'm on audio, and that doesn't necessarily reflect how it reads in physical form.
but I do like the author's books as a rule
