The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan: All loud on the Eastern Front

In 1920, HG Wells published A Short History of the World. In it he looked forward to "the great peace to which all history seems to be pointing". In 1976 JM Roberts published The Hutchison History of the World. This was an unembarrassedly Eurocentric outline of the 'Triumph of the West' in which, for example, Africa was almost entirely neglected because it had played so little part in that 'Triumph'. Now, in The Silk Roads Peter Frankopan, a Senior Research Fellow at Oxford, attempts to rethink world history and to relocate the central developments in that history some way east of Europe.