the Silk Road: How States Built and Broke Trade Routes of Asia for Two Thousand Years

The Silk Road was never a road, and for most of its history silk was not its most valuable cargo. What existed instead was a chain of short hauls between oasis towns and river valleys, each leg run by traders who knew that one stretch of country and its water, its officials, and its prices, and who handed the goods on to someone else waiting at the other end. This book follows that chain from the Han dynasty's push into Central Asia in the second century BCE to the arrival of steamships and railways in the nineteenth, and argues that its health depended less on merchant enterprise than on the price of protection: garrisons, way stations, courts, and the calculation of whichever state controlled the ground. When protection became cheap enough, goods moved and states collected tax and tribute on them. When it did not, the traffic contracted to whatever a private network could defend on its own.Drawing on Han frontier paperwork, Sogdian merchant letters, Tang customs records, and the manuscripts sealed in a cave at Dunhuang for nine centuries, the book reconstructs what actually crossed this ground: horses first by value, then paper, glass, silver, furs, and people, alongside the textiles that gave the routes their name. It traces the rise and interruption of successive systems under the Han, the Tang, the Mongols, and the early modern empires of Iran, Russia, and China, and shows why the routes did not close in 1500 but persisted, in altered form, for four more centuries before steam and rail finally ended them. The name itself, coined by a German geographer in 1877 to answer one narrow question about the second century, is examined here as part of the history rather than assumed as its subject.A history of the states that made long-distance trade across Asia possible, and of what that trade actually cost.