Download or read book Beyond the Silk Roads written by Magnus Marsden and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-09 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Small-scale traders play a crucial role in forging Asian connectivity, forming networks and informal institutions separate from those driven by nation-states, such as China's Belt and Road Initiative. This ambitious study provides a unique insight into the lives of the mobile traders from Afghanistan who traverse Eurasia. Reflecting on over a decade of intensive ethnographic fieldwork, Magnus Marsden introduces readers to a dynamic yet historically durable universe of commercial and cultural connections. Through an exploration of the traders' networks, cultural and religious identities, as well as the nodes in which they operate, Marsden emphasises their ability to navigate Eurasia's geopolitical tensions and to forge transregional routes that channel significant flows of people, resources, and ideas. Beyond the Silk Roads will interest those seeking to understand contemporary iterations of the Silk Road within the context of geopolitics in the region. This title is also available as Open Access.
Download or read book Beyond the Silk and Book Roads written by Michelle C. Wang and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-11-27 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Silk Road studies has often treated material artifacts and manuscripts separately. This interdisciplinary volume expands the scope of transcultural transmission, questions what constituted a “book,” and explores networks of circulation shared by material artifacts and manuscripts. Featuring new research in English by international scholars in Buddhist studies, art history, and literary studies, the essays in Beyond the Silk and Book Roads chart new and exciting directions in Silk Road studies. Contributors are: Ge Jiyong, George A. Keyworth, Ding Li, Ryan Richard Overbey, Hao Chunwen, Wu Shaowei, Liu Yi, Lan Wu, Sha Wutian, Michelle C. Wang, and Stephen Roddy.
Download or read book Mapping the Silk Road written by Kenneth Nebenzahl and published by Phaidon. This book was released on 2004-11 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nebenzahl documents the mapping and discovery of West Asia and the trade routes of the Silk Road. The book includes rare maps spanning 2,000 years of cartographic history.
Download or read book Journeys on the Silk Road written by Joyce Morgan and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2012-08-22 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When a Chinese monk broke into a hidden cave in 1900, he uncovered one of the world’s great literary secrets: a time capsule from the ancient Silk Road. Inside, scrolls were piled from floor to ceiling, undisturbed for a thousand years. The gem within was the Diamond Sutra of AD 868. This key Buddhist teaching, made 500 years before Gutenberg inked his press, is the world’s oldest printed book. The Silk Road once linked China with the Mediterranean. It conveyed merchants, pilgrims and ideas. But its cultures and oases were swallowed by shifting sands. Central to the Silk Road’s rediscovery was a man named Aurel Stein, a Hungarian-born scholar and archaeologist employed by the British service. Undaunted by the vast Gobi Desert, Stein crossed thousands of desolate miles with his fox terrier Dash. Stein met the Chinese monk and secured the Diamond Sutra and much more. The scroll’s journey—by camel through arid desert, by boat to London’s curious scholars, by train to evade the bombs of World War II—merges an explorer’s adventures, political intrigue, and continued controversy. The Diamond Sutra has inspired Jack Kerouac and the Dalai Lama. Its journey has coincided with the growing appeal of Buddhism in the West. As the Gutenberg Age cedes to the Google Age, the survival of the Silk Road’s greatest treasure is testament to the endurance of the written word.
Download or read book The Silk Road written by Kathryn Davis and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A spellbinding novel about transience and mortality, by one of the most original voices in American literature The Silk Road begins on a mat in yoga class, deep within a labyrinth on a settlement somewhere in the icy north, under the canny guidance of Jee Moon. When someone fails to arise from corpse pose, the Astronomer, the Archivist, the Botanist, the Keeper, the Topologist, the Geographer, the Iceman, and the Cook remember the paths that brought them there—paths on which they still seem to be traveling. The Silk Road also begins in rivalrous skirmishing for favor, in the protected Eden of childhood, and it ends in the harrowing democracy of mortality, in sickness and loss and death. Kathryn Davis’s sleight of hand brings the past, present, and future forward into brilliant coexistence; in an endlessly shifting landscape, her characters make their way through ruptures, grief, and apocalypse, from existence to nonexistence, from embodiment to pure spirit. Since the beginning of her extraordinary career, Davis has been fascinated by journeys. Her books have been shaped around road trips, walking tours, hegiras, exiles: and now, in this triumphant novel, a pilgrimage. The Silk Road is her most explicitly allegorical novel and also her most profound vehicle; supple and mesmerizing, the journey here is not undertaken by a single protagonist but by a community of separate souls—a family, a yoga class, a generation. Its revelations are ravishing and desolating.
Download or read book The Silk Roads written by Geordie Torr and published by Arcturus Publishing. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Take an intrepid journey through the history of the Silk Roads with this brilliant reference book. Traversing snowy mountain passes, vast, forbidding deserts and stormy seas, these ancient trade routes were about much more than the movement of goods, they paved the way for an unprecedented period of cultural exchange, diplomacy and conflict creating a legacy that continues to affect global geopolitics in the 21st century. Forged over millennia through a desire for enterprise, the Silk Roads have had an profound influence on Eurasia and beyond, connecting cultures, languages, customs and religions. And with China now working to reopen this ancient trade network, the time is right to shine a new light on its history and impact. This edition has been updated with an expanded chapter on China's efforts to reopen this ancient trade network through the Belt and Road Initiative and the many impacts it has had along the way, from its ambitious infrastructure projects to new cities emerging along its route to the growth of a digital silk road, Geordie Torr examines the profound impacts of the revival of the world's greatest trading route. With helpful timelines and useful information boxes, The Silk Roads gives you everything you need to master the history of this world-changing region.
Download or read book American Kingpin written by Nick Bilton and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-05-02 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. The unbelievable true story of the man who built a billion-dollar online drug empire from his bedroom—and almost got away with it In 2011, a twenty-six-year-old libertarian programmer named Ross Ulbricht launched the ultimate free market: the Silk Road, a clandestine Web site hosted on the Dark Web where anyone could trade anything—drugs, hacking software, forged passports, counterfeit cash, poisons—free of the government’s watchful eye. It wasn’t long before the media got wind of the new Web site where anyone—not just teenagers and weed dealers but terrorists and black hat hackers—could buy and sell contraband detection-free. Spurred by a public outcry, the federal government launched an epic two-year manhunt for the site’s elusive proprietor, with no leads, no witnesses, and no clear jurisdiction. All the investigators knew was that whoever was running the site called himself the Dread Pirate Roberts. The Silk Road quickly ballooned into $1.2 billion enterprise, and Ross embraced his new role as kingpin. He enlisted a loyal crew of allies in high and low places, all as addicted to the danger and thrill of running an illegal marketplace as their customers were to the heroin they sold. Through his network he got wind of the target on his back and took drastic steps to protect himself—including ordering a hit on a former employee. As Ross made plans to disappear forever, the Feds raced against the clock to catch a man they weren’t sure even existed, searching for a needle in the haystack of the global Internet. Drawing on exclusive access to key players and two billion digital words and images Ross left behind, Vanity Fair correspondent and New York Times bestselling author Nick Bilton offers a tale filled with twists and turns, lucky breaks and unbelievable close calls. It’s a story of the boy next door’s ambition gone criminal, spurred on by the clash between the new world of libertarian-leaning, anonymous, decentralized Web advocates and the old world of government control, order, and the rule of law. Filled with unforgettable characters and capped by an astonishing climax, American Kingpin might be dismissed as too outrageous for fiction. But it’s all too real.
Download or read book The Silk Roads written by Peter Frankopan and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2016-02-16 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • Far more than a history of the Silk Roads, this book is truly a revelatory new history of the world, promising to destabilize notions of where we come from and where we are headed next. "A rare book that makes you question your assumptions about the world.” —The Wall Street Journal From the Middle East and its political instability to China and its economic rise, the vast region stretching eastward from the Balkans across the steppe and South Asia has been thrust into the global spotlight in recent years. Frankopan teaches us that to understand what is at stake for the cities and nations built on these intricate trade routes, we must first understand their astounding pasts. Frankopan realigns our understanding of the world, pointing us eastward. It was on the Silk Roads that East and West first encountered each other through trade and conquest, leading to the spread of ideas, cultures and religions. From the rise and fall of empires to the spread of Buddhism and the advent of Christianity and Islam, right up to the great wars of the twentieth century—this book shows how the fate of the West has always been inextricably linked to the East. Also available: The New Silk Roads, a timely exploration of the dramatic and profound changes our world is undergoing right now—as seen from the perspective of the rising powers of the East.
Download or read book The Silk Road and Beyond written by Ivor Whitall and published by Fox Chapel Publishing. This book was released on 2021-02-01 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: True accounts of one man’s long-distance trucking career that began in the late 1960s, these adventurous anecdotes are told by one of the first pioneers in long-distance trucking to the Middle East, Ivor Whittall. From traveling overseas to Kuwait, driving the desert trek between Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and surviving the infamously dangerous (and sometimes deadly) Tahir Pass in Eastern Turkey that has claimed the lives of truckers with its haphazard landslides and avalanches and tricky mountainous terrain, readers get a driver’s seat perspective to Whittall’s daring career. With 72 contemporary color photos of trucks, drivers, passports, visas, and custom forms, readers will be thrust into what it was like being a long-distance trucker in the 1970s. Full of disastrous near misses, border control mishaps, intense home sickness, mechanical failures, cultural misunderstandings, and so much more, this book will urge you to buckle up.
Download or read book The Silk Road and Beyond written by Iftikhar H. Malik and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-07 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Silk Road and Beyond attempts to capture lived realities across Central Asia, Iran, Turkey, Spain, Italy, Morocco, Finland, Britain, USA, Palestine, Switzerland, Finland, and the subcontinent. It also aims at initiating readers into encountering Muslim heritage across the four continents where cultures share commonalities beyond the narrowly defined premise of conflicts. This book is an effort to capture history, literature, mobility, crafts, architectural traditions, and cultural vistas by focusing on diverse Muslim individuals, communities, cities, and their edifices. It attempts to reconstruct deeper and munificent aspects of Muslim histories and lived experience that often stay ignored by the writers and travellers. Normative accounts of cities such as Bukhara, Jerusalem, Isfahan, Fes, Samarkand, Granada, Palermo, Cordova, or Konya may lifelessly posit them as sheer tourist destinations, ignoring their cultural and historical depth. Written in an autobiographical genre, this book benefits from a 40-year-long exposure and encounters with the vibrant lives across the four continents as experienced by a curious Muslim academic at different stages of his life. The reader can explore and relish these predominantly Muslim locales along with a frequent exposure to r socio-intellectual institutions in Europe and the United States.
Download or read book Traveling the Silk Road written by Mark Norell and published by Sterling Signature. This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An elegantly, lavishly illustrated history of the legendary Silk Road and the cultural pathway it blazed for the modern world. Spanning centuries of history, this engrossing book--created in conjunction with the world-famous American Museum of Natural History--takes an epic journey to major stops in China, Uzbekistan, Iraq, and beyond. Not only did people from many lands trade their goods along this incredible network of routes, they also exchanged their languages, religions, art, and technology in what can be seen as man's first engagement in globalization."
Download or read book Shadow of the Silk Road written by Colin Thubron and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shadow of the Silk Road records a journey along the greatest land route on earth. Out of the heart of China into the mountains of Central Asia, across northern Afghanistan and the plains of Iran and into Kurdish Turkey, Colin Thubron covers some seven thousand miles in eight months. Making his way by local bus, truck, car, donkey cart and camel, he travels from the tomb of the Yellow Emperor, the mythic progenitor of the Chinese people, to the ancient port of Antioch—in perhaps the most difficult and ambitious journey he has undertaken in forty years of travel. The Silk Road is a huge network of arteries splitting and converging across the breadth of Asia. To travel it is to trace the passage not only of trade and armies but also of ideas, religions and inventions. But alongside this rich and astonishing past, Shadow of the Silk Road is also about Asia today: a continent of upheaval. One of the trademarks of Colin Thubron's travel writing is the beauty of his prose; another is his gift for talking to people and getting them to talk to him. Shadow of the Silk Road encounters Islamic countries in many forms. It is about changes in China, transformed since the Cultural Revolution. It is about false nationalisms and the world's discontented margins, where the true boundaries are not political borders but the frontiers of tribe, ethnicity, language and religion. It is a magnificent and important account of an ancient world in modern ferment.
Download or read book The Silk Road A Very Short Introduction written by James A. Millward and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-10 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The phrase "silk road" evokes vivid scenes of merchants leading camel caravans across vast stretches to trade exotic goods in glittering Oriental bazaars, of pilgrims braving bandits and frozen mountain passes to spread their faith across Asia. Looking at the reality behind these images, this Very Short Introduction illuminates the historical background against which the silk road flourished, shedding light on the importance of old-world cultural exchange to Eurasian and world history. On the one hand, historian James A. Millward treats the silk road broadly, to stand in for the cross-cultural communication between peoples across the Eurasian continent since at least the Neolithic era. On the other, he highlights specific examples of goods and ideas exchanged between the Mediterranean, Persia, India, and China, along with the significance of these exchanges. While including silks, spices, and travelers' tales of colorful locales, the book explains the dynamics of Central Eurasian history that promoted Silk Road interactions--especially the role of nomad empires--highlighting the importance of the biological, technological, artistic, intellectual, and religious interchanges across the continent. Millward shows that these exchanges had a profound effect on the old world that was akin to, if not on the scale of, modern globalization. He also disputes the idea that the silk road declined after the collapse of the Mongol empire or the opening of direct sea routes from Europe to Asia, showing how silk road phenomena continued through the early modern and modern expansion of the Russian and Chinese states across Central Asia. Millward concludes that the idea of the silk road has remained powerful, not only as a popular name for boutiques and restaurants, but also in modern politics and diplomacy, such as U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton's "Silk Road Initiative" for India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.
Download or read book Life Along the Silk Road written by Susan Whitfield and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Silk Road was the most traveled trade route for over 1,000 years until it was eclipsed by maritime trade. Whitfield presents composite stories of merchants, soldiers, artists, and princesses who traveled the route, and presents its history through their personal experiences.
Download or read book Geocultural Power written by Tim Winter and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-09-30 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Launched in 2013, China's Belt and Road Initiative is forging connections in infrastructure, trade, energy, finance, tourism, and culture across Eurasia and Africa. This extraordinarily ambitious strategy places China at the center of a geography of overland and maritime connectivity stretching across more than sixty countries and incorporating almost two-thirds of the world’s population. But what does it mean to revive the Silk Roads for the twenty-first century? Geocultural Power explores this question by considering how China is couching its strategy for building trade, foreign relations, and energy and political security in an evocative topography of history. Until now Belt and Road has been discussed as a geopolitical and geoeconomic project. This book introduces geocultural power to the analysis of international affairs. Tim Winter highlights how many countries—including Iran, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, and others—are revisiting their histories to find points of diplomatic and cultural connection. Through the revived Silk Roads, China becomes the new author of Eurasian history and the architect of the bridge between East and West. In a diplomatic dance of forgetting, episodes of violence, invasion, and bloodshed are left behind for a language of history and heritage that crosses borders in ways that further the trade ambitions of an increasingly networked China-driven economy.
Download or read book Beyond That Last Blue Mountain written by Harriet Sandys and published by . This book was released on 2020-02-20 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Silk weaving in Afghanistan, bartering in Peshawar and snipers in Bosnia, Harriet Sandys reveals her remarkable travels in her memoir, Beyond that Last Blue Mountain
Download or read book The Silk Road written by Valerie Hansen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Silk Road is as iconic in world history as the Colossus of Rhodes or the Suez Canal. But what was it, exactly? It conjures up a hazy image of a caravan of camels laden with silk on a dusty desert track, reaching from China to Rome. The reality was different--and far more interesting--as revealed in this new history. In The Silk Road, Valerie Hansen describes the remarkable archeological finds that revolutionize our understanding of these trade routes. For centuries, key records remained hidden--sometimes deliberately buried by bureaucrats for safe keeping. But the sands of the Taklamakan Desert have revealed fascinating material, sometimes preserved by illiterate locals who recycled official documents to make insoles for shoes or garments for the dead. Hansen explores seven oases along the road, from Xi'an to Samarkand, where merchants, envoys, pilgrims, and travelers mixed in cosmopolitan communities, tolerant of religions from Buddhism to Zoroastrianism. There was no single, continuous road, but a chain of markets that traded between east and west. China and the Roman Empire had very little direct trade. China's main partners were the peoples of modern-day Iran, whose tombs in China reveal much about their Zoroastrian beliefs. Silk was not the most important good on the road; paper, invented in China before Julius Caesar was born, had a bigger impact in Europe, while metals, spices, and glass were just as important as silk. Perhaps most significant of all was the road's transmission of ideas, technologies, and artistic motifs. The Silk Road is a fascinating story of archeological discovery, cultural transmission, and the intricate chains across Central Asia and China.
