My most important/favorite history book that I own, the Silk Road
- jamessterrett48
- Dec 8, 2025
- 3 min read
The Silk Road
The most important book in my library is The Silk Roads A New History of the World. I think it is an incredibly well researched, written organized book that is explained well enough that a high schooler who wanted to read it could read it. I would say it is one of the top 5 most important secondary and tertiary history books that I have ever read.
The book that I recommend the most, which is an important one and is my favorite, is The Silk Road: A New History of the World. The second most important book is Guns, Germs, and Steel. The Silk Road tells the story of silk, the Silk Road, and the trade between China and Europe, which brought immense wealth to China, the Middle East, and India. The Silk Road was a trade route between China, through the Middle East, all the way to Europe. It brought immense wealth to Egypt, China, India, the Mongol Empire, Persia, and the Ottomans.
The book talks about the history of the Silk Road. The Silk Road was founded by the large and prominent empire, the Persians. The Persians founded the Silk Road in the 6th century BC. The Silk Road was incredibly important and led to immense wealth for Central Asia. The main goods traded were Silk to Europe and gold and silver to Asia. Silk was incredibly valuable in the Roman Empire. However, the Roman Empire viewed the color purple as only for royalty/and the emperor’s circle. Purple could only be worn by the emperor in ancient Rome because it was an incredibly hard-to-create, rare, and expensive color. Purple was created by crushing a very specific, rare, and special seashell.
I highly recommend this book, and it’s one of my favorites because it covers one of the most game-changing/important/powerful pieces of history. It also covers history from 650 BC to today in a critical piece that changed the world and dictated most of ancient history. It still exists in the modern day. The Silk Road is still relevant to the modern-day world. The Silk Road still exists through large roads that cover all of China, India, and the Middle East. It is considered the “Modern Day Silk Road.” The “Modern Day Silk Road is built by roads, trains, ships, and planes that carry goods to Europe from China, through the Middle East.
The Silk Road existed because silk was an extremely valuable commodity during the times of the Romans through the time of the Renaissance. It was so valuable that European traders exchanged gold and silver in bulk to buy silk, an extremely light commodity. The European aristocracy valued silk highly as a high-quality, light, and comfortable fabric that improved their lives, a rarity for most clothes outside of aesthetics.
The Silk Road book explains important pieces of information; it is very helpful, and it also explains one of the key changes in the trajectory of history. Finally, it explains how the world works and functions through the story of one piece of the world. It finally intersects with much history at different points. This is one of the last books in my room that I would not want to keep anymore. The author is Peter Frankopan. It is an international bestseller. It was published in 2015 by a sector of Penguin Books (called Vintage Books).
The link to the book is here; I do not earn a commission.
Comments