Reimagining the Silk Roads: an introduction

Since the third millennium BCE, populations have transversed the many routes that make up the silk roads spanning Eurasia. Although the term ‘Silk Road’ coined in the late nineteenth century fills the popular imagination with visions of an almost modern road of camel caravans and merchants, the road was anything but that. The silk roads were a network of connections that fanned out across deserts, mountains, and grasslands from Japan to the Mediterranean, Africa, and Scandinavia. And not just terrestrial connections, but sea routes too, from the East African coast, the Persian Gulf and Red Sea across the Indian Ocean to Southeast Asia, China, Korea, and Japan. Critical scholarship in the recent decades has questioned the term, because it arguably privileges the people from literate agrarian empires over the nomadic communities of the vastness in between, and because it has been co-opted by the Chinese government. These critiques inspire the organisation of this volume to reimagine the silk roads. We argue that the term is useful as a concept to frame the interactions that took place resulting from trade, conquests, diplomacy, migrations, and pilgrimages over millennia.