Peter Frankopan is a writer and historian whose foremost desire is to uncover the hidden links in history that bind peoples, nations, and events together. Despite having penned several positively received works since 2012, he continues to be enthralled by the relationships that define the past as well as the modern world, and he considers himself a student of the various sciences that allow a deeper understanding of some of the planet’s most enduring mysteries. He is also adamant that history is worth exploring for its own sake instead of only being exploited for the signposts it can provide.
Bringing a fresh perspective to the Asian continent with his 2015 book The Silk Roads: A New History of the World and its 2018 followup The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World, which both explore how trade influences the development of civilization, Frankopan’s fascination with humanity’s impact also led him to write 2023’s The Earth Transformed: An Untold History, which focuses on the link between natural events and human societal change. His advice to new historians, shared during an interview held amidst the Galle Literary Festival 2025, is to keep their innate appreciation of history alive as they chart such waters in their future works.
What inspired you to write The Silk Roads and to take such a global approach to history?
I did a paper on the Byzantine Empire in my last year as a student, and in the first lecture I heard, my professor started explaining the connections between Constantinople and Scandinavia, Iceland, Spain, North Africa, the Middle East, Russia, Kiev, Ukraine, Central Asia, China, and more.
I thought: this is a whole world I’d never really heard of before, how have I missed this? How has it never come up in anything that I’ve ever been taught before?
Since then, I’ve worked on connected histories, linking different parts of Asia together, and Asia is a big continent for many, many different people—different cultures, different views, norms, societies, and so on, and it has also changed over time. By the time I was approaching my 40th birthday, I knew I wanted to do something ambitious and brave. I thought I’d love to write a connected history that explains people’s cultures, histories of cities, of nomadic peoples, of forest peoples.
With The Silk Road, and the way the world was changing, it felt like there was something interesting to say. It took me about five or six years to write. I had no expectations that people would read it, so I didn’t mind. I wasn’t trying to make it a bestseller, but I’m very proud of it as a work of scholarship, and I’m very proud of it as a work of literature. Being smart is one thing, but explaining stories is also important.
It came out at a time when China had just announced the Belt and Road Initiative. Here in Sri Lanka, there are complicated relationships with Beijing. Iraq and Afghanistan were obviously a problem, Iran was being very aggressive, Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, India was just coming into the Modi era where the character of India was changing, and Pakistan likewise, partly because of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and the connections with China.
I think I was lucky that, although I’m proud of it, The Silk Roads came out at a time where people felt the world was unfamiliar, and in those times people will often turn to history to say what can we learn, how strange are these times?
When I went to have lunch with my editor, just before my book was published, he said, you know, these stories of the Silk Roads are of change, of war, of resources, of religions. He said, “Somehow it makes you feel happier about today that the world has been through lots of turbulence before,” but that was the motivation for writing The Silk Roads.
The research for this book covers a vast network of topics. How did you find a foothold to start untangling it?
The honest answer to that is I’m grateful that I didn’t try and write it when I was a 25-year-old trying to make an impression.
The truth is that to do this kind of stuff, you need to know how to handle complex materials, understand manuscripts, and be comfortable working in lots of languages. Sometimes in languages that you’re less well versed in than other ones. You need to be able to read things that are tricky to uncover. You need to be careful dealing with sources. You’ve got to be careful dealing with things written by contemporary commentators, too.
When The Silk Roads came out, I was 44, so I’d had quite a long career. For the latest book that I wrote, The Earth Transformed, I’ve had to learn a whole new set of skills, too. To be able to write on history, you need to understand planetary sciences, earth sciences, DNA, statistical modelling, how diseases spread, and so on.
Some of the most exciting work being done at the moment, for example, is about the spread of the Black Death and the plague that devastated much of Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe in the 1340s. Historically, we’ve had very little evidence on the spread of this plague in China, South Asia, and in West Africa—which are all connected in the trade routes.
It looks now that a lot of the reason why the plague caught fire in these regions was because of what traders, merchants and Mongol overlords ate and wore. The animals that they killed to eat and to make materials from were highly effective spreaders of disease.
Thanks to DNA materials, we’ve started to find the first evidence of mass mortality in all these places, and we can do that not because texts tell us—because they don’t—and not because we can guess it—because we can’t—but because we have new materials to analyse. Bones in cemeteries, for instance, can identify how people died; the costs of doing that have come down massively in the last 20 years, and the tools are more accurate.
These new tools mean that, as a historian, you keep learning. Education isn’t something you do, and which finishes at university. You spend your whole life learning things. Human experience is always about learning from people you talk to, whether it’s at a bus stop, at a book festival, at work, or wherever.
Your work challenges an Eurocentric view of the world. What do you think are the biggest misconceptions about world history?
Take the term itself, “world history.” Does that mean everything’s got to be included? Does it mean the parts of the world that haven’t often been covered by other people? Does it mean it has to be connected? Does it mean it has to be everything?
World history can mean trying to shine a light on people who get ignored. But it can also mean big, connected stories, and I think there are not many things that are really truly global—that involve all of us.
Climate is one, and disease is another. When you have big pandemics that go global like coronavirus, then everybody is exposed to similar kinds of trends. But when the Hundred Years’ War was being fought in Europe in the 1300s, it didn’t make any difference in Sri Lanka.
Some events do happen that are big connectors. The spread of Islam, for example, first with the building of the first Arab Empire, then the expansion of Muslim trade into the Indian Ocean. I suppose the arrival of Europeans counts, too, where suddenly you’ve got a connection between the Portuguese, the Netherlands, Northern Europe, and Sri Lanka that had never existed before.
Then you think, well, this connects to West Africa, Elmina, the spice trades, and so on. So you can have these moments where lots of things get brought under world history. For me, not focusing on Europe is always a key trait, partly because there are lots of wonderful historians who do that instead of me. So my job isn’t to attack how other people do it, my job is to stand in a different place and try to explain what I see.
How do you feel the historical silk roads compare to modern global trade networks like China’s Belt and Road initiative?
They’re very different things, in terms of which peoples are involved and how they are connected. I suppose you could boil it down to something more basic: Why do people trade? Why do people invest in countries that aren’t their own, and what do they want and need? I think that’s one fundamental question one could share.
Second, by the time the global community got over-excited about China and the Belt and Road Initiative, the funding had more or less stopped. China went through a big phase of trying to work out how to think about its own world view, how to try to build new political and commercial ties with countries like Sri Lanka, so Belt and Road today means something very different in 2025 to what it did in 2013.
What makes the silk roads so useful as a framing, to think about the past, is it allows you to talk about connections that aren’t led by one single country, or one single culture. It’s about lots of complexities. Belt and Road became a Chinese flagship, and people have often interpreted it that way, but the silk road here in Sri Lanka can mean something very different.
It means Portuguese trade to Europe, it means Singhalese people settling in the South Pacific, it means connections to India, it means the archipelago of the Maldives. These are all silk roads, and they’re all part of the ways in which faith, languages, genetics, fruits, food, fashion, trade, luxury goods have moved over a long time, but they mean different things to different people.
And one of the good things about ‘Silk Roads’ as a label is it doesn’t belong to a single nation. Belt and Road became something slightly different because it was a little bit heavier than it probably should have been for it to be a useful, convenient tool.
How does understanding the history of the silk roads help us make sense of today’s geopolitical tensions?
History doesn’t need to be your guidebook to the future. History is interesting and important for itself. It’s a beautiful subject, to learn about the past, but what studying history of any kind can do is show you where we came from. It’s like standing on one of these beautiful beaches in Galle; you can turn around and see your footsteps in the sand. Other people can have a guess at where it leads, but I think it’s important to understand how we got to where we are.
If you were to give a different kind of answer to a politician or to a business, you’d say trade has been a great reason for people to become more tolerant. If you live on an island and you’re used to people arriving to buy and sell things, your capacity to want to find ways in which you can work together becomes quite high, your exposure to new ideas and your interests in new ideas are also different than if you lived in the desert. The environment and ways in which trade functions to bring people together can be very positive.
But we know that trade can bring greed. It can bring excessive profits, monopolies, exploitation, persecution, and unkindness. How do you create a structure that allows transparency, justice, peace, and tolerance to work? These networks, across the silk roads for two thousand years or more, were pretty good at allowing safe travel, a rule of law, urban settlements that work in connection with each other, and reasonably low levels of intense competition.
If history shows us patterns and cycles, are you optimistic that our current global issues will eventually come to calmer waters?
I learnt a long time ago that optimism and pessimism are just emotions. I can become scared easily, I can become over-pleased with myself easily, but the reality is a different thing. Being pragmatic, trying to work out which bits are actually real and which bits really matter, is much more important than being hopeful or being fearful.
We live in a world with echo chambers of people wanting to become radicalized or wanting to complain and take action. I’m very fearful of that. Security services all around the world have had to learn how to deal with radicalization of all kinds.
Young men who find it hard to get girlfriends, people who feel excluded because they don’t get paid enough, people who feel that their religious faith is being mocked. All these things can find communities that can become extremely powerful and very dangerous. So finding ways to respect all people, to be more inclusive, to try to explain how to give dignity to other people, that’s the sort of thing I write about in The Earth Transformed—that those things can get washed over very quickly by people making these inflammatory comments, which play very well to some people in the world. But I think that the world we live in today is more hopeful than it was when I was growing up, because I lived in fear of nuclear catastrophe.
What is your advice to new historians in a world that seems to be leaning further towards a post-truth era?
History is not a one-man job. You have all the research that underpins it—world-class researchers in amazing institutions around the world. So I think that’s part of it, to be able to show that this is where the source comes from. Here’s the verification, read the specialist papers, and so on.
I would imagine that in times where there is change, people who are authentic and reliable can be important. And I suppose that’s a reason that people like Felippe Sands (writer and lawyer), Adam Rutherford (scientist, writer, and broadcaster), and me get invited to places like Galle because it’s not just that we write books that are bestsellers, but there’s authenticity and reliability.
I’m a little bit defensive about the idea of the post-truth world, too, because the post-truth world has always existed. People have always invented, people have always dissimulated, always blamed, always said things that are misleading.
I write in my new book about Sargon of Akkad, one of the great Mesopotamian leaders who talks exactly like Trump: “I am the greatest ruler in the history of all humankind, I’ve delivered peace to every single nation I’ve touched, everyone’s bowed down in front of me.” The difference today is that the mechanisms through which we can disseminate information are changing.
Even when we talk about deepfakes, it feels brand new, right? I remember when I was at Cambridge, Mary Beard (a Professor of Classics) showed us a picture of a statue of Emperor Augustus, who looked like he went to the gym and had fantastic muscles. He looked like a man in peak condition, and this statue of Augustus was put at the gates of Rome. So people would see it as they entered. They’d think, “here is a tall, powerful embodiment of a handsome, fit, strong man.”
Then we read a report of what Augustus looked like in his lifetime. It said he was very small and had terrible, bad breath, a waxy head, was physically very unimpressive, and so even this was a ‘deepfake’ two thousand years ago.
Depending on the perspective you look at things, they can be moulded. Navigating truth, explaining what the reality is, has always been important. That’s why we remember some of the great historians of the past, because they were trying to explain what they could see in front of them.
Most people don’t get the privilege to write world history, so to do that, twice now, I’m extremely grateful. I don’t have any illusions, I’m very grateful I’ve had the success that I have. I know many people who are more clever than I am, whose books I love, who haven’t been invited to Galle or haven’t been able to have their books on display in bookshops.
I read a lot of fiction, and I tell my students to read a lot of fiction to learn about storytelling, to learn about how to engage the audience. You learn from the best. I’m lucky to have friends who are novelists, and I talk to them a lot about how to shape a story. This is how you keep people wanting to turn the page till the end.