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Perspectives: New Silk Roads
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In this episode of our Perspectives series, world-renowned historian and author, Peter Frankopan, joins Frederic Neumann, HSBC’s Chief Asia Economist and Co-Head of Global Research Asia, for a fascinating conversation on the history of exchange through the Silk Roads and the interconnectedness of the world today.
They explore how people, goods, religions and ideas flowed through global corridors for centuries, as well as new areas of connectivity across markets and regions. Watch or listen to understand more about the legacy of the Silk Roads and their influence today.
This episode was recorded behind the scenes of the HSBC Global Investment Summit in Hong Kong on 26 March 2025. Find out more here: grp.hsbc/gis
Disclaimer: Views of external guest speakers do not represent those of HSBC.
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Transcript
Introduction and Welcome
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome to Perspectives from HSBC. Thanks for joining us. And now on to today's show.
00:00:14
Speaker
Welcome to the latest installment of HSBC's Perspective series. My name is Fred Newman. I'm the Chief Asia Economist here at HSBC in Hong Kong. And I'm really delighted to be joined by one of the authors, really, when it comes to Asian global history, Peter Frankopan, of course, Professor of Global History at Oxford University.
00:00:37
Speaker
And I just had the pleasure to actually see your presentation here at the HSBC conference in Hong Kong. And I must say, really the breadth and scope that you deliver is is really, barred it's it's really incomparable, I would say. Really, you have you bring in nuances, you bring in history, contemporary issues.
00:00:57
Speaker
So thank you, it's an honor to have you on this ah on this podcast.
The Silk Roads: A Historical Overview
00:01:00
Speaker
Thanks, Fred. You know, this is one of the great cities on the planet. So being here and getting a chance to think about the lessons you can learn from history, the resonances.
00:01:09
Speaker
And like you said, you know, it's big history and big ideas are all very well, but there needs to be detail too. so So getting that fine grain and the nuances is really important. It does. Yeah. The nuances, the details, ah the the fine grain and granularity.
00:01:22
Speaker
um Of course, in in the current environment, the big questions matter even more because we have so much uncertainty out there geopolitically, trade policy, etc. But your first book was really called The Silk Road.
00:01:39
Speaker
the Silk Roads. are and And maybe set us a scene of, because what you've done in this book is really put Central Asia, the Silk Roads at the center of global history.
00:01:52
Speaker
Can you give us a sense of of what what does this involve? what How far did the Silk Roads expand? When does take place? what did Why are these sources significant? I guess it's about lots of different things. I mean, I'm interested, as I suspect everybody listening to this podcast and who's here at this conference, in histories of exchange. And of course, trade is is part of that, but so too are things like religion, art, music, food, all the other things too. And so I'm interested in where people trade and exchange in the past. And when you start with that, you start with where the first cities
00:02:27
Speaker
on Earth and they tend to be the early ones that we really spend a lot of time thinking about, not just in Egypt, everyone hears about in their school classes, but in Mesopotamia, in what's now mainly Iraq and I guess a bit of Iran, in the Indus Valley, in the Yellow and Yattsin rivers.
00:02:41
Speaker
And those agglomerations of people start to build hierarchies, trade networks, corridors that link people together. So the Silk Road as a label can mean whatever you want it to mean. I mean, if you're a tour guide or you're trying to sell a tourist package or you want to sell a map on Amazon, you draw some kind of line between China and and and the Mediterranean and you think it looks like a motorway.
00:03:02
Speaker
But it's about high levels of interaction exchange. In fact, the label was developed in the early eighteen hundred s by German geographers trying to understand how particularly China ah Central Asia and India were connected.
Silk Roads' Historical and Modern Significance
00:03:15
Speaker
And the label of silk was because there's a lot of written material and lot of a lot of surviving material actually about textiles that show that that was one of the major commodities that people were moving and trading. So when I wrote my book, I start Silk Reds about just over two and half thousand years ago, because you find high levels of interaction not just but across Central Asia, but locally within these different oases and cities ah between them.
00:03:41
Speaker
But you start to find much high levels of connection that link Europe, Africa and Asia together. Now I'm a bit older and I know more. I'd probably go back to much much earlier in history and those first genetic corridors that allow major global migration. So there's a reason why, for example,
00:03:58
Speaker
about 18% of the population northern India shared genetic material with Scandinavian people. And it's because Yamnaya populations that lived in what's now central Eurasia, sort of Ukraine, central Asia, ah moved and they as they migrated, they took ideas about art, about language and and also The genetics to said these things they go back thousands of years, but the super is quite a useful kind of catch all to think about high levels of interaction and change together. So it depends on who you ask.
00:04:27
Speaker
If you ask someone in the Gulf of what the Silk Reds are, they'll talk about thousand and one nights. They'll talk about Sinbad. They'll talk about trade with China, with India, with the you know with Central Asia. If you ask. The last president of Turkmenistan, the Silk Road is a Turkmen idea that's connected with great silk roads of horsemen moving across the steps.
00:04:45
Speaker
If you ask the Belt and Road Initiative and and the government in Beijing or Xi'an, the Silk Road is something that was deeply connected to China's past. But it's really about thinking about trade flows, networks, corridors,
00:04:57
Speaker
exchange. It can be tempting to think about the shiny expensive stuff, but the day-to-day world, where calories come from, food, energy, sort of basic building blocks of history are important you. So sort it's really the the the center of of human civilization in a way. There was cross-fertilization, ideas moving from east to west, west to east. There was genetic material moving east to west. There was goods, there was coins, there was silk.
00:05:24
Speaker
Of course, a lot of exchange.
Asia's Rising Influence
00:05:26
Speaker
And north to south too. When people think about this, sort it always kind of goes east-west. But things go back in another direction. So i mean there were more Christian. i mean christianity i guess is the quintessential you know ah think most people think of it as a European export because the Pope is in Rome or the Archbishop of Canterbury is in England.
00:05:44
Speaker
um But Christianity of course was born in Asia, the fulfillment of Judaic prophecies. and And there are more Christians living in Asia and than there are in Europe until around 1400. One of the things I tried to do in the Silk Road is to remind that that world order that most people think of as being natural, of the West being economically the superpower, being the cultural heartland, you know, it was Western European countries that colonized the Americas and Africa and Asia, that that that central gravity is really recent. And it's, you know, if you go back 500 years, the great cities on Earth, populations, the great scientists, the great schools of learning,
00:06:20
Speaker
they weren't in Europe. you know The Harvards and the Oxfords and Cambridges of the time were in places like Bukhara or Samarkand or Xi'an and so on. And and that that shift means that what we're seeing today's world feels like a reversion to So you're saying the Western-centric world from that perspective was an aberration in many ways.
00:06:40
Speaker
and If you look at a long span of history. Yeah, maybe aberration may be maybe maybe slightly provocative. It's not an aberration. but It's but but it was because the Americas were essentially cut off from global trade connections until 1492. And when Columbus and those who followed, and then quite soon afterwards, the connections between Mexico and South America and China in particular from 1520s onwards, Magellan sailing around the world,
00:07:05
Speaker
those that bring in the Americas into global trade networks meant that that that central gravity obviously shifted because Western Europe wasn't any anymore at the wrong end of trade routes. It was suddenly in the center.
00:07:16
Speaker
And that meant that Spain, Portugal, eventually Britain, Netherlands so on France were in a much better place to exploit resources, riches and so on. But but you know today's world in Asia, as you know, as a chief economist here for Asia, there are there are more people living in Asia than all the other continents
Current Geopolitical Landscape
00:07:32
Speaker
combined.
00:07:32
Speaker
And at a certain point, that means that their interactions, their use of fossil fuels, their energy needs, their climate change elements, their calorie consumption, the water, it means that you start with what's happening here.
00:07:44
Speaker
you know So, for example, you know right now there's a lot of criticism for China for its its energy footprints, but per capita, Chinese citizens on average use 50% of an American citizen. And and those kind of discussions then about what's fair, what's right and what's balanced are why geopolitics has become such an important part of investment architecture at the moment. to you Now, the the way your book certainly brings out the interconnectedness of the ancient world, antiquity of of the Middle Ages, how ideas and trade and goods moved across the Eurasian African continents.
00:08:20
Speaker
um There is a sense, though, that perhaps in recent decades, really, strictly speaking, the Silk Roads have kind of fallen dormant a little bit, at least a span between Central Asia, maybe parts of Middle East. Relativity moved west to Europe, moved to East Asia.
00:08:38
Speaker
and but I don't agree with that at all. You don't agree with that? No. Look at the last 30 years. you know The um breakdown of Afghanistan has been the single biggest spend on US defense budget of the last three decades. Iraq likewise.
00:08:51
Speaker
The fact that the revolution in Iran in 1979 has given a ah global superpower, whether you think Iran deserves to be in that category or not, it's just it it doesn't really matter. But for three Cold Wars simultaneously against effectively Saudi Arabia, there's ah but a bit of shift in that too ah with um with the United States and also with Israel.
00:09:12
Speaker
with with round about 2% of the US defense budget. So Iran is a kind of you know whether you whether you think it's an axis of evil. It's a key part of China's energy security and it's you know it's it military and and diplomatic posture to you know the ah the emergence of the bricks.
00:09:29
Speaker
You know this is all about the centrality of those connections between Russia China and West Asia too. So superficially I agree with you when you go well what's happened in Central Asia has been really important. you need to scratch scratch the surface. But when you do that and you see the play for rare earth minerals, for example, in Afghanistan, particularly in the in the last couple of years since the Taliban got back into power, places like Kazakhstan, 50 percent of the world's chromium, 30 percent of the world's uranium, you know that those things are they really do matter.
Central Asia's Role in Global Politics
00:09:59
Speaker
So it's right when we think about the Silk Road, we think it's something about the past and about camels and trade that's been supplanted by
00:10:06
Speaker
by ships. ah But energy security, food, exchange, networks, political power, it's it's always right there. Throw in Pakistan, throw in India, which chooses not to sit within what it thinks of as silk goods. It's always right there, you say, but it's becoming more important again, isn't it?
00:10:23
Speaker
isn't Isn't it in the last 10 years becoming even more central again to the rest of the world compared to, say, the 50s and 60s? Is that...? It depends on what you want. I mean, the whole Soviet space program has run out of Kazakhstan.
00:10:38
Speaker
you know There's a reason why NATO expanded into Turkey was to have aperture over what happened across Central Asia as well as in Iran. the just The relationship with the Soviet Union and China under Mao was absolutely critical and that all played out around around the borderlands.
00:10:55
Speaker
where attitudes of China to its western provinces and to Central Asia were very heavily shaped by how Mao read the relationship with Khrushchev and also how it read what was happening in the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 60s. So, you know, of course, that's true because we we think of the 50s and 60s, it's all about JFK.
00:11:12
Speaker
It's about the kind of the the Monroe Doctrine or the, you know, it's about the Marshall Plan. It's about U.S. becoming the global superpower. But, you know the Soviet, um you know, nuclear... system worked as a result of uranium coming from Central Asia. The relationships between India and the Soviet Union were incredibly profound to the point that until about three years ago, 70% of India's defence spend came was spent on Russian weapons and materials. So those those connections are they're there, but we we we don't focus because we don't think they're important. That's not just Eurocentrism, that's about following where the noise is loudest.
00:11:49
Speaker
And one of the challenges is that not many people specialize in these parts of the world. So certainly depends whether you mean Central Asia, Turkmen Republic, Tajikistan, or whether you mean broadly silk roads which i mean the gulf i mean iran i mean in iraq i mean central asia i mean india pakistan china add those all together and first you're you're at 50 of the world's population you're you're about 70 of the world's uh hydrocarbons and and that has accelerated dramatically so i would put places like abu dhabi just i'm a football fan for example uh know the the two best teams in the uk or in england i should say specifically of different leagues
00:12:26
Speaker
But two best teams in the last 30 years have been
Connectivity and Globalization Trends
00:12:28
Speaker
Chelsea, which was my team, which was owned for a large chunk of that by Roman Abramovich, whose wealth came from ah Russian hydrocarbons and metals. um all to do with where they are being exported to.
00:12:39
Speaker
And the current best team in the world is Manchester City, which is all Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth, that's that's from remember but ahievv's fo from from its particularly from its fossil fuels. But but that that that way in which the world has been shaped by actors, even just in the kind of day-to-day football world, let alone investment, has been huge. We don't think about it. One takeaway, I think, from your first book, On the Silk Road, is...
00:13:04
Speaker
the importance of goods exchange that brings ideas and prosperity with it as well. right Just to bring into the modern age, we see a little bit of was retreat from globalization in some corners of the world. um i Are you as a historian, how worried are you about this? Do you see really the potential here for kind of a retreat from globalization or does does a study of history suggest actually interconnectivity is just a human impulse and there are new connections being formed, particularly in that part of the world, even if other parts of the global world retreat.
00:13:40
Speaker
yeah Look, I think anybody who tells you that, you know, microprocessors, you know supercomputers, out of space, militarization of space, somehow you can learn something from the East India Company or from, you know, Alexander the Great or the Silk Roads the past, you know, meat needs to have a so stiff drink.
00:13:57
Speaker
Because these worlds are very different. Our technologies means that the way in which we can do think about corridors and networks are distance and space don't matter quite so much that they do matter. Actually, we know that global trade and local trade are very closely correlated to your proximity. So, for example, the nitty together of ASEAN over the last 20 years, but particularly last decade and what we're expecting in the next five years, it's extremely rapid acceleration of interactions because countries in the same neighborhood are strongly incentivized to work together to share to lower trade tariffs.
00:14:29
Speaker
and cooperate. But those networks also allow other things to happen. you know They allow fragilities, things that allow you to have faster trade offer vulnerabilities. So, for you know, we learned that because of Covid, that the fact we're all globally connected and every place on Earth is about 18 hours by flight connected means that a pathogen that establishes spreads incredibly quickly. And the Silk Roads were in the past times were were fantastic examples for that because the Black Death spread along these trade networks incredibly quickly because the Mongols built networks that allowed information, people, goods to move really fast. So de-globalisation, you can only learn so much thinking about the past. I suppose the sort of top line is that
00:15:11
Speaker
what is it that encourages people to trade with each other? And then if we have de-globalisation, what is it that the politicians are trying to solve as a problem? And you know, you can see, for example, the current US administration, one of the challenges has been about the shift in manufacturing out of the United States to other parts of the world where cost of labour is much cheaper. In many cases, environmental mental standards have been much lower and the benefits have flowed to consumers.
00:15:35
Speaker
Now, it doesn't take much to realise whether you agree with Trump's policies or not, that reassuring, whether it's domestic businesses or incentivising employment, ah back in back in the US, that that's not a difficult thing to get your head around.
00:15:50
Speaker
I think what the challenge is, is how do you find a level playing field that is politically sellable domestically within the US, but also at international levels? And for what it's worth, if history tells me something, it's that the chances of reaching such a grand bargain are probably quite high.
00:16:06
Speaker
because the incentives for all sides are right. And because I've spent a lot of time in China the last 10, 15 years, you know I don't think that are policy planners that I've spoken to, people involved the business, people right at the top, the government, I don't think there's a conceptual problem about what's involved. It's how do you find a deal that is that works?
00:16:25
Speaker
And that's like anything that HSBC does. i mean, that's why this that's why this bank was set up in... Hong Kong and Shanghai in the first place. In 1865. 160 years, right? No, 160 years, indeed, yeah. I'm not wearing any HSBC
Modern Silk Roads and Future Outlook
00:16:38
Speaker
pin, I'm afraid. But that was there to provide credit, to facilitate exchange. And if exchange is imbalanced, then either gets solved through revolution or breakdown. Well, and I think even that history suggests we've gone through wars. We've gone through periods of rising terrors in the 1930s. And we always come back, ultimately, to further
00:16:58
Speaker
integration human exchange i think there's something inherently human about it but i wanted to ask you this idea of silk roads we can think of it as a physical geographical location but you've also extended that to new areas of connectivity you talk about not just geographically but the arctic for example becoming more important now but also digital, for example, and other types of kind of connectivity nowadays. Can you talk a little bit about those? What do you have in mind? Well, yeah I think if if if you take Silk Road, not a sort of particular defined cluster of places. And you can have people who say, is this place, I'm going to um travel you travel along the whole Silk Road, or is this place on it or is it not on it? you know History is very political. So, for example, the
00:17:43
Speaker
government in India and historians in India like to see themselves out of the ideas of the Silk Road because it clashes with Modi's vision what India is and of what China is. And so India's version of how it thinks about itself is, um you know, it can be exclusionary because it has its own view.
00:18:00
Speaker
I mean, ironically, that's something that's been capitalised at the moment in China, where India's, you know, the the contribution that Buddhism makes in Indian culture, South Asian, i should say, and South Asian cultures, because India is on a journey towards higher levels of Hinduism and exclusion of minorities and even including of Muslims and so on, that that China is positioning itself to say that India may have discovered or South Asia might have discovered Buddhism, but China is the current champion. So history is always political.
00:18:27
Speaker
So Hillary Clinton, for example, gave a speech in 2011 in Chennai talking about how important it was to rebuild the new Silk Road, she called it. And she specifically left China and Iran out of that. because from the US perspective, connecting India to Central Asia had greater connectivity. So if the salt grid is you take a step back and go, it's just about trade, it's about connections, about networks, about corridors, then there's some obvious areas that one might think of that lower the politicization of geography, that lower the politicization of current...
00:19:00
Speaker
states and administrations that might change their views about what they're willing to talk about. And so some of those new networks seem to me second nature that no longer about caravanserized camels. It's about digital connectivity. It's about know kind of connect cabling for energy supplies.
00:19:17
Speaker
It's about space. It's about changing the changing the environment around us, that's shift or changing to react the shape to the environment around us that's on the move. And the ways in which the Arctic are being opened up and will open up for shipping and for mineral exploitation, for seabed exploration, mean that those all form part of the same structure of how one thinks about global exchange. So, you know, when I read about Silk Roads, I think thinking about how Latin America and China were connected, how Manila was the first proper global city.
00:19:46
Speaker
set up in the 1570s i think one one needs to be loose with these definitions because they allow you more chance to think creatively about what you can learn from them and the two big things about networks uh and corridors are are both the ways in which they can act to galvanize and accelerate exchange but also where their vulnerabilities are and you know as historian i'm much more worried about downside and and risk than about the assumption that the sun will set will rise every morning and that people will solve problems.
00:20:18
Speaker
my My worry is that some of those shocks are poorly understood and they're very badly priced by markets because they don't look recognisable. So, for example, you know I was brought into 10 Downing Street in December 2019 to talk about the next 10 years. This was a time when China was was rising in the levels of geopolitical risk that we thought we faced in Europe.
00:20:37
Speaker
Russia was sort of emerging as something that we need to think about more, but not critical. And I said, the the two things I was worried about were global pandemic and the lack of global response. And the question I should have been asked, which I wasn't, I said to the the the guys who invited me in, I said I didn't understand why that hadn't been run through, was why was that a risk right then?
00:20:57
Speaker
And did know there are lots of different reasons if you work on histories and work about work on vulnerabilities. You maybe ask slightly different questions to if you are straight-up investor. It's interesting that that banks like HSBC have pushed up geopolitical risk and even thinking about history to become much more important than they were 10 15 years ago. And probably we should have been doing that a long, long time before. So know there's a reason why but by people like me get invited to things like this, because it's not just about what can you learn from what happened three, four hundred years ago or two thousand years ago?
00:21:28
Speaker
But it's because that sense of sense of perspective can be quite helpful yeah in a changing world. And
Conclusion and Reflections
00:21:33
Speaker
whatever your political views are, whichever part of the world you're living in, those changes today of of an age of revolutions of climatological, technological, geopolitical, economic, etc., energy, food, demographic, there are so many of those things going on that that having as wide open a field to listen to as possible makes sense.
00:21:53
Speaker
Peter, this is a wonderful note to end on and listening to you also, just going back to this idea of deglobalization risk, et cetera. um We've been through these terminals so many times before. We're really looking at reconfiguration of globalization. It's a different forms. Things are evolving. So thank you for this perspective. And thank you, ah ladies and gentlemen, for joining us on this episode of HSBC Perspectives and We hope you join us again on the next episode.
00:22:22
Speaker
Thank you very much. Thank you for joining us for this episode of Perspectives. Make sure you're subscribed to HSBC Global Viewpoint to stay connected.