The Silk Road Idea

Traces the rise and fall of a set of modern disciplinary fields devoted to premodern historical contact that drew on intellectual currents across and beyond China and Europe.

The Silk Road Idea examines how the transnational past became a modern object of inquiry. Tamara T. Chin argues that between 1870 and 1970—a century spanning imperialism, decolonization, and the Cold War—interest in deep global connections unexpectedly emerged across opposing camps: the colonialist and the anticolonial, the capitalist and the communist, the antiquarian and the activist. To study world history through cross-cultural contact rather than isolated civilizational origins, scholars around the globe turned to ancient Afro-Eurasian ties with China. This entangled modern intellectual debates in East Asia and Europe with those in South Asia and East Africa. During the ascent of academic specialization and national studies, disciplines developed distinct frameworks and units for analyzing contact: maps in geography, narratives in history, words in philology, and sounds in linguistics. The Silk Road Idea models a multiregional and multidisciplinary history of knowledge that reveals how the connecting up of the modern world both enabled and was enabled by a radical reimagination of antiquity.