Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Silk Road: How States Built and Broke the Trade Routes of Asia for Two Thousand Years

The Silk Road: How States Built and Broke the Trade Routes of Asia for Two Thousand Years

Rothbury, Nathaniel

Paperback

General World History

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN13: 9798171019372
Publisher: Independently Published
Pages: 286
Weight: 0.63
Height: 0.60 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English

The Silk Road was never a road, and for most of its history silk was not its most valuable cargo. What existed instead was a chain of short hauls between oasis towns and river valleys, each leg run by traders who knew that one stretch of country and its water, its officials, and its prices, and who handed the goods on to someone else waiting at the other end. This book follows that chain from the Han dynasty's push into Central Asia in the second century BCE to the arrival of steamships and railways in the nineteenth, and argues that its health depended less on merchant enterprise than on the price of protection: garrisons, way stations, courts, and the calculation of whichever state controlled the ground. When protection became cheap enough, goods moved and states collected tax and tribute on them. When it did not, the traffic contracted to whatever a private network could defend on its own.

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