The new Sino-Indian War British historians have been appropriated by nationalists

There is, of course, a difference in emphasis in their accounts — Frankopan being a Byzantinist, and Dalrymple an Indianist. Yet the world-historical objective is the same — guided, one surmises, by their similar intellectual formation. Born to a Dalmatian father and Swedish mother, Frankopan was fired by the lectures of Jonathan Shepard, a historian of the Byzantine world at Cambridge. His debut was an account of The First Crusade that swapped Latin for Greek sources, reversing the conventional gaze. Dalrymple, a Highland aristocrat, also passed through Cambridge before cutting his teeth as a travel writer, traversing the same subcontinental lands as some of his forebears. For both, then, there were strong biographical imperatives that militated against insularity. With such backgrounds, it is hardly surprising that they didn’t turn out to be little Englanders.

This habit of mind was aligned to a historical sensibility. Born in 1965 and 1971, respectively, Dalrymple and Frankopan belong to the same cohort, coming of age as writers at a time when the British reading public was happily devouring 1,000-page tomes on, say, the French and Russian Revolutions. It was an age when doorstopper histories sold like air-fryer cookbooks, which is to say an age that lent itself easily to public-facing history. Happily, it was also an age relatively innocent of precarious contracts and pretentious postmodernism; pecuniary considerations and the stylistic dictates of the academy would prevent many from scaling the heights of public intellectualdom in a later age. Dalrymple took up the cudgels for popular history with a quartet on the Raj — a darker riff on Jan Morris’s trilogy — before moving backwards to Indian antiquity. Frankopan, by contrast, moved in both directions, encompassing the longue durée in histories of the Silk Road and climate change.

Billed as a “new history of the world”, no less, The Silk Roads offered a highly idiosyncratic take on global history, giving us the view from the Stans, as it were. Halford Mackinder called the region the world’s “heartland”, control over which is the sine qua non of global hegemony — a provocative argument when it was made in 1904, though these days seen as common wisdom in think-tank circles. Frankopan’s sweep — taking in the Achaemenids and Abbasids, commending the Persians and Mongols, depicted here not as barbaric cretins but as begetters of a sophisticated civilisation — no doubt had a touch of Whiggishness to it, confirming Herbert Butterfield’s wry observation that historical compression often tends towards upbeatness. One can see why Beijing’s mandarins fell head over heels with it. Trade gets top billing in these pages. War and prejudice — between Arab and Jew, Christian and Muslim — often recede from view. This was the kind of feel-good story the architects of a new Silk Road could get behind.

All the same, Frankopan was at pains to argue that the term itself was, in fact, of recent vintage. He didn’t go as far as Khodadad Rezakhani in dubbing it the “road that never was”, though he did maintain that the East-West carrying trade — ferrying money and maladies, goods and gods — coursed in the main through Indian ports. Overland routes from China were a minority taste. The fact is that no “Silk Road” ever existed in antiquity or mediaeval times. The Romans and Chinese were hardly aware of one another’s existence. On the other hand, Rome and India did a roaring trade in diamonds and drugs, amethysts and eunuchs, hair and diaphanous fabrics. Fast-forward a millennium to the 9th century, and it is still Gujarati entrepôts, topped up with the likes of Basra or Siraf in the Persian Gulf, doing the heavy-lifting.

Historically, the camel and caravan were no match for the ship. Across Central Asia, disconnection — not connection — was the norm. Then as now, sea transport was exponentially cheaper than land transport. Thanks to the revolution that is containerisation, these days it costs next to nothing to have your Shein jeans conveyed halfway across the world; the real expense, and environmental harm, lies in last-mile delivery. As it was, the “Silk Road” only became a proper thing in 1877. That is when the Prussian geographer Baron von Richthofen, enlisted to supply a fanciful genealogy for a railway linking Berlin and Beijing, coined the word. It was still later, in 1938, that the Silk Road made its Anglophone debut.

These subtleties were lost in the reception of The Silk Roads. Coming at a time of the Middle Kingdom’s return to the world stage under state-capitalist aegis, the hype around it neatly dovetailed with the Belt and Road Initiative, China’s latest effort to win friends and buy influence. It followed that Beijing was unencumbered by real history, preferring a nostalgic version of it. As Don DeLillo’s quip has it: “longing on a large scale is what makes history.” Very simply, the ancient Silk Road was good PR, another win for China’s “heritage diplomacy”.

It is only fitting, then, that the British Museum has cleared some precious Bloomsbury real estate to commemorate its (chimerical) existence in its blockbuster show. Not in any sense a work of Chinese propaganda, of course, the Silk Roads exhibition is nevertheless of a piece with the deceptive Silk Road Revival. Its message of global connection inevitably, if inadvertently, plays up its popular image as a Belt and Road Initiative avant la lettre. Rather much is made of silk, a commodity that scarcely featured in international trade. Historically speaking, an emphasis on more important items — cotton, pepper, ivory, sandalwood — would have placed India to the fore. Indeed, as Dalrymple has argued, the elision of India in the show was striking, even as a great many of the exhibits screamed the Subcontinent. One suspects that the omission owed to curatorial parochialism, not a willingness to regurgitate Beijing’s talking points, but it was revealing all the same.

On this score, Dalrymple’s The Golden Road, published this year, is a salutary corrective to the Scylla of Sinocentrism. Yet in its upbeat Indocentric pushback, it makes itself vulnerable to the Charybdis of Hindu nationalist appropriation. Time was when India was number one, Dalrymple argues, exporting mathematics and medicine, music and mythology, religion and architecture across what he calls the “Indosphere” — “the Sanskrit ecumene” to pointy-heads in the know – spanning Kandahar and Singapore from c. 250 BC to AD 1200.

It’s a story that is bound to give Hindu nationalists hard-ons, not least because the Indosphere bears a passing resemblance to an akhand bharat — a Greater India fencing in much of Southeast Asia under direct rule from Delhi. This, apparently, was the way things were in Asia’s deep past. The more hare-brained of the Hindu nationalists, the historian Sara Perlangeli has shown, continue to harbour fantasies of an “offshore Hindu nation” protected by Delhi. Dalrymple’s own retort, prefigured in The Golden Road — that a great deal of ancient “Indian” soft power was of Buddhist, definitely not Hindu, stamp — one suspects falls on deaf ears in this puerile milieu.

Historians have no control over how their books are received — more’s the pity. Frankopan is under no illusions. “I know my place as a commentator and it’s not to shape answers for politicians… I’m a mere historian sitting in Oxford,” he has said with resigned candour. Dalrymple’s version could run: “…sitting in a farmhouse in Mehrauli.”

The Golden and Silk Roads have acquired lives of their own, as signs of forgotten, precolonial national greatness. Conceived at the outset as correctives to Eurocentric history, they will be read in an altogether different light in certain quarters. For the votaries of China’s “wolf warrior diplomacy” — Global Times editor Hu Xijin (who once likened Britain to a “bitch asking for a beating”), for instance, or China Daily EU bureau chief Chen Weihua (who once called an American senator a “lifetime bitch”) — accounts of the Silk Road no doubt serve as comforting reminders of a seemingly endless golden age before the country’s “century of national humiliation”. In India, too, histories of precolonial gloire will go down swimmingly in milieux brimming with postcolonial resentment. One imagines India’s foreign minister S. Jaishankar might cull a titbit or two from The Golden Road for inclusion in a future speech rehashing his obligatory swipes at “the West” and its “old habit” of imperialism.

Yet it can scarcely be denied that both India and China have long since ceased to be colonised nations. If anything, they are now both colonial powers in their own right. No longer the “sick man of Asia”, China today is the world’s largest debt collector. Exporting its surplus capital and flexing its military muscle, its ruling class has come to treat a large chunk of Southeast Asia — everything west of its so-called “9-dash line” — as its own private garden. Power projection on the high seas has gone hand in hand with economic exploitation further afield, with Chinese tycoons snapping up everything from Zambian copper to Liberian redwood.

India’s ruling class, likewise, has come to assume that it is the sole keyholder to the Indian Ocean, propping up favourable regimes from Mauritius to the Maldives. Again, the Indian national oil company’s stab at controlling Sudanese oil and the Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s monopolisation of Ghana’s 5G network are hardly lessons in Third World solidarity.

Small wonder forgotten histories of Asian greatness are in such demand. As Benedetto Croce put it, “all history is contemporary history”.

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Pratinav Anil is the author of two bleak assessments of 20th-century Indian history. He teaches at St Edmund Hall, Oxford.

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