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Podcast: New Books in Medieval History
Episode: Xin Wen, "The Kingâs Road: Diplomacy and the Remaking of the Silk Road" (Princeton UP, 2023)
Description: Many of usâwho maybe arenât historiansâhave an image of the Silk Road: merchants who carried silk from China to as far as ancient Rome, in one of the first global trading networks. Historians have since challenged the idea that there really was such an organized network, instead seeing it as a nineteenth-century metaphor that obscures as much as it explains.But Xin Wen, the author of The Kingâs Road: Diplomacy and the Remaking of the Silk Road (Princeton University Press, 2023), tries to revive the idea that there really was a âSilk Road,â at least for the pe...