Reimagining the Silk Roads Interactions and Perceptions Across Eurasia

1. Reimagining the ‘silk roads’: An introduction

Julian Henderson, Stephen L. Morgan and Matteo Salonia

PART 1 - Environment

2. Climates of the Silk Road through the Common Era

Matthew D. Jones     

3. Ecological variability and early agriculture along the Proto-Silk Roads

Tengwen Long

4. Diseases and the Medieval Silk Roads

Chris King

Part 2 - Material culture

5. Roman Palmyra as a hub of trade and commerce: Material, epigraphic, and numismatic evidence

Andreas J.M. Kopp

6. Abbasid Caliphate and Tang Dynasty in the ninth and tenth centuries CE: Trade, acculturation, and the transformation

Julian Henderson

7. Natron Glass and the Silk Roads in the 1st millennium BCE

Qin-Qin Lü

8. A ‘Lion’ on the silk road

Gilberto Artioli, Ivana Angelini, and Massimo Vidale

Part 3 - Faiths and social groups

9. Buddhist missionaries at medieval Chinese courts: State ideologists and soul savers

Junqing Wu

10. The Sogdians, the ‘Cultural Bees’ of Eurasia

Pin Lyu

11. Huns and Romans in the fourth century

George Woudhuysen

12. Christianity on the Silk Roads

Teng Li

13. Dzhankent (Kazakhstan) – an early medieval trading node on the Northern Silk Road?

Irina Arkadevna Arzhantseva and Heinrich Härke

14. Replacing the Silk Road? Central Asian merchants between China and Scandinavia, 840–1000 CE

Marek Jankowiak

15. Slavery and human trafficking along the medieval Silk Roads, c.800 to c.1350 CE

Claire Taylor

Part 4 - Patterns of Eurasian trade

16. Mapping European knowledge about the silk roads in the fifteenth century

Georg Schindler

17. The Silk Road in Northeast Asia: Courtly gift-giving, 668–1449 

James Fujitani

18. Iberian Silk Roads: Spices, silver, and souls

Matteo Salonia

19. Southeast Asia, China, and the ‘maritime Silk Roads’, c.900–1650

Stephen L. Morgan         

Part 5 - Historical myths and reconceptualisation

20. The birth of Silk Road studies in China: Hedin, Andersson, and Sino-Swedish collaboration in Republican China.

Jan Magnus Romgard

21. The Belt and Road initiative at ten (2013–2023): A crucial juncture for China’s infrastructure geopolitics

Benjamin Barton

22. The road which binds: The BRI, nationalism, and the securitisation of Xinjiang

David O’Brien and Melissa Shani Brown

23 Visualising the silk roads

Julian Henderson, Stephen L. Morgan, and Matteo Salonia

24. Conclusion: Questioning and recovering the Silk Roads.

Matteo Salonia, Stephen L. Morgan, and Julian Henderson

Biography

Julian Henderson is Professor of Archaeological Science at Nottingham University and Visiting Professor at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. He has held senior management roles in Nottingham University, UK. He has published extensively on archaeological materials and increasingly on the archaeology of the silk roads. His primary collaborative research focus is silk roads archaeology and the application of science. He is Executive Director of the Global Institute of Silk Road Studies and Director of the Silk Road project.

Stephen L. Morgan is Professor of Chinese Economic History (Emeritus) in the Nottingham University Business School and has held senior management roles at the UK and China campuses. His research focus is on the economic and business history of China, with teaching and other research on international business, strategic management, and economic development in Asia broadly. In an earlier career, he was a journalist and editor of newspapers and news magazines in Australia, Hong Kong, and China.

Matteo Salonia holds a PhD in History from the University of Liverpool and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Currently, he teaches at the University of Nottingham Ningbo, where he also directs the Global Institute for Silk Roads Studies. His research interests include the economic and constitutional history of medieval Christendom, the Iberian contribution to early globalisation, and travel literature.