Reimagining the Silk Roads: Critical reflections
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
5:00 pm to 6:30 pm
- Venue
- Main Building, SOAS
- Room
- RB01
- Event type
- Seminar
About this event
Land and maritime routes have linked societies across Eurasia for millennia, diffusing cultures, diseases, faiths, peoples, and technologies. Labelled the Silk Road or Silk Roads in the nineteenth century, the study of these routes is wrapped in competing narratives.
The common romantic trope of merchants leading camels across sand dunes from China to the west clouds our understanding of the complexity and multi-faceted dimensions of the silk roads. It gives undue primacy to China as the presumed origin of the silk roads and to the land route at the expense of the contribution of the many peoples of West, South, and Southeast Asia, and the role of the maritime routes in shaping the complex interchanges across Eurasia.
Our seminar – and the book we have recently co-edited that we will introduce – seeks to rebalance critically the scholarship on the silk roads. Although in recent years the PRC nationalist narrative has hijacked the silk roads as a Chinese invention, we argue the silk roads is still a useful framework to support multidisciplinary study of the polycentric agency in the production and dissemination of goods, ideas, peoples, and faiths in Eurasia.
About the speakers
Julian Henderson is Professor of Archaeological Science at Nottingham University and Visiting Professor at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China where he is executive director of the Global Institute for Silk Roads Studies. He has published extensively on archaeological materials and increasingly on the archaeology of the silk roads. His collaborative research focus is silk roads archaeology and the application of science.
Stephen L. Morgan is Professor of Chinese Economic History (Emeritus) in the Nottingham University Business School. He researches 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 in Australia, China, and Hong Kong.
Matteo Salonia is Assistant Professor at the University of Nottingham Ningbo, where he also directs the Global Institute for Silk Roads Studies. He holds a PhD in History from the University of Liverpool and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Currently, he researches the economic and constitutional history of medieval Christendom, the Iberian contribution to early globalisation, and travel literature.
Chair
Steve Tsang (Director, SOAS China Institute)
Registration
This event is free to attend, but registration is required. Please note that seating is on a first-come, first-served basis.
This event is taking place on campus and will not be recorded or live-streamed.
Contact
- Email: sci@soas.ac.uk
Photo by Igor Sporynin on Unsplash
