The Silk Road: A New History with Documents Paperback – Illustrated, 14 Jun. 2016

This interesting book reviews the history of the world’s most famous trade route, the Silk Road from China to the West. Each of the book’s chapters focuses on one of the major cities along the route of the and is relatively self-contained making the book easy to navigate and dip in and out of. Of these chapters I found Chapter 5 on Chang’an/Xi’an and Chapter 6 on Dunhuang and its archive of documents the most interesting while the final chapter, on Beijing and Marco Polo, was probably my least favourite due to its brevity. This edition of the book also included a number of primary source material documents at the end of each chapter that are all very interesting and a nice addition to the information the book presents.As someone with a more casual interest in history rather than an active student of the subject, this book was a little more academic than those I usually read but, despite this, I still found the book to be very interesting and informative. The book seems to be very competently written, even if it is a little repetitive in places, and thoroughly researched with a lot of information presented in a way that makes it relatively easy to understand. The book also includes a number of both colour and black and white images but unfortunately some of the references to these images are out by one (directing the reader to see colour plate 15 when the correct image was colour plate 14 for example). The book also includes a number of maps, as well as the usual credits and source footnotes.Overall this book seems to be a very good history of the subject matter and should be of interest to both students of Silk Road history (and the history of Asia in general), as well as to those who have a more casual interest in the subject. Despite a couple of very minor issues I would therefore give the book a high four stars.