The Silk Roads
Peter Frankopan · 2015
"World history looks fundamentally different when told from the perspective of Central Asia's trade networks instead of Western Europe — the region connecting East and West, not the Atlantic seaboard, was the actual center of global exchange, wealth, and power for most of recorded history."
Frankopan argued that centuries of history education got the map wrong — the real center of the world for most of human history wasn't Rome, London, or Paris, it was the corridor of trade routes running through Central Asia and the Middle East.
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Guns, Germs, and Steel
"Which civilizations ended up conquering others was driven overwhelmingly by geographic and environmental accident — access to domesticable plants and animals, and an east-west continental axis that let farming spread easily — not by any difference in the people themselves."