preview

The Birth Of Classical Europe By Simon Price And Peter Thonemann

Better Essays

The Birth of Classical Europe by Simon Price and Peter Thonemann argues the foundation of Europe is not self – made civilization, which credibly absorbed technological and cultural elements from rest of the world. European gathered things like cast iron, magnetic compasses, gunpowder, and silk mostly from Far East, China through the hand of merchants. Europeans took almost 1500 years to well operate the technological and cultural learning.In the book The Silk Road in World History, Xinru Liu provides an innovatively comprehensive way to expose The Silk Road, to place The Silk Road as the example of the world history and talk about it both globally and locally for “Examining our world and for envisioning the interconnected future that is in the making”(Liu X). Therefore, the complex trading network The Silk Road was the perfect subject, which not only geographically connected the East and the West, but also considered as “a system of commercial routes” (Liu 10). More importantly, the Silk Road was the symbol of cultural exchange and power authority throughout the large territory it linked. That is to say, the story of The Silk Road is actually power struggle within the aspects of silk, religions, and empires. First of all, the foundation of the Silk Road connected various empires among the Silk Road.
Rather than simply focusing how The Silk Road expanded the economic exchange, the exchange of advanced ideas and items are more critical to those empires as they

Get Access