The new Silk Road

From the second century BC, during the Han dynasty of China, to the fourteenth century AD, a major east–west trade route network was created called the Silk Road. It was an early example of globalisation because it aided the exchange of cultures, goods and ideas. Like the internet centuries later, it made the world a smaller place. It began in Chang’an (now Xi’an) in China and ended in the Mediterranean. Silk was the major trade product which travelled on this route, but many other products such as tea, ceramics and metal were also traded. The Silk Road was not a single road, but the name given to a series of roads and sea routes linking east to west.

After the discoveries of America and Australia in the late fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries, intercontinental overland trade routes went into decline. The increased speed and better navigation of sea transportation, with its ability to carry more goods relatively cheaply, resulted in the decline of the land-based Silk Road at the end of the fifteenth century, but the final blow to the Silk Road trade was the attitude of the later Chinese dynasties. The isolationist policies of the Ming dynasty did not encourage trade between China and the West. This continued until the Qing dynasty, which lasted until 1912. Two world wars and the Communist revolution in 1949 did nothing to help the fading importance of the Silk Road.