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Precis: " The Road That Never Was: The Silk Road and Trans-Eurasian Exchange" (2010) by Khodadad Rezakhani

In Khodadad Rezakhani’s article, “The Road That Never Was: The Silk Road and Trans-Eurasian Exchange” (2010), he argues that while the regional studies on the Silk Road has attracted many scholarships, the concept of the Silk Road as a whole tends to ignore realities such as geography and ecology, as well as political units, facts that become lost among the more potent romantic notions. He continues by saying that what is amazing about the Silk Road is its pervasive influence and the continuous use of its manufactured boundaries and cultural markers in defining modern geographical and ethnopoliticao concepts, although there is less scholarship that tackles about those that reside along the route of the Silk Road. Furthermore, the Silk Road has become a grand narrative that serves mostly to obscure important details, to which Rezakhani suggests is counter-productive and has no basis in historical reality or records, thus a need to rethink the artificial and nostalgic concept of the Silk Road and bring out what this narrative tends to conceal. This article is useful for future research and studies concerning the Silk Road as it serves as a counter-argument and provides a different point of view of tackling the subject matter.

(June 18, 2019)

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