Peter Frankopan is a British historian who built a career out of turning the map. Professor of global history at Worcester College, Oxford, and director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research, he also holds a chair in Silk Roads studies at Cambridge and works with the UNESCO Silk Roads programme.
His central argument, made most famously in 2015, is straightforward and quietly radical. For most of recorded history the world’s centre of gravity lay not in Europe but along the belt of territory running from the eastern Mediterranean through Persia and Central Asia to China. Trade, faith, disease and ideas all travelled that corridor first. Europe joined late.
He came to it through Byzantium and the First Crusade, which taught him to read the medieval world from the east looking west. Later work has widened the lens further still, taking in climate and the natural world as forces in human history. He writes with the confidence of a specialist and the pace of a storyteller, which is why his books reach readerships academic history rarely troubles.
25 hours and 7 minutes
