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Cities of the Silk Roads: past, present and future
Peter Frankopan sees the Belt and Road Initiative as the latest in a long line of similar projects across similar regions, and looks for the lessons that history can reveal
The Silk Roads are rising again. In September 2013, President XI Jinping visited Kazakhstan. It was a foreign policy priority, he said in a speech at Nazerbayev University in Astana, "for China to develop friendly co-operative relations with the Central Asian countries". The time had come, he continued, to make economic ties closer, improve communication, encourage trade and enhance monetary circulation. The time had come to create a 'Silk Road Economic Belt', straddling the spine of Asia.
The project of the century
Four years on, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is galvanizing change not only across Asia but also in Africa and Europe too. The scale of Chinese-led investment is breathtaking, with nearly US$1trn of commitments already given to infrastructure projects, ranging from the construction of train and road connections to the building of energy plants and pipelines, deep water ports and international airports. Little wonder, then that at the Belt and Road Initiative Forum held in Beijing in May 2017, President Xi talked of 'the project of the century.' The initiative promises to change the lives not of millions or even hundreds of millions of people; but of billions: nearly two thirds of the world's population fall within the broad and deliberately vague parameters of the BRI.
Like all major projects, the BRI presents many challenges and will need to overcome many obstacles, ranging from project finance, implementation and successful investment returns, to regional dissonance between countries anxious about the speed of possible change and about China's roles both as a catalyst and as a nascent superpower. How to deal with rising levels of exchange and the impact this will have on the environment, on cities and rising urbanization, on the demand for energy, natural resources and food – but also on gender, healthcare and literacy? As we know, increasing trade has much more complex consequences than simply fuelling growing economies.
As such, it is worth remembering that the Belt and Road Initiative is the latest in a long line of similar projects – across similar regions. Looking to history not only reveals case studies that are interesting in themselves, but actually holds many valuable lessons. For example, when Alexander the Great conquered vast swathes of Western and Central Asia nearly two and a half thousand years ago, one of his priorities was founding new cities, many of which he modestly named after himself – such as Alexandria in Aria (modern-day Herat), Alexandria in Arachosia (modern-day Kandahar) and Alexandria ad Caucasum (modern-day Bagram) – and establishing an infrastructure that linked these and other towns together to enable the safe passage of goods, people and information.
It was the same story over the centuries and millennia that followed. Merchants and travellers like Pegolotti and Ibn Battuta noted not only the ease of being able to get from one location to the next but also the fact that undertaking journeys, including over long distance, was secure. "A man can travel for nine months alone with all great wealth," wrote Ibn Battuta, "and has nothing to fear." The prerequisite for close economic ties, improved communications and rising trade were the same in the past as they are today.
The effectiveness of infrastructure in the past was the reason that, one thousand years ago, cities like Merv in modern Turkmenistan grew to be home to the largest urban population on Earth and was a place impressive and beautiful enough to be described by one writer at the time as a "delightful, fine, elegant, brilliant, extensive and pleasant city', or Rayy, not far from modern Tehran, which around the same period was described by another author as being "the world's most beautiful creation" and "the bridegroom of the Earth".
Changes brought about by growing trade routes, by new connections and by the emergence of new power centres helped to seed cities like Delhi, Jaipur and Lahore, which flourished as new markets linked South to Central Asia under the Mughals. Investment spurred innovation in the past, just as it does today.
Irrigation helped develop and expand the amount of cultivatable land – which in turn helped cities grow in size. In the past, there were limits to how large a population could be sustained in a single metropolis: exhausting the water supply or having more mouths than it was possible to feed meant that our ancestors were natural environmentalists: sustainability was not just admirable, it was fundamental in the life (and death) of cities and of citizens.
And in fact, cities did fall along the Silk Roads, just as they rose. So, Merv and Rayy are no more, while cities along the New Silk Roads, like Astana or Dubai, Doha and Abu Dhabi, which were little more than pinpricks a hundred years ago, have become new oases for finance, trade and culture thanks to the opening (or projected opening) of foreign university campuses and outposts of the Louvre and the Guggenheim, alongside the Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar.
One major difference from the past, of course, comes from the speed at which exchange and travel is possible today. The ability to move goods, people and information at great speed accelerates connectivity. But it also magnifies risks and exposes fragilities, whether between states (such as the recent stand-off between Qatar and Saudi Arabia and the other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council), by enabling non-state actors like Islamic State to establish logistical and communications platforms, or by unnerving states so that they take uncompromising positions against minority groups in their own countries because of the threat – real or imagined – of instability in a changing world.
Another key difference is the advance of technology. Food and water can now be brought in from far and wide, which removes barriers to urban growth. So too does energy generation, clean and otherwise, that not only enables expansion but allows the natural environment to be tamed. Building cities in climatic zones where it can rise above 40C in the summer months is possible thanks to air-conditioning, refrigeration and cooling techniques in residential and commercial buildings.
Naturally, this presents opportunities but it also presents challenges. Industrial development is closely linked to changing dynamics of the city. Asia will be disproportionately represented by the megacities that are one of the definitive features of the modern world. Understanding how to help them to enable the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger, rather than exacerbate both; how to use cities as beacons to ensure environmental sustainability rather than be part of the process of destruction; and how to use partnerships to reinforce best practices, to share the best ideas and to build networks that are offer mutual benefits are the areas where the United Nations Industrial Development Organization can offer effective assistance.
The connections that link East with West were not just robust in the past; they were the very arteries and veins forming part of a global central nervous system. It is no coincidence that they are rising again today.
- Peter Frankopan is Professor of Global History at Oxford University and Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research. He is the author of The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (2015).
Posted in All Posts, Features | Tagged Belt and Road Initiative, China, cities, Peter Frankopan, Silk Roads, trade, UNIDO, XI Jinping