"The Silk Roads"

Peter Frankopan's aim is nothing less than re-orient world history through the storied trade routes. Personally I enjoy more a focused study a la "A City of Fortune" than a sweeping general survey.

• "Milk and honey flow freely in our lands; poison can do no harm, nor do any noisy frogs croak"... Purported letter from Prester John, 12th century
• The accepted and lazy history of civilisation, wrote Wolf, is one where ‘Ancient Greece begat Rome, Rome begat Christian Europe, Christian Europe begat the Renaissance, the Renaissance the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment political democracy and the industrial revolution. Industry crossed with democracy in turn yielded the United States, embodying the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ .. there were alternative ways of looking at history – ones that did not involve looking at the past from the perspective of the winners of recent history.
• When I read about Arab geographers whose works were accompanied by charts that seemed upside down and put the Caspian Sea at its centre, I was transfixed – as I was when I found out about an important medieval Turkish map in Istanbul that had at its heart a city called Balāsāghūn, which I had never even heard of, which did not appear on any maps, and whose very location was uncertain until recently, and yet was once considered the centre of the world.
• The present has washed away the past: gone are the days when the name of Kabul conjured up images of the gardens planted and tended by the great Bābur, founder of the Mughal Empire in India.
• Indeed, the language penetrated deep into the Indian subcontinent. Some of the edicts issued by Maurayan ruler Ashoka, the greatest of the early Indian rulers, were made with parallel Greek translations, ..
  The vibrancy of the cultural exchange as Europe and Asia collided was astonishing. Statues of the Buddha started to appear only after the cult of Apollo became established in the Gundhara valley and western India. Buddhists felt threatened by the success of new religious practices and began to create their own visual images. Indeed, there is a correlation not only in the date of the earliest statues of the Buddha, but also in their appearance and design: it seems that it was Apollo that provided the template, such was the impact of Greek influences.
• It has been suggested, for instance, that the Mahābhārata, the great early Sanskrit epic, owes a debt to the Iliad and to the Odyssey, with the theme of the abduction of Lady Sita by Rāvaa a direct echo of the elopement of Helen with Paris of Troy.
• Trade between China and the world beyond developed slowly. Negotiating the routes along the edge of the Gobi desert was not easy, especially beyond the Jade Gate, the frontier post past which caravans of traders travelled on their way west.
• Silk performed a number of important roles in the ancient world apart from its value to nomadic tribes. Under the Han dynasty, silk was used alongside coins and grain to pay troops. It was in some ways the most reliable currency: producing money in sufficient quantities was a problem, as was the fact that not all of China was fully monetised;
• These measures are to be understood not as a form of suspicious surveillance, but rather as a means of being able to note accurately who was entering and leaving China, as well as what they were doing there, and above all to record the value of the goods that were bought and sold for customs purposes. The sophistication of the techniques and their early implementation reveal how the imperial courts at the capital in Chang’an (modern Xi’an) and from the first century AD at Luoyang dealt with a world that seemed to be shrinking before their eyes.49 We think of globalisation as a uniquely modern phenomenon; yet 2,000 years ago too, it was a fact of life, one that presented opportunities, created problems and prompted technological advance.
• The increasing volume of this fabric available in the Mediterranean caused consternation among traditionalists. Seneca for one was horrified by the popularity of the thin flowing material, declaring that silk garments could barely be called clothing given they hid neither the curves nor the decency of the ladies of Rome... For Seneca, silk was simply a cipher for exoticism and eroticism. A woman could not honestly say she was not naked when she was wearing silk
• with as much as 100 million sesterces per year being pumped out of the Roman economy and into trade markets beyond the frontier.86 <> This astonishing sum represented nearly half the annual mint output of the empire, and more than 10 per cent of its annual budget.
• Where Augustus had portrayed himself as a soldier in a famous and magnificent statue found at the Prima Porta on the outskirts of Rome, Diocletian preferred to present himself as a farmer. This summed up how Rome’s ambitions had changed over the course of 300 years, from contemplating expansion to India to contemplating the cultivation of prize-winning vegetables.
• while pottery manufactured in southern France could be found in England and in the Persian Gulf. Spices and condiments grown in India were being used in the kitchens of Xinjiang, as they were in those of Rome. Buildings in northern Afghanistan carried inscriptions in Greek, while horses from Central Asia were being ridden proudly thousands of miles away to the east.

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• This too was part of the programme to spread the religion by making it more accessible. Commerce opened the door for faith to flow through.
• But in fact every aspect of early Christianity was Asian. Its geographic focal point, of course, was Jerusalem, together with the other sites related to Jesus’ birth, life and crucifixion; its original language was Aramaic, a member of the Semitic group of tongues native to the Near East; its theological backdrop and spiritual canvas was Judaism, formed in Israel and during the exile in Egypt and Babylon; its stories were shaped by the deserts, floods, droughts and famines that were unfamiliar in Europe.
• The world was entering a period of environmental change. In Europe, this was evidenced by rising sea levels and the emergence of malaria in the North Sea region, while in Asia from the start of the fourth century sharply reduced salinity in the Aral Sea, markedly different vegetation on the steppes (evident from high-resolution pollen analyses) and new patterns of glacier advances in the Tian Shan range all show fundamental shifts in global climatic change.
  The results were devastating, attested by a remarkable letter written by a Sogdian trader in the early fourth century
• As if this were not bad enough, in the middle of the fifth century, having flushed forward a hotch-potch of tribes – Terevingian Goths, Alans, Vandals, Suevi, Gepids, Neurians, Bastarnians and others besides – the Huns themselves appeared in Europe, led by the most famous figure of late antiquity: Attila... Trained from youth to cope with extreme cold, hunger and thirst, they dressed in the skins of field mice that were stitched together; they would eat roots and raw flesh – which would be partially warmed by being placed between their thighs.
• Cities like Merv, Gundesāpūr and even Kashgar, the oasis town that was the entry point to China, had archbishops long before Canterbury did... After all, Baghdad is closer to Jerusalem than to Athens, while Teheran is nearer the Holy Land than Rome,
• Although it is difficult to trace this accurately, it is striking that the halo became a common visual symbol across Hindu, Buddhist, Zoroastrian and Christian art, as a link between the earthly and the divine, and as a marker of radiance and illumination that was important in all these faiths.
• The Türks were playing an increasingly dominant role in trade, much to the annoyance of the Chinese, who portrayed them as difficult and untrustworthy – a sure sign of their rising commercial success.
• The many loan-words from Greek, Aramaic, Syriac, Hebrew and Persian in the Qurān, the text that recorded the revelations handed down to Muammad, point to a polyglot milieu where emphasising similarity, rather than difference, was important.63 Unity was a core tenet, and a major reason for Islam’s imminent success.
• In 628, however, following further revelation, it was apparently announced that this instruction had been a test and should now be amended: the direction or qibla to face when praying was nowhere else but Mecca.65
• Not only that, but the Kaba, the old focal point of the polytheistic, pagan religion in Arabia, was identified as the cornerstone for prayer and pilgrimage within the city... By confirming the Kaba as sacred, continuity was affirmed with the past, generating a powerful sense of cultural familiarity.
• Those who converted to Islam early were rewarded with a proportionately greater share of the prizes, in what was effectively a pyramid system. This was formalised in the early 630s with the creation of a dīwān, a formal office to oversee the distribution of booty. A share of 20 per cent was to be presented to the leader of the faithful, the Caliph, but the bulk was to be shared by his supporters and those who participated in successful attacks.
• Word soon began to spread among Jewish communities that Muammad and his followers were allies. An extraordinary text written in North Africa in the late 630s records how news of the Arab advances was being welcomed by Jews in Palestine because it meant a loosening of the Roman – and Christian – grip on power in the region.
• The Qurān makes plain that early Muslims saw themselves not as rivals of these two faiths but as heirs to the same legacy: Muammad’s revelations had previously been ‘revealed to Abraham and Ishmael, to Isaac and Jacob and the tribes’; God had entrusted the same messages to Moses and Jesus too. ‘We discriminate against none of them,’ says the Qurān. In other words, the prophets of Judaism and Christianity were the same as those of Islam.
• In a parallel with early Christianity’s internal wrangles, establishing precisely what Muammad had been told, how it should be recorded and spread – and to whom – became a source of major concern after his death. The struggles were ferocious: of the first four men appointed to follow the Prophet as his representative, successor or ‘caliph’, three were assassinated.
• The Muslim conquests completed Europe’s shunt into the shadows that had begun with the invasions of the Goths, Huns and others two centuries earlier. What remained of the Roman Empire – now little more than Constantinople and its hinterland – shrivelled and teetered on the brink of complete collapse.
• The Muslims had taken over a world that was well ordered and studded with hundreds of cities of consumers – taxable citizens, in other words. As each fell into the hands of the caliphate, more resources and assets came under the control of the centre.
• As tastes became more sophisticated, so did appetites for information. Even if the traditional story that Chinese prisoners captured at the battle of Talas in 751 introduced paper-making skills to the Islamic world is overly romantic, it is certainly the case that from the later part of the eighth century the availability of paper made the recording, sharing and dissemination of knowledge wider, easier and quicker.
• Luxury items flooded in from abroad. Porcelain and stoneware from China were imported in considerable volume, and shaped local pottery trends, design and techniques – with the distinctive white glaze of Tang bowls becoming extremely popular. Advances in kiln technology helped production keep up with demand, as did developments in size: it is estimated that the largest Chinese kilns became capable of firing 12,000–15,000 pieces a time... Such was the quantity of merchandise flowing into the ports of the Persian Gulf that professional divers were employed to salvage jetsam around the harbours, discarded or fallen from cargo ships.
• This disdain for science and scholarship baffled Muslim commentators, who had great respect for Ptolemy and Euclid, for Homer and Aristotle. Some had little doubt what was to blame. Once, wrote the historian al-Masūdī, the ancient Greeks and the Romans had allowed the sciences to flourish; then they adopted Christianity. When they did so, they ‘effaced the signs of [learning], eliminated its traces and destroyed its paths’.92 Science was defeated by faith. It is almost the precise opposite of the world as we see it today: the fundamentalists were not the Muslims, but the Christians; those whose minds were open, curious and generous were based in the east – and certainly not in Europe.

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• But in the Viking age the bravest and toughest men did not head west; they headed east and south. Many made fortunes and won fame not just at home but in the new lands that they conquered. The mark that they left, furthermore, was not minimal and transient, as it was in North America. In the east, they were to found a new state, named after the traders, travellers and raiders who took to the great water systems linking the Baltic with the Caspian and Black Seas. These men were known as Rus’, or rhos, perhaps due to their distinctive red hair, or more likely thanks to their prowess with the oar. They were the fathers of Russia.
• Such captives were also turned into eunuchs and were highly valued. If you took Slavic twins, wrote one Arabic author in this period, and castrated one, he would certainly become more skilful and ‘more lively in intelligence and conversation’ than his brother – who would remain ignorant, foolish and exhibit the innate simple-mindedness of the Slavs. Castration was thought to purify and improve the Slavic mind.
• All over Italy, when they meet, people say to each other, ‘schiavo’, from a Venetian dialect. ‘Ciao’, as it is more commonly spelt, does not mean ‘hello’; it means ‘I am your slave’.
• The result was the reorientation of trade routes from the east, with a clear shift away from the continental hinterland through Khazaria and the Caucasus to the Red Sea. The land routes that had made Merv, Rayy and Baghdad blossom were supplanted by shipping along the maritime lanes. The boost to Fusā, Cairo and above all to Alexandria was unmistakable, with the middle classes mushrooming as these cities thrived.58 Byzantium was well placed, and soon began to enjoy the fruits of its new relations with the Fāimids: from the later tenth century,
• Kiev became a linchpin of the medieval world, evidenced by the marriage ties of the ruling house in the second half of the eleventh century. Daughters of Yaroslav the Wise, who reigned as Grand Prince of Kiev until 1054, married the King of Norway, the King of Hungary, the King of Sweden and the King of France. One son married the daughter of the King of Poland, while another took as his wife a member of the imperial family of Constantinople.

• The Italian city-states were quick to grasp that the seizure of Jerusalem would open up exciting commercial possibilities. Even before the Crusaders had reached the Holy City, Genoa, Pisa and Venice had fleets out on the water, making for Syria and Palestine.
• The riches at stake inevitably led to an intensification of rivalries and a new chapter in the medieval Great Game: the pursuit of primacy in the eastern Mediterranean at all costs. By the 1160s, competition between the Italian city-states was so acute that there were running battles between Venetians, Genoese and Pisans in the streets of Constantinople.
• As the Crusaders considered how to justify such actions and argued about what to do next, a golden opportunity presented itself when one of the claimants to the throne in Byzantium offered to reward the army generously if they helped him take power in Constantinople. The forces that had originally set out for Egypt under the impression that they were heading for Jerusalem found themselves by the walls of the Byzantine capital, weighing up their options.

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• In the late 1230s, after extraordinary successes in Central Asia masterminded by Ögödei, who became the Great Khan, or supreme leader, soon after his father’s death, the Mongols launched one of the most stunning attacks in the history of warfare, mounting a campaign that surpassed even that of Alexander the Great in terms of speed and scale.
• The terror the Mongols aroused was reflected in the name by which they were soon being referred to: Tatars, a reference to Tartarus – the abyss of torment in classical mythology.
• With remarkable irony, the new Egyptian overlords were men from similar stock to the Mongols themselves – nomads from the steppes. Just as the Abbāsid caliphate of Baghdad had been taken over by its slave soldiers recruited from the Turkic tribes on the steppes, so the same thing happened in the caliphate of Cairo in 1250. In the case of Egypt, the new masters known as Mamlūk, as a result of being largely descendants of slaves (mamalik) who had been taken from the tribal constellations north of the Black Sea and traded through the ports of the Crimea and the Caucasus to serve in the Egyptian military.

• Instinctively, the Mongols knew how to be great empire-builders: tolerance and careful administration had to follow up on military might.
• Shrewd decisions taken when it came to dealing with important potential allies paid off handsomely. In Russia, the blanket exemption of the church from all taxes and from military service was met with jubilation, just one example showing that sensitive handling could generate goodwill even after brutal conquest.
• Militarily dominant, politically astute and theologically tolerant, the Mongols’ template for success was far removed from our common perceptions of them. But, for all their efficiency, they were also lucky in their timing. In China, they came across a world that had seen population growth, economic expansion and technological developments following a sharp rise in agricultural productivity.17 In Central Asia, they found fractured statelets riven by rivalries and ripe for consolidation.
• Influences from the east even lay behind the hennin, the most distinctive fashion accessory of the Renaissance across Europe. The conical headgear favoured by ladies and so visible in the portraiture of the fourteenth century onwards appears to have been directly inspired by the distinctive hats worn at the Mongol court in this period.
• Such was the level of interaction and exchange that Persian and Arabic provided many loan words and idioms still common in modern Chinese.
• In fact something else entirely that entered the bloodstream had an even more radical impact: disease. An outbreak of plague surged through Asia, Europe and Africa threatening to annihilate millions. The Mongols had not destroyed the world, but it seemed quite possible that the Black Death would. <> As well as being home to livestock and nomads for thousands of years, the Eurasian steppe also forms one of the world’s great plague basins, with a string of linked foci stretching from the Black Sea as far as Manchuria.
• And yet, despite the horror it caused, the plague turned out to be the catalyst for social and economic change that was so profound that far from marking the death of Europe, it served as its making. The transformation provided an important pillar in the rise – and the triumph – of the west.
• The transformations triggered by the Black Death laid foundations that were to prove crucial for the long-term rise of north-western Europe. Although the effects of the divergence between parts of Europe would take time to evolve, the systemic flexibility, the openness to competition and, perhaps most importantly of all, the sense of awareness in the north that geography counted against them and that a strong work ethic was required in order to turn a profit, all laid the basis for the later transformation of the European economies in the early modern period.
• It is possible that these difficulties were made worse by a period of climatic change. Famine, unusual periods of drought coupled with cases of destructive flooding in China tell a powerful story of the impact that environmental factors had on economic growth. Evidence from sulphate spikes in ice-cores from the northern and southern hemispheres suggest that the fifteenth century was a period of widespread volcanic activity. This triggered global cooling, with knock-on effects across the steppe world, where intensifying competition for food and water supplies heralded a period of dislocation, especially in the 1440s.

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• (In 1498...) Some pearls were so large that they became famous in their own right – such as ‘La Peregrina’ (the ‘Pilgrim pearl’), which remains one of the largest single pearls ever found, and the similarly named ‘La Pelegrina’, famed for its unparalleled quality.
• Charles (V)’s good fortune was disruptive for other European leaders, who found themselves outgunned, outmanoeuvred and outjostled by a ruler determined to expand his power ever further. His wealth and influence stood in sharp contrast with those of figures like Henry VIII of England, whose income was positively embarrassing compared with that of the church in his own country – to say nothing of that of his Spanish peer.

• Economic contraction had forced lessons to be learnt, not the least of which was the need to control the tax base more vigilantly – something that in turn led to what has been called the ‘revival of monarchy’, where centralisation was as important from a monetary point of view as it was socially and politically
• The infrastructure necessary to support the horse trade was also lucrative. One quick-witted speculator invested in rest-houses along the main routes, establishing more than 1,500 in the space of fifteen years in the middle of the sixteenth century.
• The Mughals brought new ideas, tastes and styles with them. Miniature painting, long favoured by the Mongols and the Timurids, was now championed by the new rulers, who brought in master practitioners from far and wide to create a thriving school of visual arts. Watching wrestling became popular, as did pigeon racing, both favoured Central Asian pastimes.
• The Mayan Empire had also been flourishing before the arrival of the Europeans. ‘Then there was no sickness; they had then no aching bones; they had then no high fever; they had then no smallpox; they had then no burning chest; they had then no consumption. At that time the course of humanity was orderly. The foreigners made it otherwise when they arrived here. They brought shameful things when they came,’

• The capture four years later of the Madre de Deus, a Portuguese caravel, off the Azores as it returned from the East Indies laden with pepper, cloves, nutmeg, ebony, tapestries, silks, textiles, pearls and precious metal, made the point about seapower even more emphatically. The haul from this single ship, which was towed into Dartmouth harbour on the south coast, was reckoned to be worth half of England’s regular annual imports.
• The English, moreover, had support from the Muslims of North Africa in an attack on Cádiz in 1596 – an incident that is referred to at the very start of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. Such was the alignment of interests in this period that one modern commentator talks of the English and the Moors participating in a ‘jihad’ against Catholic Spain.
• Ultimately, England’s posturing was framed by a keen awareness that it was in a weak position to exploit the astonishing opportunities that had been created by the great changes of the early sixteenth century. Religious dispute and unfortunate timing had turned the country into the sworn enemy of the rising global power that Spain had become,
• The influence of the Silk Roads began to be felt in the arts. A thriving ceramics industry blossomed in Haarlem, Amsterdam and above all in Delft, heavily influenced by the look, feel and design of items imported from the east. Chinese visual themes dominated, while the characteristic blue and white wares developed centuries earlier by potters in the Persian Gulf, which had become popular in China and in the Ottoman Empire, were adopted so widely that they became the distinctive feature of Dutch ceramics as well.
• One reason why the domination of Africa, Asia and the Americas was possible was the centuries of European practice in building fortifications that were all but impregnable. Castle-building had been the staple of European society since the Middle Ages, with thousands of spectacular strongholds springing up across the continent... Europeans were world leaders in building fortresses and in storming them. It was striking how the European insistence on constructing imposing sites that could be secured from the inside was a source of bemusement to locals.
• It was not for nothing that world war and the worst genocide in history had their origins and execution in Europe; these were the latest chapters in a long-running story of brutality and violence... Similarly, although the names of scientists like Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton and Leonhard Euler have become famous to generations of schoolchildren, it can be all too easy to forget that some of their most important work was on the trajectory of projectiles and understanding the causes of deviation to enable artillery to be more accurate.
• In that sense, seminal works like Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan were quintessential texts that explained the rise of the west. Only a European author could have concluded that the natural state of man was to be in a constant state of violence; and only a European author would have been right.
• States with more urban centres had a considerable advantage over those with large rural populations. It was less time-consuming, easier and more efficient to gather taxes from cities, not least since the velocity of commercial exchange was so much greater than in the countryside. Densely populated areas also produced more reliable income streams and were less risky to lend to. England and the Dutch Republic could borrow more at better rates than their commercial and political competitors.

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• This in turn meant that the gap between rich and poor was never as acute as it became in Europe because money was redistributed and recirculated more widely. These values to some extent inhibited growth: as a general rule, teaching and stipulations about legacies meant that families found it hard to accumulate capital over successive generations because inheritance was progressive and egalitarian; in Europe, primogeniture concentrated resources in the hands of one child, and paved the way for great fortunes to be built up.
• Expenditure on the navy rose so sharply that it soon consumed nearly a fifth of the entire national budget.15 The process was overseen by Samuel Pepys, whose very personal diaries give little sense of the military and geopolitical shift that was taking place – or of the scale of the change running through shipyards up and down the country.
• The maritime revolution was based on three separate observations. The first was that specialised, heavy vessels were more effective than light cruisers.
• in 1666, nearly 10 per cent of the navy’s senior commanders were killed in a single engagement. As a result of such bruising encounters, naval tactics were systematically re-evaluated.
• The incentivising transparency of this meritocratic system was further enhanced by a system that rewarded those who had served for longest in the most important capacities. It was broadly identical to the organisation put in place in the earliest days of Islam and which had proved so effective during the Muslim conquests.
• Yale had been in the right place at the right time. In the 1680s, the Qing court in China lifted its restrictions on foreign trade, leading to a surge in exports of tea, porcelain and Chinese sugar. As a result, ports like Madras and Bombay were not only important trade centres in their own right, but became staging posts in a new and vibrant global trading network.24 The late seventeenth century marked the start of a new era of contacts between Europe and China. These were not confined to commerce. The mathematician Gottfried Leibniz, who developed the binary system, was able to hone his ideas thanks to texts about Chinese arithmetic theories sent to him by a Jesuit friend who had gone to live in Beijing towards the end of the seventeenth century.
• But the trump card that proved unbeatable was that of geography. England – or Britain after the union with Scotland in 1707 – had a natural barrier protecting it from its rivals: the sea. This was helpful in terms of dealing with military threat, but it was a godsend when it came to government expenditure. With no land frontiers to defend, Britain’s military expenditure was a fraction of its continental rivals’.
• It was as though Britain was vaccinated from the contagious problems of Europe that saw seemingly never-ending warfare as states on the mainland squabbled and fought in almost every possible permutation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
• An empire was being born.<> Its genesis marked the end of a chapter. The passing of most of India into British hands ensured that the overland trade routes were starved of oxygen, as buying and spending power, assets and attention were decisively diverted to Europe. The decline in the importance of cavalry in the face of yet more improvements in military technology and tactics, particularly relating to firepower and heavy artillery, also played a role in depressing the volumes passing along the roads that had criss-crossed Asia for millennia. Central Asia, like southern Europe before it, began to fade.

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• in the first half of the nineteenth century Russia’s eastern frontier was not in Asia at all, but somewhere else altogether: in North America. Colonies had first been established across the Barents Sea in what is now Alaska, with communities then founded on the west coast of Canada and beyond, as far south as Fort Ross in Sonoma County, California, in the early 1800s.
• For Russia, the terms imposed at the peace talks of Paris in 1856 were nothing short of disastrous. Britain and France collaborated to tie a noose around their rival’s neck: stripped of hard-won gains in the Caucasus, Russia suffered the ignominy of being deprived of military access to the Black Sea, which was declared neutral and closed to all warships. Likewise, the coastline was to be demilitarised, free from fortifications and stores of armaments.48
  The aim was to humiliate Russia and to strangle its ambitions. It had the opposite effect – this was a Versailles moment, where the settlement was counter-productive and had dangerous consequences. Quite apart from the fact that the settlement was so punitive and restrictive that the Russians immediately tried to slip its shackles.
• As it was, 1914 brought the showdown that Queen Victoria had anticipated decades earlier: everything, she had said, boiled down to ‘a question of Russian or British supremacy in the world’.111 Britain could not afford to let Russia down.
• And so, like a nightmarish game of chess where all possible moves are bad ones, the world went to war.
• Answers were needed to explain the sacrifice of brilliant figures like Patrick Shaw Stewart, a scholar whose superlative achievements at school, at university and in business had astonished his contemporaries as well as his correspondent, Lady Diana Manners, to whom he sent letters rich with erotic quotations in Latin and Greek.

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• Arnold Wilson, a British army lieutenant who was in charge of the security of the site, sent a coded cable back home with the news. It simply said: ‘See Psalm 104, verse 15 second sentence.’36 The verse entreated the good Lord to bring forth from the earth oil to make faces shine with happiness.
• Arnold Wilson complained he had to spend time bridging the cultural gap between the British ‘who cannot say what they mean and Persians who do not always mean what they say’. The British, he declared, saw a contract as an agreement that would stand up in court; the Persians simply saw it as an expression of intentions.
• The discovery of oil made the piece of paper signed by the Shah in 1901 one of the most important documents of the twentieth century. For while it laid the basis for a multi-billion-dollar business to grow – the Anglo-Persian Oil Company eventually became British Petroleum – it also paved the way for political turmoil.
• On a human level, Knox D’Arcy’s concession is an amazing tale of business acumen and triumph against the odds; but its global significance is on a par with Columbus’ trans-Atlantic discovery of 1492. Then too, immense treasures and riches had been expropriated by the conquistadors and shipped back to Europe.
• Conversion to oil made British vessels faster and better than their rivals; but the most important advantage was that they could stay out at sea. Not for nothing did Lord Curzon give a speech in London in November 1918, less than two weeks after the armistice had been agreed, in which he told fellow dinners that ‘the Allied cause had floated to victory upon a wave of oil’. A leading French senator agreed jubilantly. Germany had paid too much attention to iron and coal, he said, and not enough to oil. Oil was the blood of the earth, he said, and it was the blood of victory.
• In the case of Mesopotamia, this was done by forging a new country that was given the name of Iraq. It was a hotch-potch made up of three former Ottoman provinces that were profoundly different in history, religion and geography: Basra looked southwards towards India and the Gulf; Baghdad was closely linked with Persia; Mosul naturally connected to Turkey and Syria.21 The amalgam satisfied no one except London... The fact that he was a Sunnī Muslim where the local population was predominantly Shīa was thought to be something that could be smoothed over with the introduction of the new trappings of a nation, such as guard-changing ceremonials, a new flag (designed by Gertrude Bell) and a treaty that recognized Iraqi ‘national sovereignty’,
• The two very different outlooks were perfectly captured at a dinner in Baghdad in 1920, just as the shape of the new Near and Middle East was becoming clear. One of those attending was the dynamic and fiercely intelligent Gertrude Bell, who had been recruited at an early stage in the First World War to work for British intelligence, and was an astute observer of Arab politics. Rest assured, she told Jafar al-Askarī, soon to be appointed Prime Minister of the new country of Iraq, that ‘complete independence is what we [the British] ultimately wish to give’. ‘My lady,’ he replied, ‘complete independence is never given – always taken.'

• Of the 101 members of the supreme military leadership, all but ten were arrested; of the ninety-one detained, all but nine were shot. These included three of the five marshals of the Soviet Union and two of its admirals, as well as the entire senior air force personnel, every head of every military district, and almost every divisional commander. The Red Army was brought to its knees.24 In the circumstances Stalin needed breathing space to rebuild. The German approach was a godsend.
• It was this sense of unease and uncertainty that led to the decision that was to cost the lives of millions of German soldiers, millions of Russians – and millions of Jews: the invasion of the Soviet Union. In typical fashion, when Hitler announced his latest venture at the end of July 1940, he dressed it up in terms of an ideological battle. It was time to seize the chance, he told General Jodl, to eliminate Bolshevism.60 In fact, what was at stake were raw materials, and above all, food.
• But there was another model that Hitler regularly referred to as well, with which he saw parallels and to which he looked for inspiration: the United States. Germany needed to do what the European settlers in the New World had done to the native Americans, Hitler told Alfred Rosenberg, the newly appointed Reichsminister for the Occupied Eastern Territories: the local population had to be driven back – or exterminated. The Volga, he proclaimed, would be Germany’s Mississippi, that is to say, a frontier between the civilised world and the chaos beyond.
• Numb from shock, he slumped into a catatonic state, leaving it to Molotov to make public announcements. ‘An act of treachery, unprecedented in the history of civilised nations, has taken place,’ Molotov announced gravely on the television and on the radio. But have no doubts: ‘the enemy will be crushed and victory will be ours’. There was no mention of the fact that the Soviet Union had been dancing with the devil and now the time had come to pay up.
• ‘The German Military and Economic Position’ and ‘The German Supply Problem on the Eastern Front’. They calculated that each 200 miles of advance would require an additional 35,000 freight cars, or a reduction of 10,000 tons in daily deliveries to the front line. The speed of the advance was proving to be a major problem.
• Having predicted that millions would die from food shortages and famine, the Germans now began to identify those who should suffer. First in line were Russian prisoners. There is no need to feed them, wrote Göring dismissively; it is not as though we are bound by any international obligations.62 On 16 September 1941, he gave the order to withdraw food supplies from ‘non-working’ prisoners of war

• made in early 1947 that Britain would withdraw within sixteen months, creating panic as a result. It was a disastrous decision, as Winston Churchill, voted out of office after the war, told the House of Commons. ‘Will it not be a terrible disgrace to our name and record if . . . we allow one fifth of the population of the globe . . . to fall into chaos and into carnage?’
• Mossadegh turned the screw, giving British employees of Anglo-Iranian a week to pack and to get out of Iran in September 1951. To top it off, Ayatollah Kashani declared a national day of ‘hatred against the British government’.  (Iran)
• Money was spent liberally elsewhere. According to one eyewitness, the flood of American currency into Teheran was so great that the value of the dollar relative to the rial fell by nearly 40 per cent during the summer of 1953.
• These events seemed to herald a near-certain expansion of the Soviet Union’s interests. Iran, the Russian supremo Nikita Khrushchev told President John F. Kennedy at a summit in 1961, would soon drop like a rotten fruit into Soviet hands – a prospect that seemed likely given that even the head of the Iranian secret police was known to be plotting against the Shah.
• The Cold War often prompts thought of the Berlin Wall and eastern Europe as the principal arena for confrontation between the superpowers. But it was the swathe of territory within the Soviet Union’s underbelly where the real game of Cold War chess was played out.
• The problem, of course, was that it did not take long for leaders in the countries concerned to realise that they could play the two superpowers off against each other – and extract increasingly large benefits from both as a result. Indeed, when President Eisenhower visited Kabul in person at the end of the 1950s, he was asked point-blank to match the aid that was being given to his country by Moscow.48 Refusal had consequences, but so did acquiescence.
• A scheme designed to help both Iranian and American poultry farmers by introducing US chicks to Iran had calamitous results too, with the unavailability of suitable feed and the lack of vaccination having consequences that were all too predictable. The embarrassing failure to understand how the water table in Iran worked led to wells that drained underground reservoirs and destroyed the viability of many farms across the country.
• Iran was also supplied in large volume by Israel, which took the view that Saddam Hussein had to be stopped at all costs. The willingness of the Iranians and the Israelis to do business with each other was in many ways surprising, especially given the derogatory way that Khomeini in particular regularly talked about Jews and about Israel. ‘Islam and the Islamic people met their first saboteur in the Jewish people who are at the source of all anti-Islamic libels and intrigues,’ he wrote in 1970.84 Iran and Israel were now cast as unlikely bedfellows thanks to Saddam Hussein’s intervention in the Gulf.
• Diplomatic pressure on the Soviet Union, which included a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, failed to deliver any tangible results. From Washington’s point of view, there was little to be hopeful about – until it dawned on policymakers that there was an obvious move to make: to back Saddam.
  As such, however, it was highly embarrassing that Iraq’s production capability, as one senior American officer pointed out, was ‘primarily [derived] from Western firms, including possibly a US foreign subsidiary’. It did not take much to realise that this raised uncomfortable questions about complicity in Saddam’s acquisition and use of chemical weapons.