Abstract
This article offers critical engagement with ideas of shared heritage, considering representation of the silk roads in Europe as a counterpoint to their representation in China. Often cast as a ‘bridge’ between ‘East and West’ or ‘China and Rome’ (e.g. UNESCO’s description of the Silk Road Heritage Corridors), the silk roads are regularly depicted as an abstraction of interconnection. And as an abstraction, the idea of shared heritage is often emptied of its potential to communicate greater understanding of the past, respect for cultural difference and co-dependency, or to invite reflection on forms of community constituted through shared histories. Exploring the Sinicization of the silk roads, we argue that much of the rhetoric of shared heritage is deceptively exclusive. We turn to consider the depiction of these histories of trade within Europe, offering a discursive analysis of metatexts around the United Nations World Tourism Organization/European Commission Western Silk Road tourism project, with some discussion of the representation of ancient trade at different European museums. We argue that an enduring legacy of the silk roads’ romanticized image and the transcription of this into commercial tourism inhibit their potential as a useful metanarrative for the future because it fails to communicate the complexity of the past, particularly histories of violence and inequality. However, considering recent depiction of the amber roads, we argue that histories of trade can nevertheless be mobilized towards a more nuanced understanding of the past and a critical reflection on the past and present.
Keywords
The so-called silk roads spark the imagination. Yet they do so largely through abstraction. As noted by James Millward, while the phrase ‘silk roads’ evokes a precise image – ‘We imagine strings of laden camels laboring … across grasslands, deserts, and mountain passes, stopping at oasis cities where bazaars overflow with silks and spices’ 1 – the actual geography or history represented by such images remains vague. In referring to ‘neither silk nor a road’, 2 it is a poor term for the complex network of routes, and flows of people, produce, and ideas, which it has come to name. Yet, celebratory rhetoric regularly frames this imaginative potential as a key value – the ability to embody abstractions of historic interconnection. As noted by Tim Winter, 3 referring to China’s One Belt One Road/Belt and Road Initiative (OBOR/BRI): ‘reviving the idea of the silk roads … gives vitality to histories of transnational, even transcontinental, trade and people-people encounters as a shared heritage’. China is actively mobilizing this idea of the silk roads as a shared heritage, partly so that it can characterize the OBOR/BRI as a ‘rejuvenation’ of these ancient routes, and offer a more romantic vision of globalization projects.
The silk roads are inherently a history which exceeds national borders. Framing them as a shared heritage is often characterized as a provocative challenge to Euro-centric histories, xenophobia, and nationalism, something which ‘encourage[s] a more global historical viewpoint’. 4 Indeed, Peter Frankopan’s popular history of the silk roads is subtitled A New History of the World. 5 Across such discourses, the silk roads tend to be cast as ‘a positive past’, 6 offering blueprints for a shared future. 7
Such rhetoric is particularly clear around the surge in silk-road-themed tourism and cultural heritage branding. Consider the United Nations World Tourism Organization’s (UNWTO) statement that presenting the silk roads as shared heritage ‘can contribute to a wider goal of promoting mutual understanding across cultures and diffusing the growing mistrust present in today’s world’. 8 This proposes that educating people about the silk roads encourages social stability and peace. Indeed, it states that promotion of silk roads tourism can ‘be beneficial in linking the West and East in a manner that could neutralize the current wave of exclusivist discourses’. 9 This is ambitious, and such discourses invite interrogation particularly when presented as self-evident.
Some of this, cynically, is marketing. A paragraph away in the document just mentioned, one of the main opportunities presented by silk roads tourist destinations in Europe is ‘to capture the major Chinese cultural tourism market. It is perceived that Chinese visitors would find attractions that high-light the linkages between China and Western Silk Road destinations to be highly desirable.’ 10 This is quite revealing: having just celebrated the silk roads as interlinking cultures across Eurasia, it is re-articulated as an interconnection between one nation – China – and a generic ‘West’. It tacitly proposes that Chinese tourists do not seek an encounter with something different, but with the familiar – Western history told so that it tells them of China. Partially a response to the numbers of Chinese tourists to Europe (prior to COVID-19), this is also the broader Sinicization of the silk roads: the idea that they are owed to China, despite the rhetoric of transnational shared heritage.
In this article, we build on the work of scholars arguing for a more critical response to the mobilization of the silk roads. 11 In his discussion of the evolution of the idea of the silk roads from von Richthofen to China’s OBOR/BRI, Winter notes in his conclusion that ‘even when cast in its romanticized forms it seems to have escaped the now familiar critiques of orientalism and cultural imperialism’. 12 It is precisely to such critiques that we seek to contribute.
We begin with a theoretical discussion of tensions within the idea of shared heritage. As with any concept of community, shared heritage is not transparent. At the heart of this is the question of who shares what heritage, and what sharing means for those involved. We explore such questions using the silk roads as a touchstone. The silk roads are regularly described as a ‘bridge’ between ‘East and West’ and often specifically ‘China and Rome’ (e.g. UNESCO’s description of the Silk Road Heritage Corridors). 13 Scholars have been critical of China’s appropriation of the silk roads, 14 and the extent to which other countries’ depictions increasingly reiterate this narrative. 15 Exploring the Sinicization of the silk roads, we argue that discourses of shared heritage can be deceptively exclusive.
But there has been far less research on the depiction of these routes within Europe. 16 Not only as the so-called Western ‘Terminus’, 17 but as the origin of the concept of the silk roads, and as a region with fraught histories of empire-building through trans-national trade, greater consideration of the depiction of these routes within Europe is needed. Thus, we turn to discuss how the silk roads are framed in grey literature around the UNWTO/European Commission Western Silk Road (henceforth WSR) project, with discussion of the representation of ancient trade at different European museums. In the WSR, the elision of religious histories (such as Islam and Judaism) or goods originating within Europe (such as amber, glass, and salt) significantly limits Europe’s place within the silk roads in problematic ways. This illustrates how, even when incorporating a diversity of perspectives and regions, the communication of shared heritage can be rendered problematic by over-simplification. We then consider the depiction of a strand of the silk roads – the amber roads – at a special exhibition at the National Museum in Vilnius, Lithuania. Its more nuanced engagement with ancient trade illustrates the potential to promote wider understanding of the complexities of shared heritage and to promote critical reflection on the entanglement of cultures and peoples, past, present, and future.
The shared heritage of the silk roads?
Recent discussions of shared heritage partly rearticulate UNESCO’s concept of world heritage. Behind this earlier idea was a conscious intention to take ‘what used to be uniquely national jewels of the world’s nation-states, and crucial to their formation … reinterpret[ing them] from the point of view of humankind as a whole’. 18 This was an attempt to foster wider appreciation of different cultures (countering racism and ethnonationalism), by encouraging the perspective that despite their vibrant diversity all cultures are an integral and equal part of the history of humanity. This was part of the wider project of the UN to create a global community in the aftermath of WWII, the Holocaust, and in the midst of de-colonization. But such ideological foundations have not translated particularly well into how world heritage is regularly perceived or mobilized (in which UNESCO recognition regularly turns sites back into ‘national jewels’). 19
But the aspirational impulse to trans-nationalize history continues. For example, Kwame Anthony Appiah argues that a cornerstone of creating ‘cosmopolitan’ future communities involves normalizing how all cultural heritage is viewed, not as ‘an expression of the Volksgeist or national spirit’ of one people, but as ‘part of the common heritage of humanity’. 20 Histories of interconnection – of trade, migration, and cultural flows – challenge essentialist and purist perceptions of nations, cultures, and peoples. Such interconnections draw attention to populations’ hybridity and historic formation through interaction but also their historic mutual dependency. And such an internationalist perspective, it is hoped, is the foundation of greater knowledge of different cultures, respect for different peoples, and therefore a commitment to build peaceful shared futures. The silk roads are an ideal vehicle for such cosmopolitan visions of shared heritage, because they are the reason for much of the heritage that is shared across Afro-Eurasia, where cultures and peoples were never in isolation. 21
But we should foreground that ‘national jewels’ vs ‘humanity’s common heritage’ are competing notions of shared heritage. Despite sounding like a vision of heritage which transcends borders, heritage-which-is-shared is also a cornerstone of exclusive communities: what regularly defines a nation or a race as ‘a people’ is shared culture, language, religion, territory, lineage – history in different forms. 22 Such communities are exclusive because they exceptionalize these histories (claiming them as evidence of the superiority of one group over another). Founding communities on ideas of shared history – and destiny – has been central to ethnocentrism and racism, and more broadly nationalism, colonialism and imperialism, within and beyond Europe. 23 We should thus be cautious with regarding every evocation of shared heritage as positive.
The structure of a relationship created by shared heritage always invites interrogation. What heritage is shared, by whom, why, and with what repercussions? Conceptually: is it a hierarchical or exclusive relationship?; or does it attempt to equalize? Practically: what history has led to this heritage being shared?; what forms of trade, embrace, desire, pragmatism, gradual acculturation, forced assimilation, ethnic cleansing, or other forms of agency or violence, went into making it so? Critical reflection on forms of inequality and power, and sensitivities to the ways cultural heritage can be mobilized to support prejudice and violence, must be central to the mobilization of shared heritage if it is to have an ethical potential.
We can explore such patterns through the discursive framing of the silk roads. It is worth recalling that the term ‘silk roads’ is a modern invention, and from inception problematically linked with European colonial discourses homogenizing and exoticizing the Orient, and marking it as consumable. Recent research has identified that Seidenstraßen predates German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen (to whom it is often credited), though he made it a more widespread academic term. 24 Just like China’s OBOR/BRI, Richthofen turned to the past as offering a romanticized precedent: likening European colonial infrastructure projects to these ancient routes. But Richthofen used this term narrowly for the movement of silk through Xinjiang; he called wider networks more prosaically Hauptstrassen (main routes), Verkehr (communication/movement), and Handelsstrassen (trade routes). It was his Swedish student Sven Hedin who popularized the term beyond academia when he published The Silk Road in 1936, detailing his travels in Xinjiang. It is from this travel book that some of the iconography of the silk roads originates: desert landscapes and camels. Besides the title there is little mention of these routes, but Hedin was ‘first to invoke [Richthofen’s] “Silk Road” for its romantic aura as a means of marketing a book (emphasis added)’. 25 This is the inception of the silk roads as an affective, commodifiable, idea. Many of the expanding discourses of the silk roads continue this vein, making them a metaphor, not a specific history, of ‘peaceful trade’ and ‘people-to-people encounters’. 26 It is as a metaphor that much of its imaginative potential resides, yet its abstraction from historic specificity is fundamentally problematic, because descriptions often never get round to communicating what actually was shared across continents through these routes.
This is clear in China’s positioning of the Ancient Silk Road as a precedent for its New Silk Road, the OBOR/BRI. Characterizing the latter as an attempt to rejuvenate the former capitalizes upon the romantic aura, mobilizing it to rose-tint Chinese investment and geopolitics, though there is no resemblance between this contemporary project and the ancient routes. 27 But the OBOR/BRI has led to a wider retelling and promotion of China’s (recently revised) narrative of what the silk roads were, and their origins. 28
The history of the silk roads in Chinese discourses is that it was initiated around 138
Historical inaccuracy aside, this narrative is politically endorsed within China, because the silk roads’ romantic aura allows the CCP to liken the OBOR/BRI to a return to a lost golden age of Chinese hegemony in world affairs. This is clear in a CCTV documentary, which offers a potted history: [From their inception] ‘the Silk Road and Maritime Silk Road became associated with a particular spirit’ that defined global history from the Han dynasty in the third century
It is unsurprising that the Chinese narrative is prevalent in Chinese texts and museums, but they are widespread far beyond. While the UNESCO webpage introducing the silk roads begins with an acknowledgement that ‘the vast trade networks of the Silk Roads carried more than just merchandise and precious commodities’, the remainder details the history of the domestication of silk in China, and its export along the silk roads.
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It hedges its language by describing Zhang Qian as ‘the man who is often credited with founding [the Silk Roads] by opening up the first route from China to the West (emphasis added)’, when he was ‘sent to the West in 139
Facticity aside, it is worth exploring the repercussions of this narrative. Characterizing the silk roads as a Chinese invention allows for appropriation of these routes and the influence they had across Eurasia: they may be shared but they are owed to China. China’s ownership of these routes is reinforced through the focus on silk, characterized as though it was a uniquely Chinese export (the earliest examples of silk in the Near East and Europe may in fact be wild silk, from India). 40 This appropriation is clear on the UNESCO page where the domestication of silk in China is presented as the origin and history of these routes – implying ‘the history and civilizations of the Eurasian peoples’, 41 resulted from this single luxury commodity. This also shifts focus away from cultural, commodity, or population flows into China, reinforcing the idea of its cultural (and ethnic) purity and homogeneity. 42 The downplaying of any civilizations other than Rome and China elides the crucial roles of India, Persia, or Africa, as well as smaller states and nomadic peoples. This is also why scholars critique euphemizing this complex network as a ‘bridge’, 43 as though the entirety of Central Asia was a chasm that was vaulted between singular civilizations East (China) and West (Rome). When described as ‘world history’ or ‘global history’, it absents the histories of the peoples and cultures of the Americas, Australasia or the Pacific, from this history of the world. Finally, the closing of the silk roads in the 15th century allows for them to be dissociated from European trade expansion and colonialism – indeed, the repeated assertion that the silk roads were inherently ‘peaceful’ disconnects them from empire-building generally (including China’s military conquest of Xibu/Xinjiang), as well as from religious wars. It also elides the prevalence of organized slavery in the production of goods (notably textiles), as well as the long history of transportation of enslaved people throughout these routes. 44 The recurring assertion that ancient trade was somehow always peaceful is highly problematic for its euphemizing of colonialism, empire, slavery, and war, as benign endeavours to facilitate ‘exchanges’, rather than means of forcibly securing or controlling them. But this is also part of the shared heritage of their legacies.
One of the most significant aspects of the silk roads that should be challenged is the notion that they self-evidently refer to a positive past, a romantic history of peaceful interconnections. Because they encompass such a vast history of movement (of people, things, and ideas), the silk roads are tautologically shared heritage. But numerous descriptions remain tautological by not going into detail – the silk roads ‘connected East and West’ and thus symbolizes ‘interconnection’. 45 Here too is history turned into a symbol or metaphor: the silk roads ‘link[ed] East and West and [thus] show the connections amongst cultures’. 46 Despite the recurring reference to such connections, what these were and are often remain unexplained.
This problematic tautological frame obscures the silk roads as a complex history of sociocultural entanglement, profoundly troubling the very idea of East and West as clear cultural binaries. 47 This is the history of the spread of foods (melons from Africa, apples from Kazakhstan, wine from the fertile crescent). It is how the movement of Buddhism also introduced chairs to East Asia. It is the history of how medical theories in both Ancient Greece and China have origins in India. It is the spread of stringed musical instruments, and domesticated horses. It is the reason why phonetic alphabets from Latin to Hebrew to Mongolian have common origins in Phoenician and Egyptian hieroglyphs. It is a history of human migrations, intermingling, genocides; the spread of devastating military technologies (catapults, gunpowder), of disease (bubonic plague, smallpox), and of medicine (inoculation, analgesic opium). It is also a history of slavery – the transatlantic slave trade being a continuation of the long history of the transportation of enslaved peoples, from Africa and elsewhere, throughout these routes. European colonial expansion grew out of attempts to find shorter maritime routes to the Indies, thus earlier silk roads directly segue into 18th- to 19th-century empire-building and much of the world and its conflicts as we know them today. 48 This complexity and concrete examples must be integral to how the silk roads are imagined, understood, and communicated – moving away from abstract caravanserai crossing deserts and traced instead through so much that has been and is beautiful, tragic, and banal, in so many interlinked cultures.
The silk roads are rich in potential as shared heritage in the cosmopolitan sense, but not in their tautological or romantic renditions. Within them are the history of the coevolution of cultures, the blurring of populations, and the profound repercussions of such encounters across millennia. Critically discussing them could help challenge discourses of cultural superiority, civilization vs barbarism, cultural or racial purity, or the idea that the challenges of migration are particular to the 20th and 21st centuries. In effect, they speak of the cosmopolitanism of the past – that peoples always/already culturally (and physically) impacted upon one another and their environments, and much that we might celebrate or mourn of history is a result of this. But to be a vehicle for more ethical futures, depiction of the silk roads cannot exsect such aspects from their telling.
Which brings us back to the ethics of shared heritage, and the central question of who shares what with whom. So-called ‘difficult heritage’ 49 – histories of war, ethnic cleansing, and colonialism – are also forms of shared heritage. It is not only human suffering which makes them difficult, but that they are sites of contention. This is particularly important for post-colonial heritage approaches which hold that awareness and respect for difficult histories is a foundation for creating meaningful understanding and more fundamental respect between peoples, by acknowledging the mistakes and violence of the past, and from this, possibilities for more egalitarian futures. The violence of the past cannot be addressed or redressed – or prevented from repetition – by being occluded from the histories we tell.
Applied to the silk roads, this requires this history to be simultaneously that of peaceful trade as well as slavery, of flows of culture and colonialism, of coexistence and violence. It requires critical engagement with the fact that histories of trade always already were (and in our own times, are) histories of inequality, oppression, politics, and competition. Understood as the history of human encounters – the movement of peoples and things – the proposition that this was ‘invented’ by one people, let alone one person, a mere two thousand years ago, should be seen as non-sensical and offensive. Applied to shared heritage, such critical heritage approaches draw attention to the importance of preserving complexity, not polishing it over, if articulations of shared heritage are to retain their ethical potential, and be the basis of better shared futures.
Considering these points, we turn now to the so-called Western Terminus, querying both the depiction of these routes, and Europe’s place within them.
The Western Terminus: Europe’s silk roads
There has been far less academic attention to the depiction of the silk roads at sites within Europe. The UNWTO WSR tourism project has received some mention, but limited critical discussion. The WSR is a vast in-development project founded in 2016, originally set to incorporate sites across Italy, Spain, Croatia, Romania, Greece, Armenia, Türkiye, Bulgaria, and the Russian Federation. 50 Winter mentions it as among numerous projects burgeoning around the surge of interest in the silk roads. 51 Others have focused on how particular sites can situate themselves to benefit from this tourism project, 52 but these largely romanticize these routes. This is clear even in Ioanna Mytaftsi and Christos Tsironis’ exploration of how Thessaloniki might develop a ‘dark tourism’ route, where these are treated as separate categories: Thessaloniki has a ‘dark history’ – sites of massacres, prisons, and the point from which 50,000 Greek Jews were gathered before being sent to Auschwitz – that can also be billed as worthy of visit as one travels ‘along the great cultural route that is the “Silk Road”’. 53 Few have approached the depiction of the silk roads as needing critical querying, nor have offered critical consideration of the depiction of Europe or the West within the WSR.
There have been few sites in Europe promoted as being linked to the silk roads until recently. Much of this (e.g. Spain’s Ruta de Seda in Valencia) has been in response to China’s OBOR/BRI project – note the courting of Chinese tourists in the introduction of our article. There is significance to this absence. Europe’s place as an integral part of the silk roads has been largely absent from images of caravanserai and spices. Neither the cinnamon nor apples in strudel are regarded as a legacy of the silk roads, nor the fact that Egyptian Pharaohs wore Baltic amber eulogized in romantic images of ancient trade. 54 The silk roads have long been symbolically exotic to a Euro-centric normality.
Highlighting such silk roads connections within Europe is thus extremely important: rather than re-centring Europe, it could help foreground its interdependency with other regions, cultures, peoples. Rather than European ‘civilization’ being exceptionalized, its entanglement with cultures and technologies flowing along these routes could be emphasized. Of course, some individual nations within Europe do this more or less explicitly at different museums (or within their curricula). An illustrative example here is Poland, which has a long and complex history as a centre of trade. While the Amber Museum in Gdansk largely focuses upon how the amber trade was an important part of the local economy (tacitly keeping its significance at a local level rather than illustrating its place in an extensive network), parts of the National Museum in Krakow emphasize how the long history of trade with the Ottoman Empire and Persia was the source of silks, distinct oriental patterns and styles, and even peacock feathers, in Polish traditional clothing. 55 But this is not explicitly described as placing Poland on the silk roads, nor would most people situate Poland as part of that imaginative geography.
Depiction and discussion of the silk roads within Europe has potential to be profoundly equalizing, to trouble normal/exotic binaries and their inherent Orientalism. To do this, however, it cannot simply replace a Euro-centric narrative with a Sino-centric one, because neither is accurate, nor an ethical form of shared heritage. And, it has to avoid romanticizing these routes (particularly given Europe’s own histories of violence). In this, European narratives have to incorporate and acknowledge the histories of other regions (as well as different regions within Europe), without simply adopting the Sinicized narrative. This is, of course, a challenge.
The UNWTO Western Silk Road Project
The WSR could address some of these challenges, as a trans-national tourism project aiming at highlighting the ‘Silk Road heritage scattered throughout Europe and its close vicinity’. 56 Most metatexts produced by the UNWTO indicate its future directions with only a handful of sites in operation, or utilizing the wider brand. 57 Focusing on its grey literature, we discuss its framing of the silk roads, and examples which are not mentioned for inclusion. If not political in intent, such inclusions and exclusions are political in effect, sculpting how Europe and the silk roads are imagined and presented.
Examining the WSR Roadmap indicates ways in which the promise of ‘showing the connections between cultures … [and] promotion of shared heritage’
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is not always clearly fulfilled. Too often, the silk roads remain abstractions, failing to actually illustrate any particular connections between cultures. While the WSR Roadmap includes sites across countries in the Mediterranean, Eastern Europe, and the Near East, some of this diversity is deceptive. The description of each country’s connection to the silk roads falls into three categories:
having a direct connection to the ancient Romans (e.g. the incorporation of the Roman Emperors and Danube Wine Route traversing Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania); having a historic silk industry (e.g. Valencia, Spain; Venice, Italy; and Soufli, Greece); being placed in the imaginative geography of the silk road as a linear route between Europe and an ambiguous ‘East’ (e.g. the description of Armenia as having long ‘served as a gateway for traders travelling east and west’).
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This is reinforced by the use of ‘silk road’ in the singular (as though this was a single route), and a general absence of a wider north/south geography for these routes (e.g. more countries within Europe beyond the Mediterranean, or, particularly notable given the focus on Rome, the inclusion of North African countries such as Egypt).
Though China is not regularly explicitly mentioned, this pattern problematically reiterates the Sinicization of the silk roads, discussed previously. It replicates linking the silk roads with Rome (though they long predate it), the focus on silk as a precious commodity, and to some extent the presumptive situating of everywhere linearly between China and Rome as a ‘bridge’ between the two.
However, there is latent diversity within the WSR Roadmap which creates a dyssynchronous history for the silk roads. This is a side effect of different countries presenting slightly different takes on what – or where, or when – the silk roads were. The section on Armenia, for example, contains the following: Besides trade, Armenia greatly benefited from the exchange of scientific knowledge and technologies. Exceptional examples of scientific exchange favoured by the Silk Road include a 6200
The incorporation of the regional diversity of the silk roads creates a tacitly more nuanced depiction of these routes within and beyond Europe, challenging forms of Euro-centrism, but such incorporation also works against the Sino-centric narrative at the same time. Implicitly, different perspectives on what, or when, or where, the silk roads were are woven into the WSR project via the absence of a singular story about them. Celaleddin-i Rumi rubs shoulders with women in baroque brocades, and Copper Age Armenian astronomers are but the flick of a page away from the Vikings. However, this is partly because there is no coherent history of the silk roads being presented so as to connect these examples – in fact, no clear history is told. As a trans-national tourism project, the implicit nature of this more complex history is a failure to communicate explicitly.
Largely, the silk roads are reducted to geography (the European Mediterranean and its immediate East), or commodity (that is, silk). There is also an obvious tendency to depict the silk roads as a simple positive past. There are recurring assertions of the peacefulness of all silk roads endeavours – such as the following description of Italy’s ‘Untold Silk Road Story’: Since the times of the Roman Empire, silk was one of the most precious commodities in Italy, and Italian Catholic missionaries were of the first Europeans to explore the Silk Road, primarily for diplomatic purposes; that is, to ensure, at the time, peaceful relations with the expanding Mongol Empire.
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Religious elisions
In the WSR, there is a prevalent focus on silk as the basis of countries’ connections to the silk roads. There is much to be interrogated here. Characterizing the history of the silk roads as the history of silk has led to a skewed history: silk was neither the most common nor most valuable commodity being traded, and it creates the false impression of commodities (and technologies) flowing primarily east to west rather than in all directions. It also privileges capitalistic frames of reference: characterizing them as flows of luxury commodities, rather than involving forms of culture beyond elite consumption. Creating the impression that these routes existed first and foremost to move silk, the movement of religions, science and technologies, or indeed animals, plants, people, diseases or ideas, are implied to be happenstance to the silk trade, and less historically important.
In the WSR, historic silk production is listed as the reason for inclusion of Spain, Italy, Greece, and Türkiye. The question of whether the Vikings might be considered for future inclusion is discussed as a question of their access to silk: ‘Despite extensive research on the Vikings, little was known about their connection to the Silk Road. … the Vikings entertained extensive trade relations with neighbouring countries and foreign empires. Hence their knowledge and appreciation of silk primarily resulted from peaceful exchange.’ 62 As with the UNESCO webpage, we can see how the wider history of communication along these routes is delimited as if solely constituted by trade in silk, and the repeated assertion that such trade was primarily peaceful.
The focus on Spain’s silk industry is significant for what is excluded. The production of silk in Valencia is presented as the ‘symbol … [of] Valencia’s and, by extension, Spain’s connection to the historic routes’. 63 Valencia’s Ruta de Seda branding began in 2016 and pre-dates the WSR project, and heavily utilizes wider silk roads imagery in its tourism promotion – such as images of camels traversing the desert. Such promotion capitalizes upon the imagined geographies of the silk roads vis-a-vis Hedin, but raises questions as regards what such images are meant to represent. Since it is Valencia’s production of silk (largely for a European market) which is the reason for its inclusion, when, where or with what are such caravanserais meant to be travelling?
Though the Western Silk Road Fact Sheet specifically mentions the potential of the WSR project to incorporate Islam – ‘it would enable Western destinations to showcase local Muslim legacy’
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– the history of the Iberian Islamic states is absent from the WSR Roadmap.
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Despite its facilitation of these routes, Spain’s Islamic history is largely obscured: Spain’s connection to the historic Silk Road routes dates back as far as the ninth century, a period during which silk and other valuable goods reached the Iberian Peninsula via a route passing through India, Arabia and the Islamic North African territories. … Primarily centred on the cities of Granada, Almeria and Malaga, the silk trade greatly impacted the economic outlook of the Spanish territories. [In Valencia] local artisans of Jewish and Islamic descent converged with Genovese business-minded merchants shaped by European trading routes to form what was to become a potent regional industry by the end of the fifteenth century. As of today, the College of High Silk Art (Colegio del Arte Mayor de la Seda), the Silk Exchange (La Lonja de la Seda) and the Barrio de Velluters, the historical silk trade district, symbolize Valencia’s and, by extension, Spain’s connection to the historic routes.
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Between 711 and 1492, much of what we now call Portugal and Spain was Al-Andalus – a territory controlled by a series of Muslim states, and which included most of the Iberian Peninsula, at its greatest extent stretching north to Occitania in Southern France. 67 Though ‘artisans of Jewish and Islamic descent’ in Valencia are mentioned, ‘Islamic territories’ are described as being in North Africa – implying that these places within Spain were not Islamic territories. The cities and ports mentioned in the text were major hubs in the Caliphate of Córdoba (929–1031), and Granada, Almeria and Malaga were the major cities in the Emirate of Granada (1250–1491). 68 Though people of ‘Islamic descent’ are mentioned – as though ‘Islamic’ were an ethnic group – Islam is not. Indeed, in the WSR Roadmap, despite the variety of countries billed for inclusion, the only Islamic heritage sites are in Türkiye, the term ‘Muslim’ never occurs, and the word ‘Islamic’ appears only twice, in the passage just mentioned.
Absenting Spain’s Islamic history is not only textual, there is an absence of sites which could represent this history. For example, despite mentioning Granada in the passage above, the Alhambra is not mentioned. The Alhambra would seem an obvious inclusion in the WSR: it already has UNESCO World Heritage status, tourist infrastructures, and a clear historical connection. Building upon an earlier 11th-century palace built by Samuel ibn Naghrillah, the main complex was begun in 1238 by the Nasrid Emir of Granada, Muhammad I Ibn al-Ahmar. 69 It is touted by UNESCO as one of the best-preserved medieval Islamic palaces in the world, having been largely unchanged since the 14th century. 70 Numerous aspects of its architecture and ornamentation represent forms of cultural hybridity and technological flows (such as its famous interlacing patterns in much of its ceramic tiling). But a broader pattern across the WSR is generally an absence of religious histories – and the absenting of the Alhambra also leads to the invisibility of Islam as part of these routes.
This is one of a variety of missed potentials within the WSR to showcase and profit from the diversity of the history of the silk roads within Europe. There is little mention of religions. Apart from the single brief mention of artisans of Jewish descent mentioned above, there is a complete absence of Jewish histories or sites, despite the extremely important role of Jewish merchant groups in the history of these routes. 71 Outside of Türkiye the only references to religious sites are churches/monasteries (e.g. Chirpan Monastery of St. Athanasius, Greece). This tacitly creates an imaginative geography of Europe as a traditionally unambiguously ‘Christian’ space. Eliding Islamic and Jewish histories represents a missed opportunity to use the past as a means of responding to Islamophobia and anti-semitism in the present – and indeed, it contributes to such prejudices by reinforcing the myth of a historically homogenously Christian Europe.
The focus on silk in the WSR not only limits the rich heritage of flows of culture rather than commodities. Other commodities that were key parts of these trade routes are also unmentioned, notably the amber roads.
The amber roads
As noted in the previous section, in the WSR whether the Vikings were connected to the silk roads is turned into the question of ‘their knowledge and appreciation of silk’, rather than how the Vikings were connected to and contributed to ancient trade routes. One effect of the privileging of silk is the absenting of the sheer variety of other commodities (let alone everything else that moved through these routes). This limits the incorporation of Europe, positioning it simplistically as a homogenous consumer of the exotic, rather than likewise being a heterogenous space from which a variety of cultures and commodities flowed. The focus on silk obscures Europe’s exportation of valued materials – particularly salt, glass, and amber. The WSR makes no mention, for example, of the amber roads – despite the fact that they, and sites already developed for tourism, could also be incorporated. Incorporating European exports would be a significant means of showcasing European economic dependency on and contribution to these routes, and highlighting that it was not only the wealthy elite purchasing silk who were connected to them.
The amber roads are absent from the WSR, but some of the potentials to communicate shared heritage are in fact clearer in representations of them, such as an exhibition at the National Museum in Vilnius, Lithuania. We turn to this exhibit, because of its more nuanced use of histories of trade to explore intercultural connection. Though acknowledging that the amber trade exceeds a single time period (indeed, amber continues to be one of the main tourist souvenirs to be found across the Baltic), most of this exhibition’s artefacts came from the Roman era, and it was trade between Rome and the Baltic that the exhibition focused upon. This makes it an apt comparison with common depictions of the silk roads, though it achieved a more sophisticated exploration of these ancient routes.
The exhibition regularly evoked shared heritage, though it did not use the term. This was clear in its conclusion: [By] the first century Just as today we share innovation and technology with other countries in the European Union, and they with us, so in the past cooperation and trade were mutually beneficial, allowing societies to grow and develop faster by adopting the experience and skills of their neighbors.
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Though taking the amber roads as its focus, the exhibition situated amber trade as one thread in a skein of networks. While the Aesti imported non-ferrous metal and glass from Roman territories, their export of amber was framed as one of a plethora of goods valued in Rome: ‘Gold came from Asturias (now Spain), silver from Britain, amber from the Baltic coast, pearls and precious metals from India and Persia, as well as silk, marble and ivory.’ 73 The exhibits included maps – replicas of ancient ones, as well as a contemporary map of the globe marked with ancient outposts and routes from the Mediterranean as far as India. Though silk was mentioned, the silk roads were not named as such – and yet they were visually represented, and very much part of what was being described, albeit in complexity.
Much as the rhetoric around the silk roads, the exhibition focused on these routes as spaces of ‘encounters’ between cultures and peoples. This theme ran through the framing of grave goods, showcasing the diversity of origins of items some individuals were buried with. This encompassed luxury items, but also everyday objects (e.g. cooking pots and drinking cups marked with Roman measures, produced in what is now France, from gravesites in what is now Poland). In this it transcended the tautological frame by specifying what was traded and how, and how cultures adapted and evolved because they were in contact with others – such as adopting particular measures for food or drink, because items were available in them.
The idea of diverse encounters was reinforced in a variety of visuals, such as in a sound-and-light projection showing a doorway, tacitly the entrance to a trading post. Numerous figures pass by shown only in silhouette, depicting a variety of ‘encounters’. Two men meet, sit down to drink, they talk, and make toasts, nod, and laugh. A family walks by, a group of women stand together. A man and a woman meet, talk, clasp hands, and kiss. The depiction of this couple is far more noteworthy than the sentimentality implies: though the ‘movement of people’ and ‘people-to-people encounters’ are regularly mentioned in relation to ancient trade routes, peoples are usually depicted as distinct. Mixed marriages, or people of mixed decent, are regularly undepicted – indeed, in our wider ethnography at museums, this is one of the only cases where this aspect of such histories was shown. In this exhibition’s description of the Limes (frontiers of the Roman empire), that these were spaces of multi-lingualism, hybrid cultural practices, and intermarriage, was explicitly noted. So too was the fact that the ‘Romans’ living in these regions, in the army or in trade, were not only what we might now think of as Italians, but ‘also people from areas long under control of Rome like southern Gaul, North Africa, the Iberian coast, the East’. 74 This complexifies the depiction of the past by emphasizing the movement – and mixing – of peoples. It is significant that these aspects are so often elided in the depiction of ancient trade routes. Absenting these features of history problematically implies that the past was a time of ethnic ‘purity’.
The exhibition’s engagement with the complexity of these routes included their entanglement with Rome’s imperial expansion, war, and the fact that enslaved people were traded along the amber roads. Amber was thus explicitly made part of an economy that included slavery: ‘Pliny the Elder wrote that a small amber figurine was worth more than several slaves.’ 75 It was repeatedly pointed out that amber beads adorned nets used in gladiator fights. The multiple textual references to slavery, and visual depiction of it, served to trouble the usual romantic notion that trade is always self-evidently a good thing which benefits everyone involved, or which can be removed from power or exploitation. The exhibits incorporated these aspects as an important feature to remember when trying to understand these routes.
This exhibition also used the history of trade to explicitly provoke further questions: Visitors to this exhibition will learn … about the way of life of different cultures and how they understood the world. … Visitors will also have the chance to explore such questions as: How did the so-called civilized world differ from that of the Barbarians? Perhaps there weren’t so many differences after all? What actually defines a civilization? And with whom should we associate amber more – the Aesti or the Romans? Who actually determined its value as a tradable good: the buyer or the seller? Perhaps, by looking back from today’s perspective, we’ll understand that people don’t really change that much at all.
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It is because of this the representation of ancient trade at this exhibition illustrates a more ethical notion of shared heritage. Such opportunities to encourage reflection on the past and the present are certainly present in the history of the silk roads – the network of routes across Afro-Eurasia. Something to take from this exhibition is that histories of trade do lend themselves to exploring questions such as the inter-relationship between the trades in luxuries and slavery, the mobility and interaction of historic populations, or the hybridity of cultures – indeed, such histories should demand critical engagement with such questions.
In the WSR, the tendency to romanticize histories or present them as a self-evidently positive past generally works against this possibility, because it favours a rose-tinted assertion that once upon a time commercial trade and human encounters were simply peaceful, as though violence was a recent phenomenon in human history, rather than an enduring part of it with long and fraught legacies. Though attempting to be aspirational, the projection of uncomplicated peacefulness into the past is problematic for its circumnavigating more difficult aspects of these histories, becoming a form of historical revisionism. It also precludes any possibility of learning from or addressing the violence of this past – as though so much of the world as it is today and all of its challenges were not itself a legacy of these histories.
Conclusion
In this article, we have sought to explore how the silk roads are being mobilized as shared heritage, and to challenge the idea that shared heritage is always positive or inclusive. Indeed, there is a need for critical interrogation when shared heritage is invoked, precisely because it can be mobilized in service of prejudice and violence. The romanticization of the silk roads obscures important aspects of their histories – including the violence that often attended them, as well as the movement of cultures and peoples more broadly beyond the trade in a single luxury commodity. This narrows the possibilities for actually understanding these routes as shared heritage because it stops short of actually exploring what heritage is shared across this vast swathe of cultures and countries.
Others have critiqued China’s appropriation of the silk roads, focusing on the lack of historical evidence and the Sino-centrism of its geopolitical narrative. Here, we argue the problematics of this also runs through Chinese discourses framing it as shared heritage. In this narrative, what is shared is indebted to China. Turning to Europe, we argued that it is extremely important to highlight this region’s contributions and dependencies on these historic trade routes, but the UNWTO’s Western Silk Road often reiterates the Sinicized narrative. While there are features of this project which complexify the history told, the absence of other parts of that history – such as that of Islamic or Jewish cultures – perpetuates ideas that are in their own ways exclusive of Europe’s diverse heritage.
There remains potential here to critically incorporate depictions of these routes which celebrates their historic breadth and promotes awareness of how intertwined Afro-Eurasian cultures and peoples historically have been. The challenge of the ethics of shared heritage is not that it is too hard to make the complexities of history accessible to wider audiences. Museums, tourism projects, and trans-national heritage collaborations could be instrumental in working towards such potential. Achieving this requires a conscious attempt to showcase the variety of these historic routes, how much heritage across continents is a legacy of them, but also their inter-relationship with violence. This is ultimately a stronger commitment to the rhetoric that ‘promoting mutual understanding across cultures’ is more than a marketing blurb, but a means of providing insight into the shared heritage of the past that really does challenge the exclusivist discourses of the present.
