ABSTRACT
The initiation of the Ancient Silk Road by China’s Han Dynasty (202 BC–AD 220) would commercially connect Asia with the Mediterranean and then the Roman Empire. For more than 1,500 years, until around the Qing Dynasty, whose long reign started in AD 1644, caravans would move through Central Asia via the Persian Empire. Ships would navigate forth and back from East Asia to Southeast Asia and from South Asia to Africa, economically integrating what Halford J. Mackinder called the ‘World Island’ in his famous Heartland Theory. This chapter incorporates the contributions of the Han and the Qing dynasties and argues that infrastructure has been the key to political and economic spatial control. This chapter discusses about the caravans and voyages undertaken along the Silk Routes, and gives key insights into the discovery of America and rise of the Atlantic. With the subsequent Trans-Atlantic and Trans-Pacific commercial and colonial outreach of the European civilisation, together with the effective suspension of the Ancient Silk Road, the centre of the gravity of the world economy and gradually world politics moved from Asia to the Atlantic. This process, fuelled by geopolitical and geo-economic patterns of the modern times, would ultimately culminate into the global hegemonies of the Anglo-American sea power of the past two hundred years.
