ABSTRACT
The term “Maritime Silk Road” (MSR)—just as its terrestrial counterpart “Silk Road”—is highly fraught and politically laden. In recent years it has been actively mobilized by China in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as a powerful narrative framing and underlying China’s global economic clout (see Frankopan 2018; Winter 2019; Zheng et al. 2018). As a result, academics have largely been reluctant to use the notion of Silk Road as a framework for their research. Indeed, even before its recent political reactivation, the term was seen as a romantic and orientalist construct, as well as an oversimplification of forms of cultural exchange across Eurasia, and poorly suited to scholarly discussion. The concept of “Silk Road,” coined in 1877 by geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen, was employed to discuss the early period of trade between the Roman Empire and Han China, specifically the route described by Marinus of Tyre, and it is only later that its reach was expanded to other trade routes and involving other material goods (Chin 2013).
