The Silk Road, allegedly channelling large volumes of precious commodities from East to West, is often seen as an ancient precursor of modern globalization. Yet the Silk Road paradigm comes with a heavy colonial burden as well as a number of misconceptions about past economic processes: the universality of supply-and-demand operating between ancient empires, the prevalence of profit-maximizing entrepreneurial traders, and the fossilization of trade routes across the continent. In the last ten years, researchers working from a variety of disciplinary angles have called attention to these problems, and others have begun to probe the nature of specific interactions by analysing particular types of evidence, including coins, transmitted and excavated texts, and the archaeology of maritime and terrestrial networks. Conversely, even recent synthetic Silk Road narratives ignore the very limited and regionally heterogeneous ancient evidence that requires specialized techniques of analysis. To make this evidence fruitful for studies of global exchange demands close interdisciplinary cooperation. A proper economic history of the ancient Afro-Eurasian world beyond the Silk Road paradigm has never been attempted since the Silk Road was invented in the 19th century.
In response, the project develops a new conceptual and methodological frame for understanding economic processes in the ancient Afro-Eurasian world region. It is based on an interdisciplinary research design and will lead to a three-volume handbook that will serve as a foundation for future research. In daily cooperation, the interdisciplinary research team seeks to understand local and regional borderland markets and exchange strategies in order to comprehend inter-imperial exchanges at a Eurasian scale. All ancient trade and exchange took place in either social, religious, or ethnic networks or in economic dependency structures, which operated both within and between ancient empires. In order to understand these networks and structures on the one hand and their inter-imperial communication on the other, both the economic structures of empires and the institutional, political, and infrastructural changes in borderlands that stimulated inter-imperial exchange need to be understood. This multi-scalar model of Afro-Eurasian connectivity will abandon the one-dimensional assumptions of Silk Road trade, while maintaining the Afro-Eurasian world region as a meaningful unit for economic analysis.
The results of the project challenges the dominant Silk Road narrative of global exchange and trade. They challenge the status of market models of trade as universally valid tools for understanding economic processes in the past and as justifications of global inequalities in the present. They also question the utility of these models for analysing economic processes beyond national economies. Three aspects, in particular, come into focus: multipurpose and multidirectional network building within and across empires; imperial systems that take into consideration frontier zone processes as incubators of institutional innovation and economic initiative; and the importance of political and institutional development in regions of limited statehood.
