Silk Road Idea

Traces the rise and fall of a set of modern disciplinary fields devoted to premodern historical contact that drew on intellectual currents across and beyond China and Europe.

In The Silk Road Idea, Tamara T. Chin examines the rise of interest in “the connected past” and its impact on key disciplines, focusing on the period from 1870 to 1970. Against the predominance of national studies, Chin argues that historical contact gradually came to be regarded as an object of inquiry over a century spanning imperialism, decolonization, and the Cold War. Interest in connected histories emerged from all corners: the colonialist and the anticolonial; the capitalist and the communist; the antiquarian and the activist.

During the ascent of academic specialization, Chin contends, geography, history, philology, and linguistics domesticated contact through distinct frameworks and units of analysis, making it into something geographers mapped, historians narrated, philologists read, and linguists heard. But this also brought disruption. To historically connect Afro-Eurasia, disciplinary paradigms were questioned, and, in some cases, transformed. Intellectual debates in East Asia and Europe became entangled with those in South Asia and East Africa. Chin uses the concept of the “Silk Road” to capture the epistemological challenge of including China in a globally connected past, from the pursuit of civilizational origins to that of entangled empires. The Silk Road Idea revisits the stakes of premodern contact for the histories of colonialism, capitalism, and knowledge, showing how the connecting and reconfiguring of the modern world enabled and was enabled by a reimagination of antiquity.

Tamara T. Chin is associate professor of comparative literature at Brown University. She is the author of Savage Exchange: Han Imperialism, Chinese Literary Style, and the Economic Imagination.