The Silk Road to China: A World Connected

with Christopher Goscha,

Professor of International Relations at the Université du Québec, Montreal.

That we live in a highly connected world today few would disagree. Who, after all, could go for long without sending an e-mail via the internet or packing a cell phone in one's pocket? We forget, however, in this dizzying age of hi-tech that the world has been connected for much longer than we might realize from the screen of our iPhones.

Most of us have learned in school that the Europeans led by Christopher Columbus in 1492 connected the world by sea and in many ways they did. But they were not the first to do so. Starting almost two thousand years earlier, a collection of merchants, explorers, missionaries, and political leaders connected the land mass we call "Eurasia" by land and sea routes. We know these routes today under the name of the Silk Road, for the silk the Chinese exported from one end of this massive continent to the other. In this lecture on the Silk Roads, we will discover how our world has been connected in a myriad of different ways from the time of the Romans to the present.