A Conversation on Trans-Asian Networks in the First Millennium and Beyond

Xin Wen (Princeton University)
Supratik Baralay (Princeton University)
Michael Frachetti (Washington University in St. Louis)
Moderated by Richard Payne (University of Chicago)

To begin its exploration of the pitfalls and potential of the Silk Road as a framework for understanding trans-Asian interactions, the Silk Road Imaginaries research project hosted a conversation with Xin Wen, author of The King’s Road: Diplomacy and the Remaking of the Silk Road (Princeton, 2023). In one of the most important recent books in Silk Road studies, Wen reframes the “road” as more a matter of royal, or imperial, initiative than silk. Rulers, envoys, and diplomats displace merchants as the primary agents of exchange. The conversation took the book as a starting point for debating the metaphors and categories scholars adopt in their attempts to explain the intensifying trans-Asian interactions characteristic of the first millennium.

Joining Wen in conversation were two scholars from different evidentiary and disciplinary perspectives. Supratik Baralay is an ancient historian who studies how Central Eurasian communities negotiated empire, and vice versa, in the early centuries BCE and CE. Michael Frachetti, an archaeologist, is known for recovering the social and economic dynamics at the origins of Silk Road phenomena in the Bronze Age and is currently documenting unprecedented forms of political complexity in the ancient and medieval Central Eurasian highlands. The discussion was moderated by Richard Payne, a historian of the Iranian world in late antiquity and its trans-Asian interactions.