The No. 1 Sunday Times and international bestseller is a major reassessment of world history in light of the economic and political renaissance in the re-emerging east. For centuries, fame and fortune were found in the west, particularly in the New World of the Americas. Today, it is the east that calls out to those in search of adventure and riches. The region stretching from eastern Europe, across Central Asia, deep into China and India, is taking center stage in international politics, commerce, and culture, shaping the modern world. This region, the true center of the earth, is obscure to many in the English-speaking world. Yet, this is where civilization itself began, where the world's great religions were born and took root. The Silk Roads were not merely an exotic series of connections, but networks that linked continents and oceans together. Along them flowed ideas, goods, disease, and death. This was where empires were won and lost. As a new era emerges, the patterns of exchange are mirroring those that have crisscrossed Asia for millennia. The Silk Roads are rising again. This important account of the forces that have shaped the global economy and the political renaissance in the re-emerging east is a significant reassessment of world history.