Susan Whitfield's Silk, Slaves, and Stupas is not only about the history of the Silk Road; it is a dialogue that oscillates between the people and the objects that traveled along the Silk Road. It is a book on material culture, an approach historians have increasingly applied to help us perceive and understand how social reality was structured and framed through objects and material items. This approach also engages with the psychology of taste, individual motivation, metaphorical analogies, and social unity. It does so by recapturing the physical conditions and structural patterns of everyday life among various communities or, in the words of economic determinists, within the capitalistic market. The growth of the so-called school of material culture tended to maximize the amount of attention given to artifacts, crafts, commodities, and the material environment of the societies being studied. The new material culturists continue to prevail, and most of their studies have yielded positive results. Such an approach has an indispensable value of its own and is a remarkable element in examining the history of human progression. Yet, despite the importance of this approach, I am in agreement with J. H. Hutton that all enquiries into material culture must have a factual basis.Footnote 1 Without a strong, empirically supported foundation, no historical interpretation can be effectively transmitted from the past to the present through the study of material culture.
Whitfield's new book provides us with a brilliant example of how material history should be written. It highlights the social lives of a series of commodities that we are relatively familiar with, such as glassware and silk; but at the same time, it also brings to light a set of commodities that are inevitably less celebrated within the context of the trade that took place along the Silk Road, including earrings, ewers, stupas, and the Quran. The history Whitfield traces is actually quite ambitious, as she attempts to cast the transregional interactions and material culture across the Eurasian continent into one field of vision. One of the core ideas of the book is to emphasize that the Silk Road did not simply facilitate economic exchanges, but it was also a cultural highway that linked production (the people who made objects), marketing (those who carried and sold objects), consumption (those who bought and used them), and the preservation of heritage (those who conserved, curated, and even worshiped the traded objects). Also central to this book is the argument Arjun Appadurai advances in his classic edited volume The Social Life of Things, where he notes that “objects take on different forms and regimes of value as they move through socially mediated worlds.”Footnote 2
Silk, Slaves, and Stupas consists of ten chapters, each of which features a different object and its social and cultural interactions. While the book focuses on the Silk Road, the story Whitfield narrates is truly global. Glass technology was refined in West Asia, on the fringes of Europe, and spread east into China and Korea. Some of the refined glassware was transported across the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean region. The story of silk and the spread of silk technologies also went beyond a Eurasian setting, even reaching the other side of the Pacific Ocean. The popularity of the chinoiserie style reflected the fashion for Eastern goods, while China, Japan, and Korea imported luxurious and uncommon goods from Britain, France, and Italy. Most of these commodities were transported along the Silk Road. If we were to make the Silk Road even more cultural, it occurs to me that the “Silk Road” is now being seen as a particular identity, like a brand, and the goods related to it were desirable, valuable, and profitable for at least two centuries.
Chapter 10, “The Unknown Slave,” is worth our special attention. In Whitfield's own depiction, this chapter “does not focus on a single object that survives today” (p. 250). Slaves have long since died and decayed, and as far as I know, no museum exhibits the dead bodies of slaves that were traded along the Silk Road, in the same manner that some museums exhibit Egyptian mummies. Even though reconstructing the history of the slave trade seems like an impossible task, Whitfield does a fantastic job of revealing the story of the slave trade along the Silk Road. She does so by using primary materials, such as legal codes (mostly from China) and private writings (from the Middle East). According to the author, the slave markets were enormously profitable across the Eurasian continent. At the same time, slaves were also a global commodity. For example, Dublin was probably Western Europe's largest slave trading center, whereas Shandong, in Eastern China, was infamous for “selling slaves captured from the Korean peninsula” (p. 261). Similar to the slave trade in other parts of the world, such as the triangular trade that took place between Britain, West Africa, and the New World (the West Indies and British North America), the slaves sold by the Irish and the Chinese were treated no differently from other marketable products, or as noted in Sidney W. Mintz's narration, “the capital that made capitalism.”Footnote 3 Although numerous studies have focused on slaves as one kind of commodity, less attention has been paid to the role of the Silk Road within this context. This chapter, thus, adds some depth to the literature on the global slave trade, as it provides and discusses some meaningful case studies that have previously been ignored.
Despite its many contributions to the study of material culture, this book did not conclusively engage with those secondary literatures featuring the variegated facets of the Silk Road (ranging from religions and languages to empires and environmental history), namely the works by Richard Foltz, Valerie Hansen, Peter Frankopan, Jonathan Clements, and Xinru Liu. The book is also missing one crucial segment: a structured conclusion. A more cohesive summary of the revelations presented in the book would help readers better recapitulate Whitfield's insightful analyses. Nevertheless, as a whole, Silk, Slaves, and Stupas is an agreeable read, and will keep the attention of anyone interested in the history of the Silk Road and its global connections.
