{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.019314641744548288, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 5.153256704980843, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
The Silk Road

Evocative and enigmatic, the Silk Road occupies a unique place in contemporary culture and international affairs. Across the world, it has captured the imagination as a story of camel caravans crossing desert and mountain, of precious goods moving between East and West, and of ideas, religions, and technologies migrating across land and sea. As China seeks to “revive” the Silk Roads for the twenty-first century, this compelling, yet poorly understood, narrative of history now serves as a platform for building trade, diplomatic, infrastructure, and geopolitical connections. The Silk Road: Connecting Histories and Futures is the first book to critically investigate the merits and problems of this fabled geocultural narrative of history and map out the role it plays in international affairs. Four thematic sections trace its rise to global fame as a domain of scholarship and foreign policy and as a celebration of peace and internationalism and how it created dreams of exploration and grand adventure. China’s Health Silk Road and civilizational politics are among the themes discussed that open up the Silk Roads as a space for critical enquiry. Pathbreaking in its analysis, The Silk Road; Connecting Histories and Futures presents an entirely new reading of this increasingly important concept, one that is likely to remain at the center of world affairs for decades to come. Crossing borders and topics, the book sits at the intersection of world and cultural history, international relations, and cultural theory and will be of interest to scholars and general readers alike.