Book Review: Silk, Slaves, and Stupas: Material Culture of the Silk Road by Susan Whitfield

Abstract

Susan Whitfield. Silk, Slaves, and Stupas. Material Culture of the Silk Road . Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018. Pp. xi, 339. ISBN: 9780520 281783. $29.95. paperback. “This is a book about things on the Silk Road,” writes Susan Whitfield at the start of this engaging, well-researched and informative survey of one of the most famous exchange networks in world history that linked East Asia with Europe and North Africa. “Things or objects speak to us,” says the author, helping to “create a narrative.” Telling history through material culture has become popular in recent years. Silk, Slaves, and Stupas provides an excellent example of why that is the case. Whitfield selects ten objects (or more accurately nine, plus an “unknown slave” who stands for the countless slaves whose lives were spent in one or more location along the Silk Roads) and uses each not only to talk about the individual artefact, manuscript, or text, but to set out investigations of much bigger topics too—such as maritime trade connections, literacy, the importance of the horse to Central Asia and China, or about the role of slavery, which after “marriage, family and religion” is arguably “the most ubiquitous social institution in human history.” Whitfield’s approach of zooming in close to look at the production, use, and meaning of individual pieces, but setting them within wider contexts, is highly effective. It works so well because as the author is careful …