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[PAST EVENT] Neither Silk, nor a Road: reassessing the Impacts and Legacies of China's Eurasian Titration
March 14, 2013
5pm
Famed for luxury trade "silks and spices" and understood to have linked Han China with Rome, "the silk road" has a broader significance as shorthand for a range of long-term exchanges in biological material, technology, arts, and religious and other ideas. The cultures of China, India, Persia, Central Asia, the Mediterranean, North Africa and Europe were linked from before the Bronze Age; these linkages quickened at times of imperial unification and through diffusion of religions, up to and including the modern era. Expanding what we commonly refer to as "the silk road" can help situate the history of China within the wider Eurasian historiography and global contexts.