SSC CGL 2025 Tier-I · 20 September 2025, Shift 1 · General Awareness · Question 10 of 100

We transcribed this text from the pictures on a candidate's response sheet for this shift; the answer is the key SSC colour-marked on that sheet. Solution last reviewed 13 September 2026.

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What is the primary focus of Peter Frankopan’s book The Silk Roads: A New History of the World?

(a)The colonization of the Americas by European powers
(b)The trade disputes between ancient Rome and China
(c)A global history centered on cultural and political exchanges along the Silk Road regions
(d)The history of Western Europe from the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution

Answer

Why

Correct — C. Peter Frankopan's The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (Bloomsbury, 2015) retells world history from the routes linking Asia and Europe, rather than outward from Western Europe.

Its subject is the cultural and political exchange along those routes: a global history centred on the Silk Road regions.

Why the others are wrong

(a)
The colonization of the Americas by European powers — The Americas are not the book's centre. Frankopan's subject is the web of routes linking Asia and Europe, not European colonisation across the Atlantic.
(b)
The trade disputes between ancient Rome and China — Rome–China trade is far too narrow. The book runs from antiquity to the present, and its frame is the whole Silk Road world, not a dispute between two ancient empires.
(d)
The history of Western Europe from the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution — Western Europe from the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution is the familiar story Frankopan moves away from. His centre lies east, along the Silk Roads.

Concept

Frankopan is Professor of Global History at the University of Oxford and a Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College.

The Silk Roads (2015) argues against telling history outward from Western Europe, and puts the lands along the routes between East and West at the centre of the story.

He followed it with The New Silk Roads (2018) and The Earth Transformed (2023).

Rome and China both feature in any history of these routes. The question asks for the book's primary focus, and that is the Silk Road world as a whole.

Key facts

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, by Peter Frankopan, was published by Bloomsbury in 2015.
Frankopan is Professor of Global History at the University of Oxford and a Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College.
His sequel is The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World (2018).

Study next

China's Belt and Road InitiativeAncient India's trade links with Rome and Central AsiaBooks and authors: recent works of history

Common traps

Picking the Rome–China option because the Silk Road is famous for that link. The book's scope is far wider.
Assuming a history of the world must centre on Europe. This one deliberately does not.

Here a book title is given and its argument asked. The subtitle, A New History of the World, rules out every option that shrinks the book to one region or era.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.

Topic: Culture — all 246 SSC CGL questions on it, every solved shift.