Peter Frankopan is a popular historian and academic, best known for questioning the Western-centric consensus on the spread of intellectual ideas. Frankopan criticises strains of European history that omit Eastern contributions.
Frankopan is the Professor of Global History at Oxford University, Senior Research Fellow of Worcester College and Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research. His research focuses on the history of the Eastern Mediterranean, Russia, the Middle East, Central Asia and China.
The Silk Roads brought Frankopan to popular prominence. It was a New York Times bestseller and dominated non-fiction charts globally. It was called ‘magnificent’ by the Sunday Times and ‘a rare book that makes you question your assumptions about the world’ by the Wall Street Journal.
Frankopan’s follow-up book, The New Silk Roads, brought this history to the modern day. He contextualises Western pre-eminence, showing the US-led unipolar world as an historical aberration rather than something assured and assumed.
His most recent work traces climate’s historical impact on geopolitics. The Earth Transformed argues that climate anxiety is perennial rather than a unique concern for our modern civilisation. But Frankopan criticises modern complacency that believes society to be in control of the elements. Written from an ecological perspective, Frankopan argues for a new multinational politics that prioritises the environment.
Peter Frankopan regularly features in the international press on a range of geopolitical topics. He is also a regular on popular podcasts, as well as presenting his own: Global, I’ve Been Thinking…with Peter Frankopan. He is frequently interviewed on broadcast news and comments extensively on the state of current relations between the East and West.
