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The Future of the Silk Road: A Discussion with Tim Winters

New Books in Geography

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The History of Marco Polo and the Silk Road

Marco Polo's diaries were written up by his cellmate after he was imprisoned in Genoa when he returned. The accuracy and the validity as a historical record has been highly disputed. It was only in the 19th century that his account started to be taken seriously through new publications. He becomes also a kind of metonym of that broader Silk Road history. And so there's this interesting convergence between Marco Polo and the Silk Road that is kind of thought about in scholarship but only really begins to circulate more broadly during that time.

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