“History has, until very recently, focused heavily on western Europe”

It’s five years since your book The Silk Roads: A New History of the World was first published. What do you think has changed in global history since?

There’s now a much more vigorous discussion about what ‘global history’ really is. As is often the case with such terms, its precise meaning can vary. For some people, it means drawing together big strands of history, which presents challenges as well as opportunities. For others, it means looking at parts of the world that have been left behind or ignored by the discipline – areas of study such as pre-Columbian America or southeast Asia, for instance.

But the thing that’s changed most of all is that there is now a great awareness in the United Kingdom, both at a university level and among the general public, that history has up until very recently focused heavily on western Europe. For a long time, we were very narrow-minded about which aspects of the past we explored. But history books are less Eurocentric now, and that’s a reflection of the fact that publishers and readers, at all levels, are increasingly open to the idea of looking at other parts of the world.

When I wrote The Silk Roads [which explores the ancient networks of trade and ideas that ran through Asia and the Middle East], I didn’t think anybody was going to read it. I knew that most historians were working on 19th and 20th-century British, European and, to some extent, American history. But it turns out that the demand for global history is there – it’s just a very difficult thing to do well.

What are the challenges of writing