The BRI as disruptor

If the often-used Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and Silk Road analogy is true, and indications are that it is, then by bringing some ancient Silk Road history to bear, we may better appreciate the need to get onto the BRI.

Briefly, the Silk Road history goes like this: It began during the Han dynasty in 130 BC about 2,500 years after silk was first reeled in China and gave its name to the several routes connecting China with the Mediterranean. The Silk Road’s western stretches coincided with King Darius’ (d 486 BC) famous Royal Road, which was later extended by Alexander. And it lasted until the mid-fifteenth century. About this time one Western ambassador to Timur’s court in Samarkand reported that “almost anything useful to almost anybody was being passed along the Silk Road”.

Countless caravans brought the world’s products into the bazaars along the Silk Road, as well as new ideas, technologies, cultures, religions and people. Some technologies moved east, others west. Paper manufacturing and silk weaving went west out of China, while glass making moved east to China. The business arrangements underpinning the trade, like pooling capital to distribute risk, monetization and partnerships, and accounting methods were sophisticated, which sustains healthy trade. Its consequences went far beyond trade and economics.

How did this map on to our region? Very gainfully for our ancestors. Ours (especially present-day Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) being the ‘central region’ on the Silk Road, as it is now on the BRI, was the meeting place of the pathways between flanking trading partners. And the gateway into the Indian subcontinent. Consider, for instance, the case of Taxila, which was a hub of ancient learning.

Scholars flocked here from far off places, such as the famous Chinese monks Fa-hsien (399 AD), Song Yun (520 AD), Hsuan-tsang (664 AD). They are among hundreds of visitors to the region recorded in history books. Cutting-edge ideas received from the West and East were refined here and relayed down into the Indus and Ganges plains. The region became the seedbed of a rich and tolerant culture. It produced magnificent Gandhara artefacts, and among other things, modern numerals, which the French mathematician Simon Laplace calls one of the great inventions of mankind.

An iconic emblem of our ancestors’ intellectual achievements and sign of a prosperous commercial life is the Bakshali Manuscript. This 1,500-year-old artefact found 142 years ago in the town of Bakshali near Mardan (and taken away by the British) is an accounting book inscribed on seventy pieces of birch bark – and the oldest recording of modern numerals. Its jottings of income and expenses tracking business operations use zero as a symbol representing nothing, as well as a number with mathematical properties. Meaning, our ancestors manipulated modern numerals in the abstract eight hundred years before the West even saw them!

Likewise, Chinese metallurgy, paper-making and printing technologies in the 12th century would not be duplicated in Europe for several centuries. Meanwhile, Roger Bacon advocated, a la Sir Syed Ahmed reversed, the study of oriental languages, and reforming European education by learning from ‘higher’ eastern civilizations.

Janet Abu-Lughod in her book ‘Before European Hegemony: The World System AD 1250-1350’ tells us these achievements were among several Silk Road benefits. By the 13th century, she writes, a variety of cultural systems from China to the Mediterranean, cooperated along it in a tightly integrated network of production and exchange. Technological innovations produced surpluses, which were traded on the Silk Road and generated even more surpluses, and efflorescence of cultural, artistic and intellectual achievement. So, while the West languished in its Dark Age, the lights shone brightly all along the Silk Road. Crucially, the Silk Road system was not hierarchical. There was ‘no single hegemon dictating the terms of production and trade to others.’

But from the mid-fifteenth century the Silk Road systems faltered. The Mongol empire’s fragmentation, the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century, and finally, the Ottomans’ capture of Constantinople in 1453 cut the East from the West. The region’s natural connectedness was lost. The Silk Road was to have no counterpart until the BRI, whose broad features it matches.

As the Silk Road waned, Western players pulled ahead and forged a new system. More interested in short-term plunder and subjugation than long-term exchange and trade on equal terms, by the end of the 19th century, the new players conquered four fifths of the world, colonized half a billion people and sold nine million in slavery to enjoy previously unknown levels of prosperity.

A ‘sanitized’, though unstable, version of this system persists. It’s undisputed though declining hegemon: the United States. For us, the system locks in inequality and subordination. Consider for instance, how our economic coordinates are locked in by crippling shock therapies, aka IMF programmes, and by low growth, unbearable debts, poverty. On the other hand, the BRI is a ‘bricks and mortar’ development model, more suited to our needs, since we urgently need roads, railroads, bridges, factories, etc.

The moral of our story, which recounts the vast difference in our Silk Road ancestor’s prosperity and our present economic wretchedness, is that we should no longer endure the present world system. It is not good for us. That it is neither inevitable nor permanent because global systems come and go. And that in the Silk Road we have a model for a better future world system for us.

Be that as it may, the BRI is already upending the present system and taking over as dramatically as the West took over the world system in the 16th century. And transferring massive industrial capacity to us. Which is a unique chance to get on to the new Silk Road, the BRI. To rotate our country’s axis northward, back to our natural connectedness, and to integrate our economy with the prospering economic neighborhoods of Shanghai, Central Asia, Istanbul. It looks like our only chance given the political and economic reality, namely that powerful forces are determined to keep us locked in a web of shock therapies and impoverishment.

The writer is a freelance contributor. He can be reached at: Khwaja.Sarmad@gmail.com