Belt and Road is a project in both writing and reading history. To date, international scrutiny has fallen overwhelmingly on the former; how China’s grand ambitions are altering the course of events and the global power landscape of the twenty-first century. But if the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is about “reviving” the Silk Roads for the twenty-first century, we might also ask how China now reads the past, and in what ways it appropriates it for strategic ends. Such lines of inquiry help us begin to understand how Belt and Road not just writes, but comes to re-write history, and it is the latter that may hold the greatest long-term impact. From the very beginning, Beijing has framed Belt and Road as a “revival” of the Silk Roads. But what this means precisely has received little critical attention in the West. Journalists and analysts have noted the Silk Road as little more than a gesture to romantic pasts of trade and exchange, where the camel trails and caravanserai of previous centuries are replaced by transcontinental rail lines and special economic zones. Sailing ships carrying porcelain become the container ships and oil tankers of the twenty-first century. History then is merely a palette of richly evocative imagery through which the old is paralleled with the new to make strategies of connectivity meaningful for audiences around the world. Countless news channels, think tanks, government reports, and academic papers have thus introduced BRI by casually summarizing the Silk Road in a short sentence or two, and rapidly moving on to the “real” stuff.

The concept of the Silk Road first attained prominence in the latter half of the 19th centu­ry as part of European attempts to impose economic and political claims upon the lands and peoples of Xinjiang (also known as East Turkestan, Chinese Central Asia, or Chinese Turkestan). These claims were given cultural substance at the turn of the century by a se­ries of expeditions undertaken by Western explorers and archaeologists, who ventured in­to the deserts of northwestern China in search of Greco-Indian art and antiquities. The study and display of such artifacts were motivated primarily by a desire to highlight the eastward migrations of Indo-European speakers into Central Asia. When these same ex­peditions began to reveal the presence of ancient Chinese ruins and antiquities as well, Chinese scholars and officials joined their Western counterparts in the field, using the material proceeds of their excavations to construct competing narratives of the westward influence of Chinese civilization. In the decades since the end of World War II, the con­cept of the Silk Road has come to dominate popular and scholarly associations with the region, monopolizing everything from the advertising of Central Asian and Middle East­ern cuisine to the names of academic monographs and international string ensembles. The elusive and malleable idea of “the Silk Road” has provided an attractive ideological platform over the past 200 years for major political, economic, and cultural actors throughout Eurasia to assert their imagined historical importance across both time and space, often with a highly romanticized gloss. In that sense, it is a purely modern intellec­tual construct, one that would have been utterly unfamiliar and likely incomprehensible to those historical agents it purports to describe.

2023 is the tenth anniversary of the launching of China's Belt and Road initiative. This was one of the frist books published in the English language to analyse the initiative

As it is frequently the case in the modern world, the term ‘Silk Road’ or ‘Silk Roads’ is of colonial provenance. The elaborate network of ancient routes originating in the fourth millennium bc and linking various parts of the Eurasian landmass through Central Asia was re-imagined and reinvented in the late nineteenth century as a ‘Silk Road’ connecting China with the Roman Empire, thereby undermining the role of the steppe with its various nomadic and oasis cultures which had always been at the heart of this Eurasian system of trade and other exchange. Ever since, historiography has focussed on the role of sedentary civilisations in this system of exchange, with a particular emphasis on China and the West, thus undermining the role of other sedentary civilisations such as India. Contrary to the dominant narrative, the antiquity of the Eurasian trade network goes back to several millennia before the rise of either the Han Empire or Rome. Whereas this network did connect the agrarian...

The Silk Road or Silk Route was an ancient network of trade routes that were central to cultural interaction through regions of the Asian continent connecting the West and East from China to the Mediterranean Sea. The Silk Road derives its name from the lucrative trade in Chinese silk carried out along its length, beginning during the Han dynasty. One of the most acclaimed Silk Road projects is the One Belt, One Road initiative put forward by China, a project, which was first formulated in 2013 during a trip to Central Asia, has resonated with both the region and the wider globe. It spans almost the entire Asian continent, even extending as far as East Africa and Europe and a Maritime Silk Road, covering Southeast Asia, South Asia, East Africa, and Europe. Beyond being a simple transport corridor, it envisages economic integration of the countries along its path. The first of the five basic areas of cooperation envisioned in the project is based on the integration of transportation (railways, highways, airways, and ports) systems and the joint use of energy and natural resources as well as their extraction operations. China's One Belt, One Road initiative has received the support of countries throughout the region, but some important players consider the project as an attempt by China to snatch regional and global hegemony, stemming from worries that Beijing wishes to increase its political influence by using its economic power. It is obvious that if the project becomes successful, the Chinese economy will be the first to benefit. If it fails, it becomes a disaster for China. In all this, Africa needs to assemble the required mettle to change power relations in its dealings with China. 1. Introduction The Silk Road derives its name from the lucrative Chinese silk trade, a major reason for the connection of trade routes into an extensive transcontinental network. The German terms Sei-denstraße and Seidenstraßen (the Silk Road/Route) were coined by Ferdinand von Richthofen, who made seven expeditions to China from 1868 to 1872. Some scholars prefer the term Silk Routes because the road included an extensive network of routes, though few were more than rough caravan tracks. The Silk Road or Silk Route was an ancient network of trade routes that were central to cultural interaction through regions of the Asian continent connecting the West and East from China to the Mediterranean Sea. The Silk Road derives its name from the lucrative trade in Chi-nese silk carried out along its length, beginning during the Han dynasty (207 BCE – 220 CE). The Central Asian sections of the trade routes were expanded around 114 BCE by the Han dynasty, largely through the missions and explorations of the Chinese imperial envoy, Zhang Qian. The Chinese took great interest in the safety of their trade products and extended the Great Wall of China to ensure the protection of the trade route (Wikipedia, 2016). Trade on the Silk Road was a significant factor in the development of the civilizations of China, the Indian subcontinent, Persia, Europe, the Horn of Africa and Arabia, opening long-distance, political and economic relations between the civilizations. Though silk was certainly the major trade item from China, many other goods were traded, and religions, syncretic philosophies, and various technologies, as well as diseases, also travelled along the Silk Routes. In addition to economic trade, the Silk Road served as a means of carrying out cultural trade among the civilizations along its network. The main traders during antiquity were the Chinese, Arab, Indians, Persians, Somalis, Greeks, Syrians, Romans, Armenians, and Bactrians, and from the 5th to the 8th century the Sogdians. In June 2014, UNESCO designated the Chang'an-Tianshan corridor of the Silk Road as a World Heritage Site. The Eurasian Land Bridge (a railway through China, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Russia) is sometimes referred to as the New Silk Road. The last link in one of these two railway routes was completed in 1990, when the railway systems of China and Kazakhstan connected at Alataw Pass (Alashan Kou). In 2008, the line was used to connect the cities of Ürümqi in China's Xinjiang Province to Almaty and Astana in Kazakhstan. Starting in July 2011 the line has been used by a freight service, which connects Chongqing, China with Duisburg, Germany, which cuts travel time for cargo from about 36 days by container ship to just 13 days by freight train. As of 2013, Hewlett-Packard is moving large freight trains of laptop computers and monitors along this rail route. China has shifted from a centrally planned to a market based economy and experienced rapid economic and social development. It has lifted more than 500 million people out of poverty. The political economy of Chinese reforms and the shared gains between political elites and the private sector can be partially transplanted to the African context. Rural reforms in China helped accelerate economic takeoff through a restructuring of property rights and a boost to both savings rates and output. China has experimented with a degree of decentralization that could yield benefits for many Sub-Saharan African countries. Africa can learn from China " s policies toward autonomous areas and ethnic minorities to stave off conflict and China " s experiences and conduct developmental experiments for poverty alleviation goals. There are four developments in particular that merit attention: a focus on quality and not just price, the push to employ more local talent, greater interest in building local capacities and diversifying risk (World Bank, 2010). Today, a more vigorous debate has begun about the nature of ties with China. Hyperactive Chinese involvement is undoubtedly helping address the infrastructure shortcomings that hold up growth. Considering the drive, characteristics and dynamics of the Chinese economic assault, the fundamental question facing nations is not whether they have options for participating in the process of balanced benefits in the spirit of true globalism; it is indeed how they wish to integrate into the process and at which speed, to be partners and actors. Africa needs to assemble the required mettle to change power relations in its dealings with China. The continent " s relations with China must be tailored to yield commensurate benefits. African countries must use existing safety valves, like constitutional clauses and parliamentary agreements, to their advantage (Khalid, 2016:2).

This paper will investigate the history of Silk Road in changing patterns of Geopolitics. Historically, it remained only a road or a route but a fragment of history that connects East and West. It consists of network of routes, trails and trading posts starting from China, scattered across Central Asia, penetrating South Asia and reaching across Europe. The term Silk Road was used for this route as Silk, which was before 7th century exclusively produced in China was the main product being exported to European lands. Empires like Persian, Roman as well as regions of Middle East, Central Asia, and Subcontinent and as far as Russia were involved in the exchange which reveals an earlier version of globalization. Knowledge, inventions and religions were the commodities which travelled through this route. In the contemporary world i.e 21st century China is treading through similar paths to ensure its sustainability and development. “One Belt, One Road” (OBOR) Initiative announced in 2013,...