Peter Frankopan
Most boardrooms frame geopolitical risk as a disruption to manage, not a structural shift to understand. The assumptions that have shaped Western business strategy for three decades – American dominance, rules-based trade, stable energy markets – are no longer reliable. Organisations making ten-year decisions need a framework for reading the world that goes deeper than today’s news cycle.
As Western strategic assumptions give way to a more contested global order, Peter Frankopan – Oxford’s Professor of Global History and advisor to the World Bank – gives senior leaders the historical framework to understand what is actually shifting, and where durable power and trade are moving.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Peter Frankopan
- His central argument in The Silk Roads – that Eurasian trade routes, not Western nation-states, were the real axis of wealth and power for most of human history – gives leaders a structurally different mental map for reading where global economic gravity is moving. This is not commentary; it is a published, peer-reviewed thesis that has sold over two million copies across forty languages.
- The Earth Transformed makes a specific and uncomfortable argument for boards: that climate and the natural environment are not a policy consideration layered onto geopolitics, but the primary driver of the rise and fall of economies and empires. It resets how serious organisations should be thinking about long-term risk, not just ESG compliance.
- His advisory work for the World Bank on South Asian transport corridors and with UNIDO on Belt and Road infrastructure means his analysis of global connectivity is grounded in live geopolitical and economic reality – not theoretical.
- Named one of Prospect Magazine’s World’s 50 Top Thinkers in 2019, his work is positioned at the intersection of serious scholarship and applied strategic relevance – carrying weight with both policymakers and corporate boards.
- His geographic scope is genuinely unusual: he works across the Mediterranean, Russia, the Middle East, Iran, Central Asia, and China as an integrated system – making him the rare authority on Eurasian dynamics as a whole rather than a single-region specialist.
Biography highlights
- Professor of Global History, Oxford University; Stavros Niarchos Foundation Director, Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research; Senior Research Fellow, Worcester College
- UNESCO Professor of Silk Roads Studies; Bye-Fellow, King’s College, Cambridge
- Author of The Silk Roads (Bloomsbury) – No.1 Sunday Times bestseller, Sunday Times Book of the Decade 2010–19, translated into more than 40 languages, 2m+ copies sold
- Author of The Earth Transformed (Bloomsbury) – The Times History Book of the Year; Financial Times and Guardian/Observer Book of the Year
- Named one of Prospect Magazine’s World’s 50 Top Thinkers (2019); recipient of the Calliope Prize, German Emigration Center, and the Carical Foundation Human Sciences Prize
- Senior Advisor to the World Bank on South Asian transport corridors; involved with UNIDO’s Bridge for Cities Programme on Belt and Road and sustainable urban development
- Regular contributor to the Financial Times, Guardian, and New York Times; co-host of the Legacy podcast (Goalhanger/Wondery) with Afua Hirsch
- Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Royal Historical Society, Royal Asiatic Society, and Royal Geographical Society
Biography
The Silk Roads were not a romantic footnote to European history. They were the main event. That is the argument Peter Frankopan – Professor of Global History at Oxford and Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research – has spent two decades building: that the trade routes running through Central Asia, Persia, the Middle East, and the Indian Ocean were the real axis of wealth, power, and exchange for most of recorded history, and that the West’s period of dominance was the exception, not the rule.
His book The Silk Roads made that case to a global readership – No.1 in the Sunday Times, named Book of the Decade, translated into more than forty languages. The New Silk Roads brought the argument into the present, reading China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the re-emergence of Central Asian states, and the reconfiguration of energy markets not as emerging-market news but as the return of structural patterns. His most recent work, The Earth Transformed – The Times History Book of the Year 2023 – extends the argument further still: climate and the natural environment, he argues, are not a policy layer on top of geopolitics but the defining force in the rise and fall of civilisations and economies.
Frankopan does not only write about geopolitics. He advises on it. He has served as Senior Advisor to the World Bank on South Asian transport corridors and worked with UNIDO on the future of sustainable cities along Belt and Road. Named one of Prospect Magazine’s World’s 50 Top Thinkers in 2019, he contributes to the Financial Times, Guardian, and New York Times, and advises governments, multilateral institutions, and multinational organisations on geopolitical risk.
For boards navigating what is, by any historical measure, a genuine structural shift in where power, trade, and risk are concentrated, Frankopan offers something rarer than expertise: a framework for distinguishing what is structurally new from what has happened before, and knowing which is which.
Key speaking topics
- Global power shifts and the rebalancing between East and West
- The Silk Roads: Eurasian trade, connectivity, and long-term economic patterns
- China’s Belt and Road Initiative and the new geography of global commerce
- Geopolitical risk: Russia, the Middle East, Central Asia, and Iran
- Climate and environment as long-term drivers of economic and geopolitical change
- The limits of Western strategic assumptions and the rules-based order
- BRICS, the global majority, and the emergence of new economic frameworks
Ideal for
- Board members and C-suite teams assessing geopolitical risk in international trade, investment, or expansion
- Financial services, investment, and sovereign wealth fund audiences analysing long-term global economic trends
- Government, policy, and public sector leaders navigating strategic realignment between West and East
- International affairs forums and CEO-level summits seeking rigorous historical context for decisions with long time horizons
Audience outcomes
- A reframed understanding of where global economic and political gravity is moving – grounded in historical evidence rather than current news cycles
- Clearer thinking about China, Central Asia, and the Middle East as structural actors, not simply emerging markets or risk zones to monitor
- A historical framework for treating climate and environmental factors as long-term geopolitical and economic forces rather than compliance issues
- Greater ability to distinguish structural shifts in the global order from cyclical volatility when making decisions that extend beyond the short term
- Specific historical precedents and patterns that challenge Western-centric assumptions embedded in most strategic planning frameworks