Peter Frankopan

Why organisations work with Peter Frankopan

• His central argument in The Silk Roads, that Eurasian trade routes rather than Western nation-states formed the axis of wealth and power for most of recorded history, gives leaders a different map for reading where economic gravity is moving. The book has sold more than two million copies and his work has been translated into forty languages.
• The Earth Transformed, The Times History Book of the Year, puts climate and the natural environment at the centre of why economies and empires rise and fall. It gives boards a way to treat environmental change as a strategic variable on a decades-long horizon.
• He advised the World Bank and DFID on transport corridors in South Asia and has worked with UNIDO’s Bridge for Cities programme on Belt and Road infrastructure. His reading of global connectivity comes from inside those projects.
• Prospect Magazine named him one of the world’s 50 top thinkers in 2019. He has also won the Calliope Prize from the German Emigration Center and the Carical Foundation’s Human Sciences Prize for The New Silk Roads.
• He works across the Mediterranean, Russia, Iran, Central Asia and China as one connected system, which is how questions about energy, sanctions and supply routes actually reach a board.

Biography highlights

• Professor of Global History, Oxford University; Stavros Niarchos Foundation Director, Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research; Senior Research Fellow, Worcester College; Distinguished Fellow, Blavatnik School of Government
• UNESCO Professor of Silk Roads Studies; Bye-Fellow, King’s College, Cambridge
• Author of The Silk Roads (Bloomsbury): No.1 Sunday Times bestseller, one of the Sunday Times Books of the Decade, more than two million copies sold and translated into forty languages
• 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 and academic expert on a World Bank and DFID project on transport corridors in South Asia; worked 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 with Afua Hirsch for Goalhanger and Wondery
• Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Royal Historical Society, Royal Asiatic Society, and Royal Geographical Society

Biography

For most of recorded history, the richest and most connected places on earth sat between the Mediterranean and China. That is the starting point of Peter Frankopan’s work as Professor of Global History at Oxford and Stavros Niarchos Foundation Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research.

The Silk Roads went to No.1 in the Sunday Times, stayed in the top ten for nine months, and was later named one of the Sunday Times Books of the Decade. It has sold more than two million copies, and his work has been translated into forty languages. The New Silk Roads carried 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 as the return of much older patterns.

The Earth Transformed, The Times History Book of the Year, extends the case: climate and the natural environment are the defining force behind the rise and fall of civilisations and economies. The method behind it draws on written sources, climate archives, genetic data and statistical modelling.

He also works outside the university. He served as senior advisor and academic expert on a World Bank and DFID project on transport corridors in South Asia, and has worked with UNIDO’s Bridge for Cities programme on Belt and Road and sustainable urban development. He writes for the Financial Times, the Guardian and the New York Times, has a column in the London Evening Standard, and co-hosts Legacy with Afua Hirsch for Goalhanger and Wondery.

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 and public sector leaders working on trade, energy and infrastructure policy across Europe, Asia and the Middle East
• International affairs forums and CEO-level summits seeking rigorous historical context for decisions with long time horizons

Audience outcomes

• An account of China, Central Asia and the Middle East as long-standing structural actors in world trade, with the historical evidence behind it
• Specific precedents for situations they are currently reading as unprecedented
• A basis for treating environmental change as a driver of economic and geopolitical outcomes over decades, not a reporting obligation
• The ability to tell a structural shift in the global order from ordinary cyclical volatility, with named examples of each
• A direct challenge to the Western-centric assumptions built into most strategic planning frameworks