‘Asian countries feel their time has come’: why the West must adapt

Frankopan says it’s hard for historians to bring people along with them when US Congress members can deny climate change even exists, and education has not kept up.

“Some of the [scientific] papers have been on the Oxford syllabus for 40 years.”

Won’t humanity just find a way through, I ask hopefully?

“It’s a difficult question for biologists to answer, not just historians. No human ancestor has gone through what we are going through here. So adaptability and speed of change is a real problem,” he says.

It’s interesting to me as a historian that Trump isn’t saying Make America Great, he’s saying Make America Great Again

He worries about short-term threats like war and disease. “We are in a fragile world of new technologies that allow lots of bad things to happen quickly. History is a bit like air crashes – it’s almost always pilot error. Bad decisions under pressure.”

And we have not learned half of what we should have from COVID-19, he adds.

We don’t trouble the waiters much. Frankopan may be one of those super-confident Oxford dons, but he admits to pre-match butterflies ahead of the prestigious Gandhi Oration he is giving at UNSW later than day, which is not great for his appetite.

The standard eight-course Luke Nguyen tasting menu is out, and the wine selections too. While we look at the simpler bar menu, he chats knowledgeably about Italian football news with our photographer Flavio Brancaleone, as only a man who has played cricket for the Croatian national side can.

Frankopan qualified for the team because his father, Louis Doimi de Frankopan, was Croatian. (As an aside, he mentions Croatian-Aussie expats help keep five or six Croatian teams going, adding the wickets there “don’t take a great deal of spin, though”).

His mother, barrister Ingrid Detter, is Swedish, but he was raised in England, where he attended Eton College and went to Cambridge and Oxford universities.

He met his wife Jessica, who is the daughter of British supermarket baron Sir Tim Sainsbury, when they were at Cambridge. As well as overseeing a multi-million pound trust funded by his wife’s family, the couple have hotels in the Cotswolds, London, Amsterdam and Paris.

Rise of Asia

While micro-histories about the world’s debt to nutmeg, cod, or nautical chronometers have proved very popular, Frankopan’s two big-canvas books are like a series of mosaic tiles, he says.

“When I wrote The Silk Roads, basically there were 25 books there that could have been standalone ... you have to think about sorting big pieces of the puzzle together.”

But it’s also pretty basic. “You start with calories and hydration. You think about sanitation and disease environments, and the rest flows from that. But we tend to do history top down, rather than human beings from the bottom up.”

It also links the two books together. History is now being driven by “the biggest piece on the Monopoly board”, he says – the four billion people east of Istanbul and their calories, their water, their wealth.

He plays a question game with his students. “If you could be born anywhere into a median family income, where would you choose?” The US and Australia are decent options. Europe has, well, had a good time of it but without innovation it’s getting poorer.

But in Asia’s energy and dynamism – not always evenly distributed – there is a sense of “this is our moment. You find it everywhere”. Ten years ago, he says, Indian hotels were full of European tourists asking about the Raj. Now they are full of middle-income Indians who want to hear a different history.

But the two shocks of Asia revival and the limits of the environment are on collision course. Frankopan rattles off statistics on Asia’s boom and the strains that exist side by side.

Kuala Lumpur has more super-tall towers than mainland Europe, but the three most climate-stressed regions are in Asia.

India consumes 100 times more data than it did five years ago, but it stopped exporting rice last year. “That’s a warning shot about food supply,” he says.

Lunch arrives, small but perfectly formed. He has banh hoi chicken skewers in lemon grass and turmeric. I have an assortment of exquisitely presented but filling dumplings.

The need for pragmatic historians

Shouldn’t we be more optimistic? I remind Frankopan of his own lines: “History is about batons dropped, and picked up by others.”

The Earth Transformed describes the crisis of late antiquity, the volcano-driven weather changes and catastrophic plagues. Yet it benefited those more adaptable: Anglo-Saxons in western Europe, Slavs in the Balkans, Berbers in North Africa, all peoples still in place. Even so-called civilisational collapses are quite nuanced, he writes. Isn’t our technological progress going to make a difference?

“It’s the job of a historian to be pragmatic rather than optimistic or pessimistic. But what innovation and technology means is a widening of hierarchies – those that can shape the world in their own image for good or bad. New technologies drive benefits to those who already own or are invested.”

AI will give them control of information, just as codifying the word of God did in past societies. “And it didn’t end well”.

Frankopan didn’t want to write about “1066 and all that”, and found the eras when Europe was sidelined had more “stop-you-in-your-tracks moments”.

Who knew early Christianity spread as fast eastwards as westwards, with an archbishop in Kashgar in western China, long before there was one in Canterbury?

Europeans think the Middle Ages was about knights and chivalry, when the future of the medieval world was decided by Arab armies defeating the Mongols in the Middle East. A hoard of Arab coins from Dark Ages Lancashire points to the huge slave trade from Europe to the Muslim world run by the Viking Rus.

How does he keep all this fact-a-line stuff in his head? “Such a lovely question. It’s a bit like opening my favourite drawer of sweets. Working out which one I should eat next.”

Statues can fall

This historian of Rome and Byzantium is surprisingly relaxed about protesters pulling down statues, because those societies routinely cancelled ousted rulers in this way.

But should we drag historical figures into our fights about identity politics and “decolonising” the present?

Chopping Captain Cook off at the knees doesn’t actually change history, he says. “I think it’s a good thing that historians are asking different, better questions. It’s not threatening, though it can quickly turn into virtue signalling and people claiming their view is more valid than others. People look for ways to explain their political persuasions, and history is a latch-on point to let them do that. I think revisiting and reopening some of those wounds is probably a phase we all have to go through.

“Everybody’s now asking questions of history. It’s interesting to me as a historian that Trump isn’t saying Make America Great, he’s saying Make America Great Again.

Putin thinks Russia needs to be put back on some pedestal he believes it once was on, and China, India, and Turkey too”.

“Twenty years ago, no one was asking those questions, and we’re asking them now, It’s birthing pains, a new world of Asian countries feeling their time has come. Those kind of changes are hard to adapt to.”

The link between climate, inequalities and persecution

He says there’s a strong statistical correlation between climate, inequalities and persecution, with historical charts showing links between temperature, food shortfalls and attacks on Jews.

“When you have shorter harvests there’s less to go around, people look for someone to blame.”

In the developed world, migration is linked to housing and cost-of-living problems, and political leaders have low approval ratings.

But Frankopan has started thinking about the big Asian democracies too, with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi looking unchallengeable and Probowo Subianto winning massively among young voters in the Indonesian presidential election. “It’s something to do with the fact that people think that tomorrow will be better than today.” Talking climate can make us a bit depressed and defensive...but it shows we can also do better”.

How does the West adapt? Start by studying these places, he says. The Lowy Institute’s latest Global Diplomacy Index shows China, Japan, Russia, even Turkey, right up there.

“It’s about building ties, building friendships, taking people out to lunch to talk about how you rise together … we think of diplomacy as a luxury.”

How does the West fit into this world? Not easily, he says, because Asia and the Middle East are shrewd diversified investors in Western countries, and whole-of-state actors who have spent more time studying us than we have them. How does the West build those connections, and diversify too? Frankopan sat on the British government’s integrated review of foreign policy, which asked of a post-Brexit country “what strengths we have, and what should we expect in return”. The same discussion should be happening here.

Is the West still hobbled by some inner assumption of superiority? No, he says, it’s very open to new ideas, “but we do still assume that the people on the make, with the energy, will just come to us..and that’s what an imperial system looks like, you go to the centre of power”.

Security depends on a geological lottery

But is the “Asia owns the future” story now ageing badly? China’s economic model is stalling. The Middle East is booming, but it might be just the last hurrah of fossil fuels.

“The decisions that matter today are taken in Riyadh, Delhi, Beijing, Jakarta and Manila. The real challenges and opportunities are not going to happen anywhere else except Asia – with over 400 of the world’s 500 most polluted cities.”

And long-term security depends on a geological lottery. Well-governed imperial China was baffled by its 19th-century losses to tiny Britain, which had coal in the right places, he says.

“But the British colonised a quarter of the world that had no oil, hence the sacrifice of Australians to pressure the Ottomans to open up the Middle East for oil to keep the motor running.”

The natural world shapes so much of what we do. “But do you keep mineral wealth for yourself, or sell them to potential competitors and wake up one day and China has used opportunities we’ve created?”

America has almost the full deck of natural resources. But America’s insecurities mean it constantly feels under attack. Asian nations resent having to pick sides, and wonder why Washington does so little to bring people together.

“There’s a sense that China has tried working out a framework that’s non-Western but which allows others to benefit,” he says.

We finish with macchiato for him and Earl Grey for me. We leave facing the Sydney skyline across the Botanical Gardens, and I think of Frankopan’s favourite city, Merv in Turkemistan, the world’s biggest in the 12th century. It no longer exists. There’s a reason, he says, why some historians have been happier when nothing is happening.