Peter Frankopan – The Past, Present, and Future of the World | How To Academy

Tue, 8 July 2025

7:30 pm - 8:45 pm BST

Peter Frankopan – The Past, Present, and Future of the World

Live in Conversation in London

Taking us from ancient Mesopotamia to Trump’s America, Peter Frankopan reveals what the rise and fall of empires tell us about the future of humankind.

Few books genuinely transform the way we understand the story of civilisation, but Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads is one. Reorienting history from a Western perspective to the East, sweeping from Central Asia into China and India, he revealed how the flow of goods and ideas drove the creation of the world we find ourselves in today: where, once again, the east is calling out to those in search of riches and adventure.

Ten years on, the US under Trump is sowing chaos and planning to acquire territory, Xi’s China prepares for an invasion of Taiwan, and Europe is once again at war. What do people in the UAE, Russia, and Turkey think about the west? What can we learn from history to understand this precarious present? And most important of all, what does this mean for the future? Find out from one of the most renowned thinkers of our age.

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Peter Frankopan

Internationally Bestselling Historian

Peter Frankopan is Professor of Global History at Oxford University and Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford. The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, published by Bloomsbury in 2015, was a No. 1 Sunday Times bestseller and remained in the top 10 for nine months after publication. It was named one of the ‘Books of the Decade’ 2010–2020 by the Sunday TimesThe New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World was published by Bloomsbury in 2018 and won the Human Sciences prize of the Carical Foundation in 2019. The Earth Transformed: An Untold History was published by Bloomsbury in 2023 and was a global bestseller and named History Book of the Year by The Times.