Here is a history taken at the gallop, if ever there was one. And no wonder, for its coverage is broader by far than its title implies – indeed, the text makes clear (p. 328) that the term “Silk Road” is not one with which the author is entirely comfortable, so one must assume that its position on the cover is due to marketing considerations, now that the tourist trade has helped popularize Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen's coinage well beyond any currency he originally envisaged. But the scope of this volume even exceeds by far that of its subtitle, in which the term “Central Eurasian” these days seems to be a category used to discuss post-Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus as a single, loosely conceived unit. Here, by contrast, “Eurasia” really does mean the whole land mass from sea to shining sea, with the British Isles and Japan thrown in for good measure, and “central” signifies, as it were, “not too far north or too far south; excluding the chillier regions of the taiga and the warmer Mediterranean lands, the Fertile Crescent, and so forth”. But in fact, over the more than three-and-a-half millennia that this history entails we learn plenty about these contiguous areas to the south, if only because for the formative early period of Beckwith's history it is their historians who tell us most about the inhabitants of Central Eurasia, and fix for the ensuing centuries the images of barbarism and greed that he heroically sets out to contest.

In place of this unifying stereotype, which sees all horsemen of the steppes as much of a muchness, Beckwith has to keep to a couple of alternative strategies in order to impose coherence on his account of such vast distances in time and space. The first is simply to keep moving forward in a headlong narrative, albeit one that includes passages of summary at the start of each chapter, and a certain amount of skirmishing with opposing views in the footnotes. But it is only at the end of the ride, so to speak, that he dismounts in order to engage in more hand-to-hand academic combat, in two appendixes on the early Indo-Europeans and on ancient Central Asian ethonyms, plus over 100 extended footnotes. Much philological erudition is on display here, for where the historian from a peripheral society does not deign to vary the stock description of the barbarian beyond giving a few personal and group names, it is these details that provide, through close linguistic analysis, the only clues as to the relationships with other groups, whether earlier, later or contemporary, beyond the mute and far from complete evidence from material culture provided by archaeology. The decision to keep such materials out of the main text was undeniably wise, but even where they are relegated to a supplementary position it has unfortunately not been possible to include any detailed discussion of contrary evidence – E. G. Pulleyblank's reasons, for example, for hesitating to see a word for “horseman” in the ethonym Wu-sun (pp. 376–7) – so despite the energy expended there is still something of the air of shadowboxing in this section of the book.

Beckwith's second tactic is to foreground from the start those cultural features that seem to transcend these particularities and to constitute a Central Eurasian Cultural Complex. Two elements seem here to be even more basic than horsemanship, whether the charioteering or cavalry variety, which explains why this is a history in which neither harness nor stirrup are mentioned, no more than are any of the “world systems” historians of the area, whose writings, inter alia, are apparently alluded to on p. ix as beyond the author's concern. Instead, right at the start we are introduced to the story of the hero, abandoned at birth but supernaturally preserved from harm, who survives to avenge himself on tyranny, a story that seems to lie at the heart of many ethnic origin myths from Central Eurasia. Linked with it is the institution of the “comitatus”, the sworn brothers of the hero who defend him in life and follow him voluntarily in death. For the first millennium ce Beckwith suggests a further Central Eurasian political innovation, namely the quadripartite – usually regional – delegation of power (pp. 137–9), but this seems more open to question as distinctively Central Eurasian. It may, for example, be due to the diffusion of the Buddhist notion of the quadripartite division of Euarasian humanity into four great kingships, with the King of the Horses representing Central Eurasia as a whole. To delegate rule to four figures representing four directions is also a fairly self-evident idea that may be found, for example, in the early days of the Taiping Rebellion – and the Hakka, whatever their origins, have never been suspected of having Central Eurasian antecedents.

For the final furlongs of his epic ride through history, moreover, Beckwith brings in a further unifying argument expressed as a strong aversion to Modernism – T. S. Eliot, for example, is subjected to a degree of criticism quite unexpected in a book ostensibly about the Silk Road, along with most of the rest of modern poetry, art and music. Against the background of the earlier depiction of the hero and his blood brothers, and laments over the fall of the Nepalese monarchy due to “the blatant, undisguised spread of populist ‘democratic’ propaganda by the international mass media on the scene in Kathmandu, who were so obviously brainwashed by Modernism they probably had no idea what they were doing” (p. 287, n. 66), this all could seem rather too Aryan for comfort. But our author is only very rarely prescriptive. “It is necessary to raise the artistic level of rock or popular music while still following, essentially, its own rules and traditions” (p. 424) is an injunction that readers may or may not take to heart, but after travelling so far in Beckwith's company most will probably forgive him for completing his journey on a somewhat unexpected hobbyhorse.

We should all no doubt accept that Central Eurasia was never at any time simply a howling wilderness of uncouth barbarity, but equally the effort to restore it to some sort of cultural centrality vis-à-vis the better-known civilizations on its periphery probably has its limits, too. To suggest that the new ideas of the Axial Age could have radiated outward from Central Eurasia, as seems to be done on p. 75, poses a stimulating question, but even Demosthenes, one of the two Greeks of partly Scythian descent put forward in evidence for this possibility, was more of an orator than an abstract thinker. And while some have argued for the influence of Scythian religion on Greece, such claims have also been quite stoutly resisted, as for example by Jan N. Bremmer, The Rise and Fall of the Afterlife (London: Routledge, 2002), chapter 3. On the other hand, when Laozi in legend quit China for a better place, it was towards Central Eurasia that he was seen heading, which suggests a culture there deemed by some not uncongenial to Taoism, for all the martial stereotypes imposed upon its inhabitants. The one period when new ideas incontrovertibly did radiate outwards from Central Eurasia was in the wake of the establishment of Islam in areas that had formerly supported Buddhist learning in the general region of Transoxiana. This important juncture in world history is well treated on pp. 152–4 and again on pp. 177–80 in relation to its ultimate importance for Europe, but it would seem clear that the Central Eurasians who contributed to the diffusion of this knowledge drew much more on ideas emanating ultimately from lands to the south of them in India rather than on innovations deriving from dwellers on the open steppes.

Even the core of the Central Eurasian Cultural Complex defined by Beckwith probably had its limitations as a contribution to world civilization, for that matter. One can see that the tale of the revenge of the hero, basically an androcentric version of the Cinderella story, could have played a positive role in legitimating a certain amount of random social mobility in a type of society that otherwise tended to be stratified (as in the Scythian case) between the warrior elite and the rest. Perhaps the ritual suicide of the comitatus had some sort of similar function. But as a political creed it surely would have been even less constructive than the “bloody tanistry” that Joseph Fletcher saw as having bedevilled the later stages of Mongol rule. So it is not that Beckwith provides us with a rehabilitation of the Central Eurasians that takes the form of a bland textbook; rather, he is often contentious and sometimes perhaps a little tendentious, too. And it is not that history on such a scale has never been discussed before: the pre-war Japanese scholar Shiratori Kurakichi, for example, theorized in his day on the opposition between north and south from Britain to Japan. But Beckwith is the first to have carried off the feat of actually writing a history of this whole expanse of time and space in a way stimulating enough to make the reader think about it from start to finish. There is certainly something heroic about that, and this book deserves therefore to go into paperback very much as it is, uncompromised by any retractions that may be forced upon its author by others. A few minor points might even so be unobtrusively corrected. It may be true that there is no Variorum edition of the travel account of “Hsüan Tsang” (recte Hsüan-tsang in the transcription used), but not specifying the edition cited at all is a bit baffling – and that prepared under the editorship of Ji Xianlin is not to be sniffed at. Where, too, philological precision has been so forcefully demanded, it is a little disappointing to find the name of the great sinologist and Mongolist Herbert Franke consistently spelled wrongly.