🌍 Travelling the silk roads — and what it taught me about power, people and public service

I picked up Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads while on holiday, expecting a sweeping history lesson. What I didn’t expect was how much it would help me make sense of the world I work in every day — a world shaped by borders, trade routes, and ideologies far older than social media or smartphones.

As someone working in strategy and systems change, it reminded me how the short-term turbulence we navigate today often has deep, long-term roots — and how empires rise and fall not just through power, but through how they relate to others.

🛤️ Migration, contradiction and cohesion

One of the things that struck me most was the irony in modern nationalism. In countries like the UK and France, nostalgia for empire often coexists with anti-migrant rhetoric. But the empires being glorified were built precisely through movement — migration, trade, extraction.

The Silk Roads helped me see how:

• Cultural mixing often created stronger societies: The Ottoman Empire thrived where it integrated difference. It fractured where it imposed uniformity.
• Borders are recent and often arbitrary: Many were drawn not to reflect people’s lives but colonial deals (Sykes-Picot, for example). We’re still living with the consequences.
• Migration is a creative force: From Persian traders to Arab mathematicians to Slavic workers, much of what we now value — science, language, agriculture — travelled with people.

It reminded me of work like British Future’s research on how to talk about immigration in a way that connects with values like contribution, fairness and shared identity — rather than polarisation.

In Adur & Worthing Councils, we’re learning how to build cultural connection into policy, not just through participation but through practice:

• Our Community Leaders sessions create space for shared reflection across different backgrounds.
• Our Kitchen Table programme supports residents to fund local projects together and build social capital in real time.

🔍 What this means for today’s public services

These reflections matter because the choices we make now are still influenced by those old dynamics — who’s in, who’s out, who’s trusted, who’s feared.

In times of crisis, we can go one of two ways:

• Isolationism and control: Powerful states doubling down on surveillance, short supply chains, and digital gatekeeping.
• Interdependence and care: Networks of mutual aid, cross-border learning, and new civic imaginaries.

We’re already seeing both:

• Camden Council partnering with residents to reimagine the future of social housing.
• Barcelona developing a city-level digital rights and data sovereignty model.
• New Local arguing for a shift from top-down systems to community-powered change.

In Adur & Worthing, our Mission Control governance helps multi-disciplinary teams collaborate across organisational and community boundaries.

Through the Thriving Together programme, we’re designing civic futures with communities — from neighbourhood priorities to seafront visions — not to preserve what was, but to shape what could be.

🧠 Practical reflections for those working in change

If you’re in strategy, delivery, innovation or participation, here are some provocations this reading left me with:

1. Look further back to look further ahead

What if your 10-year plan started with a 500-year history scan? What power dynamics, place identities or cultural flows are shaping your area today?

2. Treat cohesion as infrastructure

Social cohesion isn’t soft. It’s structural. How are your services investing in trust, belonging and participation — as intentionally as you do in tech or roads?

3. Build plural, not binary, futures

Avoid the trap of polarities (state vs. market, local vs. global). Use tools like futures cones to imagine multiple trajectories. Who gets to shape them?

4. Map cultural assets, not just economic ones

Who are the storytellers, memory keepers and connectors in your communities? In Adur & Worthing, our Colonnade House Creative Hub supports artists and communities to shape civic conversations through creativity.

5. Decentre the nation-state

What happens when we centre place, identity or purpose instead? Local government is well placed to model forms of governance that feel closer and fairer.

✨ Final thoughts: we’ve always been connected

Reading The Silk Roads helped me see strategy not as a spreadsheet or a blueprint — but as a story. One that is always being retold, renegotiated and remembered.

And perhaps our job now is not to defend a single empire, identity or outcome — but to become better travellers of the road itself. Humble. Curious. Connected.

If you’re also trying to make sense of where we’ve come from — and where we might go — I’d love to hear what you’re learning.

Because we can’t build fairer futures without understanding the roots beneath our feet.

This blog was inspired by Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads, and reflects insights from real examples including Adur & Worthing Councils, Camden Council, New Local, British Future and others across Europe.