Susan Whitfield's Silk, Slaves, and Stupas is not only about the history of the Silk Road; it is a dialogue that oscillates between the people and the objects that traveled along the Silk Road. It is a book on material culture, an approach historians have increasingly applied to help us perceive and understand how social reality was structured and framed through objects and material items. This approach also engages with the psychology of taste, individual motivation, metaphorical analogies, and social unity. It does so by recapturing the physical conditions and structural patterns of everyday life among various communities or, in the words of economic determinists, within the capitalistic market. The growth of the so-called school of material culture tended to maximize the amount of attention given to artifacts, crafts, commodities, and the material environment of the societies being studied. The new material culturists continue to prevail, and most of their...

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