Crisscrossed by many adventurers, from Marco Polo to Nicolas Bouvier, Eurasia has always fascinated. Nevertheless, it remains difficult to define, as geographers, historians and political scientists have rarely referred to this space. A vast continent running from the Far East to Europe, on which empires have been juxtaposed, it is best known for its Silk Roads and its Spice Route, which linked it from one end to the other. But these routes never unified this space, and only allowed limited exchanges of goods, ideas and techniques on the continent. Then the generalization of the nation-state in the twentieth century accentuated its fragmentation and the conflict zones multiplied on the margins of the former empires that had become great powers.
We had to wait for the Eurasian ideology, and then, in the 21st century, for the Russian project of the Eurasian Economic Union on the one hand, and the Chinese project of the « New Silk Roads » on the other hand, for our way of considering this continent to change. For these new corridors, continental or maritime, developed or planned, make up Eurasia and are likely to give greater cohesion to this area, which covers one third of our planet’s surface area and has more than 60% of the world’s population.
An ambitious and original work that focuses on what has been for too long an unthought of history and geography.
