How to Understand the Present and Future of the World

Peter Frankopan, Professor of Global History at Oxford, and bestselling author of The Silk Roads, in an unmissable conversation with Akala, award-winning hip-hop artist, writer and social entrepreneur, on “the present and future of the world”.

Drawing on his major new book The New Silk Roads, Peter Frankopan and Akala will discuss how in an age of Brexit and Trump, the themes of isolation and fragmentation permeating the Western world stand in sharp contrast to events along the Silk Roads where since 2015 ties have been strengthened and mutual cooperation established. And how the network of relationships being formed along the length and breadth of the Silk Roads, will have profound global implications in the centre of power whose importance is all too absent from today’s newspaper headlines.

All roads used to lead to Rome, but as this conversation will show, today they lead to Beijing.

Peter Frankopan is Professor of Global History at Oxford University where is also Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford and Director the Centre for Byzantine Research. He was Schiff Scholar at Jesus College, Cambridge, and Senior Scholar at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He has been Stanley J. Seeger Fellow at Princeton, Scaliger Visiting Professor at Leiden and Presidential Scholar at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. His revised translation of The Alexiad by Anna Komnene was published by Penguin Classics in 2009. He is the author of The First Crusade: The Call from the East.

Akala is a BAFTA and MOBO award-winning hip-hop artist, writer and social entrepreneur, as well as the co-founder of The Hip-Hop Shakespeare Company. With an extensive global touring history, Akala has appeared at numerous festivals both in the UK and internationally, and has led innovative projects in the arts, education and music across South East Asia, Africa, India, Australia and New Zealand. Akala has also appeared on Channel 4, ITV, MTV, Sky Arts and the BBC promoting his music and poetry, and speaking on wide-ranging subjects from music, race, youth engagement, British/African-Caribbean culture and the arts, with numerous online lectures and performances that have millions of views on YouTube. More recently known for his compelling lectures and journalism – he has written for the Guardian, Huffington Post and the Independent and spoken for the Oxford Union and TEDx.

‘Natives’ his recently published memoir is already a Sunday Times best-seller.