I picked up this book while desperately trying to find Chinese history, of any kind, on the shelves in my local bookstore - and it's an excellent bookstore with a sizable history section. I thought surely silk = China. And yet. Even standing in the store skimming, it was very obvious there was very little Chinese history to be found here. My impression was that the author couldn't avoid talking about China in the early chapters, but treated it as a kind of prologue before getting into the meat of the book, which was Europe.