Nationalists, for whom history is no more than an accoutrement of righteous vindication, have annexed their arguments. So it is that a fairly recondite debate turning on economies of old has acquired new geopolitical significance. Accordingly, a crude heuristic now has it that Frankopan is on Team China, and Dalrymple on Team India.

But they are, truth be told, on the same team. The presiding impulse of their respective books, The Silk Roads and The Golden Road — both on global trade — is to vanquish that old foe, seriously hobbled but not quite dead: Eurocentrism. Hence the emphasis on cultural diffusion, seen in the popular imagination as a set of Western bequests to a benighted East. Here, by contrast, the aim is to show that traffic was in great measure, though by no means entirely, in the reverse direction.

There is, of course, a difference in emphasis in their accounts — Frankopan being a Byzantinist, and Dalrymple an Indianist. Yet the world-historical objective is the same — guided, one surmises, by their similar intellectual formation. Born to a Dalmatian father and Swedish mother, Frankopan was fired by the lectures of Jonathan Shepard, a historian of the Byzantine world at Cambridge. His debut was an account of The First Crusade that swapped Latin for Greek sources, reversing the conventional gaze. Dalrymple, a Highland aristocrat, also passed through Cambridge before cutting his teeth as a travel writer, traversing the same subcontinental lands as some of his forebears. For both, then, there were strong biographical imperatives that militated against insularity. With such backgrounds, it is hardly surprising that they didn’t turn out to be little Englanders.

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This habit of mind was aligned to a historical sensibility. Born in 1965 and 1971, respectively, Dalrymple and Frankopan belong to the same cohort, coming of age as writers at a time when the British reading public was happily devouring 1,000-page tomes on, say, the French and Russian Revolutions. It was an age when doorstopper histories sold like air-fryer cookbooks, which is to say an age that lent itself easily to public-facing history. Happily, it was also an age relatively innocent of precarious contracts and pretentious postmodernism; pecuniary considerations and the stylistic dictates of the academy would prevent many from scaling the heights of public intellectualdom in a later age. Dalrymple took up the cudgels for popular history with a quartet on the Raj — a darker riff on Jan Morris’s trilogy — before moving backwards to Indian antiquity. Frankopan, by contrast, moved in both directions, encompassing the longue durée in histories of the Silk Road and climate change.

Billed as a “new history of the world”, no less, The Silk Roads offered a highly idiosyncratic take on global history, giving us the view from the Stans, as it were. Halford Mackinder called the region the world’s “heartland”, control over which is the sine qua non of global hegemony — a provocative argument when it was made in 1904, though these days seen as common wisdom in think-tank circles. Frankopan’s sweep — taking in the Achaemenids and Abbasids, commending the Persians and Mongols, depicted here not as barbaric cretins but as begetters of a sophisticated civilisation — no doubt had a touch of Whiggishness to it, confirming Herbert Butterfield’s wry observation that historical compression often tends towards upbeatness. One can see why Beijing’s mandarins fell head over heels with it. Trade gets top billing in these pages. War and prejudice — between Arab and Jew, Christian and Muslim — often recede from view. This was the kind of feel-good story the architects of a new Silk Road could get behind.

All the same, Frankopan was at pains to argue that the term itself was, in fact, of recent vintage. He didn’t go as far as Khodadad Rezakhani in dubbing it the “road that never was”, though he did maintain that the East-West carrying trade — ferrying money and maladies, goods and gods — coursed in the main through Indian ports. Overland routes from China were a minority taste. The fact is that no “Silk Road” ever existed in antiquity or mediaeval times. The Romans and Chinese were hardly aware of one another’s existence. On the other hand, Rome and India did a roaring trade in diamonds and drugs, amethysts and eunuchs, hair and diaphanous fabrics. Fast-forward a millennium to the 9th century, and it is still Gujarati entrepôts, topped up with the likes of Basra or Siraf in the Persian Gulf, doing the heavy-lifting.

Historically, the camel and caravan were no match for the ship. Across Central Asia, disconnection — not connection — was the norm. Then as now, sea transport was exponentially cheaper than land transport. Thanks to the revolution that is containerisation, these days it costs next to nothing to have your Shein jeans conveyed halfway across the world; the real expense, and environmental harm, lies in last-mile delivery. As it was, the “Silk Road” only became a proper thing in 1877. That is when the Prussian geographer Baron von Richthofen, enlisted to supply a fanciful genealogy for a railway linking Berlin and Beijing, coined the word. It was still later, in 1938, that the Silk Road made its Anglophone debut.

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These subtleties were lost in the reception of The Silk Roads. Coming at a time of the Middle Kingdom’s return to the world stage under state-capitalist aegis, the hype around it neatly dovetailed with the Belt and Road Initiative, China’s latest effort to win friends and buy influence. It followed that Beijing was unencumbered by real history, preferring a nostalgic version of it. As Don DeLillo’s quip has it: “longing on a large scale is what makes history.” Very simply, the ancient Silk Road was good PR, another win for China’s “heritage diplomacy”.

It is only fitting, then, that the British Museum has cleared some precious Bloomsbury real estate to commemorate its (chimerical) existence in its blockbuster show. Not in any sense a work of Chinese propaganda, of course, the Silk Roads exhibition is nevertheless of a piece with the deceptive Silk Road Revival. Its message of global connection inevitably, if inadvertently, plays up its popular image as a Belt and Road Initiative avant la lettre. Rather much is made of silk, a commodity that scarcely featured in international trade. Historically speaking, an emphasis on more important items — cotton, pepper, ivory, sandalwood — would have placed India to the fore. Indeed, as Dalrymple has argued, the elision of India in the show was striking, even as a great many of the exhibits screamed the Subcontinent. One suspects that the omission owed to curatorial parochialism, not a willingness to regurgitate Beijing’s talking points, but it was revealing all the same.

On this score, Dalrymple’s The Golden Road, published this year, is a salutary corrective to the Scylla of Sinocentrism. Yet in its upbeat Indocentric pushback, it makes itself vulnerable to the Charybdis of Hindu nationalist appropriation. Time was when India was number one, Dalrymple argues, exporting mathematics and medicine, music and mythology, religion and architecture across what he calls the “Indosphere” — “the Sanskrit ecumene” to pointy-heads in the know – spanning Kandahar and Singapore from c. 250 BC to AD 1200.

It’s a story that is bound to give Hindu nationalists hard-ons, not least because the Indosphere bears a passing resemblance to an akhand bharat — a Greater India fencing in much of Southeast Asia under direct rule from Delhi. This, apparently, was the way things were in Asia’s deep past. The more hare-brained of the Hindu nationalists, the historian Sara Perlangeli has shown, continue to harbour fantasies of an “offshore Hindu nation” protected by Delhi. Dalrymple’s own retort, prefigured in The Golden Road — that a great deal of ancient “Indian” soft power was of Buddhist, definitely not Hindu, stamp — one suspects falls on deaf ears in this puerile milieu.

Historians have no control over how their books are received — more’s the pity. Frankopan is under no illusions. “I know my place as a commentator and it’s not to shape answers for politicians… I’m a mere historian sitting in Oxford,” he has said with resigned candour. Dalrymple’s version could run: “…sitting in a farmhouse in Mehrauli.”

The Golden and Silk Roads have acquired lives of their own, as signs of forgotten, precolonial national greatness. Conceived at the outset as correctives to Eurocentric history, they will be read in an altogether different light in certain quarters. For the votaries of China’s “wolf warrior diplomacy” — Global Times editor Hu Xijin (who once likened Britain to a “bitch asking for a beating”), for instance, or China Daily EU bureau chief Chen Weihua (who once called an American senator a “lifetime bitch”) — accounts of the Silk Road no doubt serve as comforting reminders of a seemingly endless golden age before the country’s “century of national humiliation”. In India, too, histories of precolonial gloire will go down swimmingly in milieux brimming with postcolonial resentment. One imagines India’s foreign minister S. Jaishankar might cull a titbit or two from The Golden Road for inclusion in a future speech rehashing his obligatory swipes at “the West” and its “old habit” of imperialism.

Yet it can scarcely be denied that both India and China have long since ceased to be colonised nations. If anything, they are now both colonial powers in their own right. No longer the “sick man of Asia”, China today is the world’s largest debt collector. Exporting its surplus capital and flexing its military muscle, its ruling class has come to treat a large chunk of Southeast Asia — everything west of its so-called “9-dash line” — as its own private garden. Power projection on the high seas has gone hand in hand with economic exploitation further afield, with Chinese tycoons snapping up everything from Zambian copper to Liberian redwood.

India’s ruling class, likewise, has come to assume that it is the sole keyholder to the Indian Ocean, propping up favourable regimes from Mauritius to the Maldives. Again, the Indian national oil company’s stab at controlling Sudanese oil and the Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s monopolisation of Ghana’s 5G network are hardly lessons in Third World solidarity.

Small wonder forgotten histories of Asian greatness are in such demand. As Benedetto Croce put it, “all history is contemporary history”.

Our own century’s William Dalrymple is an anachronism down to his name (incidentally, the conservative writer Anthony Daniels took on the pseudonym “Theodore Dalrymple” because he felt it sounded like that of a “gouty old man looking out of the window of his London club, port in hand, lamenting the degenerating state of the world”). Once William Dalrymple might have been governor of the Punjab; now he hosts a podcast. The only comparable figure in contemporary Britain is that other prize stallion of the Goalhanger stable, Rory Stewart — with whom Dalrymple in fact lodged in Kabul in the late 2000s, when he was writing Return of a King.

Even Dalrymple’s outspoken criticism of Israel, which recently got him into genteel Twitter fisticuffs with his friend Simon Sebag Montefiore, has a smack of the old school about it: one can situate him comfortably within a Toryish tradition that disdains the Balfour Declaration as a betrayal of our Arab friends and a cause of national dishonour. In a similar vein, he has done more than most Israel-critics to highlight the plight of the Arab Christians swept up in the conflict, for whom he has agitated since he wrote From the Holy Mountain in 1997.

That book, retracing John Moschus’s steps, completed a trilogy of travelogues that started with In Xanadu, where he followed the path of Marco Polo. Dalrymple’s account of his Silk Roads adventures, written when he was only 22, was praised far and wide by all the greats in the game, including his hero, Patrick Leigh Fermor. Then came City of Djinns, a colourful telling of life in Delhi. Eunuchs and dervishes feature prominently. “Delhi ladies very good,” says his driver at one point, “having breasts like mangoes.”

It is a cliché for the travel writer to find more of himself, and of his home country, the farther he ventures afield; but what seems to have most startled Dalrymple in City of Djinns was the absence of Britain and Britishness in India, which had somehow “managed to shed its colonial baggage”. The only traces of home were to be found among the depressed Anglo-Indians: they too are presented as an anachronism, and Dalrymple writes about them with warmth and fellow-feeling. “The dish I like is that Kentucky Fried Chicken,” says one, Joe Fowler, regarding a recent visit to the motherland: “A very popular dish over there, a delightful dish.” His tone becomes gradually more mournful: “It was born and bred in us that the British Empire would last for ever. They promised us that they would stay.”

In his travel books, Dalrymple himself is the main character, but his move to history as his preferred genre has occasioned a retreat. Already he was blurring political commentary and historical anecdote with tales of his own derring-do: the first chapter of The Age of Kali, for example, tells us a lot both about the origins of the Left-wing movement of Lalu Prasad Yadav, and the author’s efforts to flag him down for an interview (which eventually occurred when they happened to end up on the same flight). Dalrymple declared his intention to retreat from the fore in the introduction of his 2009 book Nine Lives. When he wrote In Xanadu, “travel writing tended to highlight the narrator”; now he prefers to stay “firmly in the shadows”.

Dalrymple’s acclaimed series on the East India Company pursues themes already present in The Age of Kali and City of Djinns. In the latter, he decried the savagery and rapacity of the Company, empire, and — especially — of the British response to the Mutiny of 1857, in which were manifested “all the most horrible characteristics of the English character — philistinism, narrow-mindedness, bigotry, vengefulness”. The date 1857 hangs over much of his writing. It marked the starting-point for what he has called “the world of Kipling”, characterised by “decree from London, complete racial segregation, and the Brits behaving according to stereotype”. It is a shift that Dalrymple bitterly laments.

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But Dalrymple’s interpretation of history has always been more sophisticated than bog-standard empire-bashing. In White Mughals, he illustrates and underscores the extent to which a genuine love of, and respect for, India coexisted alongside avarice and exploitation within the East India Company. On one early episode of his podcast Empire, co-hosted with Anita Anand, he goes out to bat for the great bogeyman of Company Rule, Warren Hastings. Far from prosecuting Hastings in the manner of Edmund Burke, Dalrymple finds something redeeming in him: his learning, his curiosity, his enthusiasm for Indian letters and manners. All this stands in contrast with Robert Clive, the real villain of the piece, whom Dalrymple takes as representing the less urbane, more cynical dimension of British imperialism — the dimension which ultimately, on his telling, came to dominate the stage.

Dalrymple has now moved back in time with his latest book, The Golden Road. Here he tells the grand and gripping story of how India shaped the ancient and medieval world. “Why”, he asks in the introduction, “is the extraordinary diffusion” of Indian influence “not better and more widely known?” “Some might argue that this is a legacy of colonialism,” he answers. This construction anticipates a “but”, but none comes: in any case, Dalrymple, as his appreciation of Hastings makes clear, knows better than anyone that British attitudes to India were always a good deal more complex than regarding it as an “ignorant backwater”.

In The Golden Road, he gives the impression of self-consciously hamming up his Indophilia, perhaps for comic effect. Early on he cites, with a wink, Sanjeev Bhaskar’s Goodness Gracious Me sketch: “Christianity? Indian! Leonardo da Vinci? Indian! Royal family? Indian!” Then, as we progress through his narrative, more and more things turn out to be Indian in origin. The university? Indian! The wealth of the Roman Empire? Indian! Our numbers — and with them “a revolution in commerce, leading ironically to the creation of trading companies that would pioneer the domination of Europe over Asia in the centuries to come”? Indian!

It may therefore be that the old travel writer hasn’t completely disappeared from his own narrative, and that he’s playing a character that is in some ways an imperial throwback. It is as though he goes into overdrive to undo 1857: this may be said to be his overarching mission, if he has one. In a recent interview, he bristled at being described, in jest, as the “last of the White Mughals”, but perhaps this can be meant as a compliment. White Mughals, Indophiles, and William Dalrymples have been a perennial presence in Britain’s intellectual culture, and we are better for it.