Silk Roadent!
The Blind Squirrel's 'Monday' Morning Notes. Year 3; Week 45.
Silk Roadent!
Forgive the lame 🐿️pun, but I have been obsessed by tales of the ancient Silk Road for a some time. I have to confess that my mate Peter Frankopan’s book “The Silk Roads” sat unread on my bookshelf for several years until the Covid lockdown finally gave me the time to tackle its 500+ pages (it was not a book to take on planes!).
I ended up devouring the book in 3 multi-hour sittings and it now sits (dog-eared!) on the ‘reference manual’ shelf next to my desk to help me tackle matters related to history that I was not taught at school.1
Pete’s preface to the book, ranting about these gaps in our ‘taught history’, had me ‘from hello’. It’s worth quoting this extract from his preface verbatim:
“The accepted and lazy history of civilisation, wrote [Eric] Wolf, is one where ‘Ancient Greece begat Rome, Rome begat Christian Europe, Christian Europe begat the Renaissance, the Renaissance the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment political democracy and the industrial revolution. Industry crossed with democracy in turn yielded the United States, embodying the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ I immediately recognised that this was exactly the story that I had been told: the mantra of the political, cultural and moral triumph of the west. But this account was flawed; there were alternative ways of looking at history – ones that did not involve looking at the past from the perspective of the winners of recent history.”
Frankly, we were taught more about the world pre-Ancient Greece in my English literature classes! The Romantic poets often referenced the legendary ancient silk road cities of Tashkent, Khiva, Bukhara and Samarkand (and Xanadu, obviously) - but they were sadly little more than exotic names meshed into rhyming couplets.
These days, 4 of those cities - not of course Kubla Khan’s capital - sit within modern day Uzbekistan - a country that now needs to be on your investment radar.
On Friday, I posted my recent conversation with Scott “Yurta” Osheroff, CIO of Asia Frontier Capital’s Uzbekistan Fund and CEO of Yurta Asset Management.
A Trillion to Tashkent
Scott Osheroff is true emerging market frontiersman. On Tuesday, he and I sat down to discuss the investment opportunity in Uzbekistan. This is a macro story that ticks multiple boxes for the 🐿️.
Please check it out via the link above in case you missed it (a 36 minute listen / watch). In this week’s ‘Monday Morning’ Notes, the 🐿️ is going to cover the Uzbek macro and micro story in greater detail and it is a LOT more actionable than you would imagine!
