Non-aligned countries didn't exist? Sorry I need some coffee and I'm feeling a little thick at the moment.
It was pretty well-defined as political classifications go, and people involved in actual "entities" related to it were aware of and sometimes used the term.
I always thought it was more about Developed/Developing/Undeveloped, mostly in terms of the industrial transition.
But, if we are being honest, it’s used a lot more as “third class”.
I suppose indeed that it is not really a well defined “thing”, like the Silk Road.
Even into the 1960's there were few industrialized nations outside of those two main blocks, so "Third World" quickly lost its explicitly political meaning and became more a description of the level of capital investment and worker productivity.
"While engaged in a survey of China, the baron was charged with dreaming up a route for a railway linking Berlin to Beijing. This he named die Seidenstrassen, the Silk Roads. It was not until 1938 that the term Silk Road appeared in English, as the title of a popular book by a Nazi-sympathising Swedish explorer, Sven Hedin."
-- historian William Dalrymple
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2024/oct/06/the-sil...
But it did exist, and goods were shipped between Europe and China without either side being aware the other existed, which at least I think is pretty darn amazing!
It is a great way to meet books, I think :)
And has been fun to build!
I'm hoping to do the Silk Route by bike in the next couple of years. TAD Global Cycling puts together yearly runs, and it looks amazing: https://tdaglobalcycling.com/silk-route
I have done Central Asia from Europe to China by bike twice, most recently 2024. Absolutely no problem with resupplying food and water daily. There are food stops and railway-worker infrastructure in the Kazakh and Uzbek deserts. And while Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan have a lot of wild mountain beauty, they are still inhabited. Indeed, local families earn some money by catering to cyclists.
Did you do it solo or with someone or a group?
The nice thing about going with a group is that it comes with a support vehicle and water/food/bag carrying. Doing it on my own would be about 10x more intense in terms of prep, I think. I've watched a few biking videos where they started getting close to the edge on water and had to ask random houses they finally found.
It also makes my butt hurt just to think about.
Yeah, sore bum, ouchies. That can be bypassed if you don't mind walking, don't mind camels, and don't mind being thought a bit girly:
* https://www.sidetracked.com/fieldjournal/crossing-australia-...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robyn_Davidson
Our family doesn't mind a long jolly, one of my favourites (that someone else did) was into the more restricted bits of Papua: Cannibals & Crampons (2001)
In 2001, two British ex army officers set out to climb the unscaled face of Mandela--a remote mountain rising 15,400 ft. above the jungles of New Guinea. This is the extraordinary story of their trek through some of the world's most unexplored terrain.
> Shlomo Goitein used the documents that were serendipitously discovered in the geniza of the Cairo synagogue
I'm still waiting for a proper "inclusion" of their contents in the "main" historical discourse, it's a pity that there aren't much many historians going through them and using their contents. From the dedicated wiki page [1]:
> The Cairo Geniza, alternatively spelled the Cairo Genizah, is a collection of some 400,000[1] Jewish manuscript fragments and Fatimid administrative documents that were kept in the genizah or storeroom of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat or Old Cairo, Egypt. (...) comprise the largest and most diverse collection of medieval manuscripts in the world.
Through the Jade Gate to Rome, John E. Hill. (browsed)
The Silk Road: A New History, Valerie Hansen. (yet to buy but looks awesome)