Conville & Walsh

Conville & Walsh are delighted to announce that Alexander Monro has received this year’s top Jerwood Award, to aid him in the writing of his new book The Paper Trail.

Alexander Monro has been distracted by China and her neighbours for several years. In 2002, he travelled across Mongolia by horse in the footsteps of Genghis Khan and, two years later, completed the trip as he explored the Timurid architecture of Central Asia, from western China to Afghanistan.

The Jerwood Award will allow him to continue his work on The Paper Trail, the story of how a Chinese invention revolutionized written knowledge across the world, from its birth in China two thousand years ago to the printing explosion in Europe fifteen hundred years later. It is a journey through politics and religion, as their leaders ally with paper to ensure ideological influence or domination. It is a journey of stops and starts, since paper-making in any significant quantity remained limited to East Asia for seven centuries, then spread rapidly through the Koran. Finally it twinned with printing in Europe to feed the Renaissance demand for books, and thereby allow Reformation ideas to gain currency, and “heretical” scientific ideas to gain ground as a new knowledge culture emerged, driven by commerce and, in time, a reading public.

This book will be the story of how an obsession with the past and with learning led to the invention of paper, sparking a series of explosions of knowledge that led from second century China to sixteenth century Europe, where the story climaxed with a printing-driven knowledge revolution focused on the three great founding fathers of European modernity – the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution. Along its path lay several crucial staging posts, granting to the book an entirely new order of power and, to those who could control its production, sway over the minds of their subjects, compatriots or religious devotees.

We are also delighted to congratulate Alex and Hannah on their upcoming wedding - so double congratulations are in order!