Chapter I can/should be scrapped as it stands because as already mentioned --not only is there simply no room in a paper (more of an essay, really); it also has actually fairly little to do with the Silk road itself, or rather the Silk road itself plays an important but small role in the whole. By this I mean that if you wind up telling about all those empires you will be telling more about those empires than their connection with the Silk road, which despite its major impact is still a fairly small part of that history. Furthermore the vast majority of trade on the Silk road wasn't really part of the Silk road itself, it is more of an aggregate trade made possible in those grand bazaars that sprang up on the Silk road -- or conversely: the Silk road merely came to be the new name of the ancient trading networks that had a prior existence. (Note that the part of the Silk road from at least Afghanistan to Brittain has very ancient Bronze age if not older predecessors: simply because Afghanistan was for a long time one of the precious few sources of such extravagant luxuries as Lapis Lazui (actually unique to Afghanistan in antiquity) & Rubies/Opals/Emeralds (not unique, still there were/are not _that_ many sources of them) and also because of its relative abundance of tin.)

Your paper will probably be more interesting to read (as well as write) if you focus on a facet of your ‘grand’ story that you now call ‘history of the Silk road’. Chapter II suffers from the same problem albeit to a lesser degree because you can more easily make a case out of cultural transmission (Chapter I would either have to acknowledge a bit of dead end, or wind up hopelessly impossible to integrate into a bigger context called paper).