VIRTUAL: IAS Book Launch - India and the Silk Roads: The History of a Trading World

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India’s caravan trade with central Asia was at the heart of the complex web of routes making up the Silk Roads. But what was the fate of these overland connections in the ages of sail and steam? India and the Silk Roads sets out to answer this question by bringing the world of caravan trade to life—a world of merchants, mercenaries, pastoralists and pilgrims, but also of kings, bureaucrats and their subjects in the countryside and towns. It offers a global history of a continental interior, the first to comprehensively examine the textual and material traces of caravan trade in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, through the passing of the great Islamic empires and the rise of British and Russian imperialisms in Asia. Its narrative resonates with our own times, as China’s Belt and Road Initiative brings terrestrial forms of connectivity back to the fore—transforming life across Eurasia once again.

This book is published by Hurst. Please find the book's flyer and a discount code here.

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Image: Open-air market outside the temple of Shah Ahmed, Kandahar, Afghanistan. Coloured lithograph by R. Carrick after Lieutenant James Rattray, c. 1847. Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)