India and the Silk Roads: The History of a Trading World by Jagjeet Lally (review)

Abstract

Jagjeet Lally’s India and the Silk Roads examines the world of caravan trade networks in the most intriguing but least understood commercial corridor, namely from Sindh and Punjab of Pakistan, to Kabul in Afghanistan, and to Bukhara in Uzbekistan during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Because this caravan trade arena entangled with economic and power rivalries of inner Eurasia, that is, the Great Game, and faced competition with the high tide of global maritime trade, the history of caravan trade is much more than caravan trade per se, but also displays how the people—traders, kings, peasants, bandits, mercenaries—coped with the changing world around them and took opportunities to develop their networks and reap profits. Nevertheless, they eventually abandoned the caravan trade as their main livelihood and submerged in the new order created by the British and Russian imperial expansions. The Introduction set up the landscape of the caravan trade in the context of the Silk Roads connecting Indian subcontinent to Central Asia including south Russia. The author rebuts the general assumption that maritime trade arose since 1500 suffocated the ancient inland trade of the Silk Roads. The British Empire was a sea power and maritime trade was the tool of exerting its power to India. Meanwhile, the Russian Empire conquered Kazakh hordes and Tajik khans on the