Reviewed by: India and the Silk Roads: The History of a Trading World by Jagjeet Lally Xinru Liu India and the Silk Roads: The History of a Trading World. By jagjeet lally. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. xv + 414 pp. ISBN 9780197581070. $74.00. 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 [End Page 527] steppe, colonized Samarkand and Bukhara thus drove away Indian traders there. Caravan trade from Multan to Bukhara did slow down and the space of their practices was limited. However, as the essential goods for the trade, including horses, cotton cloth, indigo, silk yarn, were rooted in the ecological differences between the dry zone composed of the high lands and Central Asia Oasis and the wet zone of India, the caravan trade made adjustments to the changing environment to ply their trade in the early modern era. The eight chapters of the book present analyses of eight aspects, or, variables, of the caravan trade. They are environment, exchanges, power, traders, material culture, colonial conquest, knowledge, and technology. The time spans of each chapter overlapped but the narrative moves down the time to the end of the caravan trade in this area. As every aspect of the caravan trade is complicated story itself, digestion of each variable reveals intimate knowledge of the caravan trade world. Take the chapter 4 on traders. Firms of caravans and money lenders were Paithan, Hindu, Jain, Muslim, Kabuli, Multani, Shikaruri, etc. Here identities of ethnic, religion, and locality overlapped and shifted. Meanwhile sufi saints meditate tensions in the trade world. Neither British nor Russian ethnographic works in their effort to pin down the identifications of those people caught the sophistication and complexity of the people operated there. Chapter 5 on material culture delineate the evolvement of fashion following political power shifts and religious changes inside and outside the world touched by caravan trade. After 1500, successors of Timur Empire in Central Asia portrayed themselves of man of letter and promoting arts and sciences. Muhammad Khan Shaybanid controlled Samarkand thus the region of Transoxiana during the sixteenth century. The lapis blue and Turquoise blue dominated architecture on mosques, madrasas, tombs of rulers not only in Central Asia, but also in Moghul India which exited from Central Asia to India. Equestrian culture permeated all the way from Central Asia to the Moghul court then to the courts of rajputs and the Silk king Ranjit Singh ruling Punjab in the early half of the nineteenth century. This royal fashion promoted a robust horse trade on the caravan routes. Blue fashion on attires of elite was the impetus for trade on precious stones for decoration and pigments. When the tide finally changed that India and Central Asia were no longer the producers of cotton textiles but the market for British and Russian looms in the late nineteenth century, the Blue dominance of color also faded. With all the efforts to get commercial information...
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Jun 24, 2024
Christian Riffel 
