Network effects

India and the Silk Roads, the History of a Trading World

Author: Jagjeet Lally

Publisher: HarperCollins

Pages: XIV+515

Price: Rs 799

Jagjeet Lally’s preference for using the word “roads”, in plural, for his incisive and empirically rich narrative of the South Asian overland linkages with Central Asia — in fact, with Eurasia — is a hallmark of his study of the communication network that was labelled Seidenstrasse in the 19th century in German, literally the Silk Road. As it was neither a single overland route nor a uniform communication system, the perception of a singular route is inapt. No less central is the point that the Chinese silk — much sought after, certainly —was never the sole commodity traversing the vast spaces. The commodities included Central Asian horses (coveted by courts), livestock and animal products, slaves, spices, fruit and nuts, Indian cotton cloth and indigo. The overland network was also frequented by soldiers and mercenaries, responding to the burgeoning military labour markets.

But Dr Lally rightly recognises that the label, Silk Road, though erroneous, has remarkable longevity. Consisting of numerous overland routes, often in an east-west pattern, the Silk Roads witnessed vibrant commercial and cultural transactions across Central Asia over a very long time. Dr Lally effectively captures how South Asia, especially its northwestern sector, became a component of this expansive overland network through Afghanistan, which stands at the crossroads of Asia, for nearly two centuries (17th to 19th). He convincingly argues for the significance of the overland Silk Roads during a phase when the economic historian’s gaze is focused on the salience of the Indian Ocean maritime world, which was being simultaneously incorporated and marginalised in the capitalist world/colonial economy.  He describes how the expanding British and Russian colonial empires eyed the Silk Roads, of course with competing and contested designs.

It is a pleasure to read Dr Lally’s engagements with the economy of this far-flung overland trade, furnishing serialised and tabular data—a refreshing departure from the current overwhelming thrust on past “cultures” that often relegate economic transactions to near invisibility. Moreover, Dr Lally has integrated this transactional analysis with matters social and cultural (chapters 5, 7 and 8) and the politics of imperial/colonial formations (chapters 3 and 6), impacting Afghanistan and the northwestern subcontinent. 

Post-Timurid times saw the growing interdependence between the South Asian wet zone with Central Asian dry zone, adding the latitudinal orientation to this predominantly east-west network. This leads to the inclusion of a chapter on environment; duly highlighted also is the indispensability of the nomadic groups as breeders of horses and pack animals in the operations of merchants (including the ubiquitous pedlar). Of particular significance are his capturing (a) the presence of Indic merchants in distant Central Asia thorough legal dispute papers; (b) the immense significance of barter irrespective of circulating coins and bills of exchanges and (c) the stellar role of itinerant Sufi Saints cutting across Islamicate Central Asia and South Asia.  I am, however, not sure why Dr Lally included the Little Ice Age (16th to 19th centuries), since it was not a global environmental phenomenon and mostly impacted the upper latitudes of the northern hemisphere.

The author’s central achievement is his convincing portrayal of the longevity and buoyancy of the Silk Roads network in early modern and colonial times since most historians’ gazes concentrate on remoter pasts. But this also creates the problem of perspectives. Dr Lally has not clearly explained the choice of his period of study. His choice of the temporal unit is not questioned, but his silence on why he chose it is problematic. To a non-specialist, this book may convey the impression that the Silk Roads became historically important only during the 17th to 19th centuries. This faulty image gains ground by the omission of any work on the eminence of this overland network in premodern times (save a single book by Xinru Liu pertaining to 600-1200 CE), in spite of a rich bibliography of primary and secondary materials. A G Frank and Peter Frankopan, to name only two scholars for want of space, are absent in Dr Lally’s bibliography. It is impossible to lose sight of the fact that this network, linking east Asia with the eastern Mediterranean zone and South Asia through Central Asia had already gained prominence in the late centuries BCE, lit up by the classical texts, Han chronicles and archaeological remains. Strabo (c.64 BCE-24 CE) knew modern Kashgarh (Su-le in Han records) as Serice, obviously named after the availability of silk there as a trading item; further, it stood at the convergence of the northern and the southern Silk Roads which bifurcated at Dun-huang to avoid the Taklamakan desert.

The Silk Roads network was a fascinating theatre of cross-cultural exchanges in which Buddhism left an indelible mark. Had Dr Lally been a little more alive to the centuries preceding his preferred period, he would have noticed that the modern Karakoram highway has yielded Prakrit, Sanskrit, Sogdian and Chinese inscriptions, engraved images of horses and their dealers, various Buddha figures and animal figures belonging to the Central Asian pastoral world — all datable to the premodern times. This prelude to the early history of the Silk Roads, even if told in a nutshell, would have enhanced the scholarly quality and contribution of this engaging examination of the overland network that cogently questions the compulsions of studying the past within the narrow bounds of modern nation states.

The reviewer is a historian of early India with a particular interest in Indian Ocean maritime history