Preface

This is a book about transactions between South Asia and the rest of the world in the very long run. I show the antiquity of long-distance intercultural economic exchanges conducted from South Asia, and also show how external factors such as new technology or new partnerships and internal factors such as geography shaped these exchanges, allowing us to mark out distinct epochs in the history of these transactions.

The idea of writing this book occurred to me some years ago while I was taking part in the proceedings of the Global Economic History Network, an international collective of economists and historians, now concluded. The conversations started during those proceedings exposed me to interesting current research on other regions, especially other Asian regions. Useful though the experience was, however, this book does not implement the intellectual program of the network with Indian material. In fact, I formed the idea of this book partly in reaction to the main item on the network’s agenda, namely, to search for the causes of international economic inequality in the modern world. It seemed to me that by placing the inequality problem at the center, we risked making the history of India’s globalization too dependent on the history of Europe’s globalization, which would be a wrong thing to do because every region did business with other regions in a somewhat autonomous and distinctive way, depending on local factors such as politics and geography. And because some of these local factors were extraordinarily durable, a longue durée India-focused narrative of transactions was possible. I did not wish to get into the sterile rhetoric about which region – Asia or Europe – was the center of the world in the seventeenth century. My point was, rather, that it should be possible to write a history of transactions that is mindful of the distinctive qualities of India. This book implements that idea.