The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World

“Reading Dalrymple’s prose is a lively journey for the modern-day armchair Marco Polo. The big picture is always present, but never at the expense of the adventure.”

Continental scale topography prevented the great empires of China and Rome from interacting. India and Persia/Iran were the hinterlands between the two. At the end of the Middle Ages, the Age of Discovery began when De Gama circumvented Africa to reach India and the Far East.

The modern world and globalization began as sea traffic broke down distances, political boundaries, and religious barriers, ultimately creating the one-world globalization we know.

William Dalrymple, a prominent scholar in a renowned generation of modern World History historians, now offers The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World, a study of India as more than just the British Raj, part of the “Anglosphere.” The author writes, "India’s ideas spread with its traders” “and transformed the world, creating around itself an Indosphere.”

During those centuries, India received the best of many ancient and sophisticated cultures that came to trade for its enormous resources, most famously ivory and jewels. Subjects like astronomy, mathematics, religions, and silk each have a place in The Golden Road. This land is an enormous and diverse peninsula, all but an island, but well situated for traveling overland to great lands east and west.

The “Golden Road,” however, refers to the winds that allowed for vast sea trade and travel across the appropriately named Indian Ocean. Sea trade with India may have begun 9,000 years ago. By the Second Century BCE, the subcontinent was building sturdy sea-going ships that could carry 1,000 passengers each.

Dalrymple explains that for 1,500 years, “India was a concurrent exporter of its diverse civilization, an empire of ideas.” The subcontinent was always more than a highway; it was an even greater creator, producer, and source, even to the present. “Out of India” came more than trade, but also artists, merchants, and scientists.

In Asia, India was the equal of China in the ancient world, although it “was seldom even temporarily united in ancient times.” Dalrymple writes of its contributions that for a thousand years, “it was a garden that issued the seeds that, once planted elsewhere, flowed in new, rich and unexpected ways.”

Missionaries and philosophers spread ideas worldwide. Modern names for famous places come from the Indian language of Sanskrit. The author devotes much of the book to the arrival of Buddhism in Cambodia and China.

The author tells that story by theme, not neglecting how each interconnects, such as “the close relationship between merchants and the Buddhist monastery movement.” Dalrymple argues that today’s Indian subcontinent often does not reflect its past as a center of the world and the beginning and terminus of great roads.

While Europe shrank into the Dark Ages, India had great learning centers, libraries, and schools. During that time, the subcontinent continued to prosper by realigning its trade from the West to the East. The author explains that events in Europe and Persia would not be allowed to drag down its economy.

Diversity, location, and topography contributed to the subcontinent’s culture. Images on caves, temples, and in manuscripts typically represent an “international cast of characters” of different lives and peoples. As the author points out, “for all of its political fragmentation, the idea of India as a single cultural, sacral, and geographical unit,” even far beyond the boundaries of the modern nation, has always existed.

Reading Dalrymple’s prose is a lively journey for the modern-day armchair Marco Polo. The big picture is always present, but never at the expense of the adventure. The reader must be patient. Dalrymple is a storyteller who must be allowed to share his archaeological anecdotes before proceeding. They make the more prominent points alive and intimate.

The Golden Road has annotations, a bibliography, a glossary, illustrations (many in color), and maps. It even has a classy gold ribbon to mark the reader’s place in reading the book!