I've been greatly enjoying The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World by William Dalrymple. Most of the buzz that led me to read it emphasized the enormous trade between Rome and India that developed once Rome secured control of Egypt, with almost all the trade carried by South Asian merchant fleets plying the Indian ocean long before their contact with the Roman market. And I was also aware that Dalrymple wants to stress that India's seatrades were much larger and more globally consequential than the overland Silk Road that briefly thrived during the Mongol control and management of the land-based route from China to the Mediterranean.
But trade is only one interest of Dalrymple as he tracks India's farflung influence in the first millennium of the modern era. Buddhism evolved and took shape in India, but was successfully exported to the Himalayan regions and to China, first by merchants, later by Chinese scholars who studied at Buddhist centres in India and returned home to make Buddhism one of the most widely followed Chinese religions. He then tracks in great detail how Buddhism made the same voyage into South East Asia, leading to such monuments as Angkor Wat in Thailand and Borobudur in Java. Hinduism was not far behind Buddhism in penetrating South East Asia but more successful in becoming the faith of ruling monarchs there, leading to a unique blending of Hindu and Buddhist cultural influences in much of South East Asia. All these religions evolved not only in India but in the other territories.
Dalrymple then moves on to set out how the elaborate mixing of culture, art, philosophy, and science, including mathematics, progressed mightily in the Indosphere before being transmitted back into India and west into the Islamic world, picking up the earlier innovations of the classical Greeks and moving on from there to Muslim Spain, and from there into Christian Europe. He lays out in great detail how the 9-digit counting system, the zero, and many of the fundamentals of western science were shared out from Indian roots. And he concludes that he argues that much of Europe's extensive borrowings from Arab and Islamic culture, by way of Spain, Sicily and the Crusader kingdoms included within them strong Indian components.
In conclusion he sees the end of the Indosphere coming with the consolidation of Muslim religion and government across India and deeply into South-East Asia. And eventually the Christian West used its learnings from the east in science, technology, and commercial methods to build its own global influence and reduce India and South Asia to colonial poverty and subservience, only recently ended.
But India had a very good millennium, he proposes, and one much too often neglected and misunderstood. One of the very great civilizations, and you cannot understand world history without it. Very impressive, the best of Dalrymple's books I have seen.
