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In the Gangetic plain, the area of this chapter's discussion, land extends from the Chattagram or Chittagong coast in the east to the Agra-Mathura region in the west, including a slice of the Nepalese Terai covering the sites of Lumbini and Tilaura Kot. In central India, the study-area comprises Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. This chapter discusses the interrelationship between their early historic urban centers, geographical units of the period, and trade routes which passed through them. In the course of the discussion the chapter also refers to the relevant archaeological situations of Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Jharkhand. This is a historical and geographical exercise based essentially on field-studies carried out since 1981 and puts forward only one understanding of the situation.

This chapter talks about the interplay between family, religion, and ruler—three key components of every premodern society, which was the major factor in shaping the pattern of migration of the various organizational forms. The interplay determined the resistance of regions and civilizations outside Europe to the importation and transplantation of the business corporation. It argues that sixteenth-century Europeans, particularly the Portuguese, did not design a good institutional framework for conducting Cape Route trade with Asia. Seventeenth-century Europeans, led by the Dutch and the English, designed an institutional framework that suited their environmental challenges well and facilitated long-distance trade between Europe and Asia. The chapter emphasizes that organizational factors determined the rise of English and Dutch Eurasian trade dominance in the seventeenth century—asserting instead that technology and violence had more determinative weight.

This chapter moves to the wider international world of book distribution. It discusses the complicated networks that existed between Venetian bookmen with agents, book carriers, and foreign printers. It also provides information on the trades routes throughout the Italian peninsula, as well as across the Alps to northern Europe. The chapter details northern European book fairs and explains such marketing tools as book-fair trade lists and printers' broadside catalogues. It concludes with a discussion of individual and institutional customers and collectors, who purchased music books.

This chapter covers the end of the Social War to the loss of Athenian control over Delos near the end of the fourth century. Although the most powerful allies of Athens had left the Second Athenian League, the Cyclades remained members until its final dissolution by Macedon. Positive relations between the Cyclades and Athens continued, however. Athens maintained a strong navy while largely avoiding military expansionism, and also required a greater variety of sources for its grain supply. Trade routes through the Cyclades became increasingly important because of this need for grain. The Cycladic communities renewed the minting of local coinage and the construction of temples and fortification walls, last seen on a wide scale in the late sixth century. This may indicate not only good political relations between the islands and Athens, but also symbiotic economic links that led to prosperity.

This chapter focuses on Trakhtemirov, one of the most important ancient settlements of the Early Iron Age in the Ukraine. During the ancient period, the trade routes and caravans met at Trakhtemirov which was situated over the three crossing points of the Dneiper. Its location on the steep heights assured residents of Trakhtemirov security of settlement. On three sides it was protected by the course of the Dnieper while on the other side it was defended by the plateau of the pre-Dneiper elevation. The ancient Trakhtemirov city is located around 100 km below Kiev, on a peninsula which is jutted into the river from the west. Trakhtemirov in the Early Iron Age was important as it was the site of the Cossack capital of Ukraine. It was also the site of the most prestigious artefacts of the Scythian period and a site for various items of jewellery, tools and weaponry. The abundance of artefacts in Trakhtemirov suggests that the city is a central place among the scattered sites of the middle course of the Dneiper.

This chapter discusses the background to a period of apparent economic prosperity in the Cyclades during the late sixth century. This period saw many of the islands in the region minting their own coinage, building and operating warships, and constructing monumental temples and fortification walls. The chapter argues that these phenomena were expressions of peer-polity interaction, but that the advent of the trireme and the involvement of outside powers in the region promoted the growth of naval power and attempts by the islanders to control local trade routes.

This chapter addresses some issues regarding the study of archaeology of the subcontinent. These issues cover geography, prehistory, settlement, agriculture, metallurgy, and trade and trade routes. It concludes that the journey from the subcontinent's palaeolithic beginnings to its early historic foundations is no doubt very varied, and, of course, very long; much of it can be seen only in patches.

Trajan's reign has been characterized as one of reforms generated by a visionary speculation that conceived of a unified political and military system for the Roman empire. Trajan constituted a defining moment in the making of Old Cairo and the topography of the entire city of Cairo. He built a harbor stone and incorporated the entrance to a great canal, which he named after himself, Amnis Traianus. This canal linked the Nile to the Red Sea and opened a direct trade route between Mediterranean and the East. The origins of Trajan's canal lie in a much earlier Holocene eastern branch channel of the Nile that flowed through the Wadi Tumilat toward the depression of Lake Timsah.

Because the historical archaeology of Taiwan has, since the seventeenth century, focused on either Dutch and Spanish occupations or Chinese immigration, it hasremained unconcerned by earlier, proto-historic encounters with the outside world. Based on foreign ceramics, particularly those originating from China, this chapter explores the exchanges between Taiwan and other regions from the tenth to sixteenth centuries. Although the archaeological record suggests that the island of Taiwan was visited by the Chinese, the two major trade routes of the time (one from Fuzhou or Quanzhou to Ryukyu and the other connecting Quanzhou and Luzon through the Penghu Islands) may have simply skimmed past Taiwan’s coasts. The lack of desired products which might have met the demands of Chinese markets restricted Taiwan’s share of the growing maritime commerce. The “Austronesian Routes” —the multi-dimensional and complicated communication and exchange networks that prehistoric aboriginals of Taiwan had long actively participated in—were steadily fragmented during the process of expansion of the South China ceramic trade, and they were eventually segregated from world commerce systems. It is this long-term process that generates the “backwardness” of Taiwan's aboriginal societies as portrayed not only in early Chinese texts but also in Dutch and Spanish documents.

When the Caulukyas declined at the end of the twelfth century, priests and missionaries of various denominations set their sights on Gujarat because of its continuing prosperity and diversity. Some of them were able to secure powerful patrons in the form of chieftains or merchants, while others became the custodians of shrines or places of pilgrimage or became organizers of pilgrimage themselves. As pilgrimage increased in importance, pilgrims regularly traversed the trade routes and enriched new sites. Despite Gujarat's well-documented association with Vaisnavism in modern times, there is little evidence to prove that it was particularly popular in this period. This chapter focuses on religion, politics, and patronage in Gujarat. It examines the decline of the royal temple cults, along with Jainism, Ismā'īlīs and other Muslims, healing and medicine, sect and religion in the sultanate, and religious conversion.

This chapter documents and explores the key routes that Afghan traders working in Tajikistan use to bring commodities to the country. It emphasises the multiplicity of these routes, and focuses on the ways in which Afghan traders alternate their use of them in response to the conditions of political fluidity that define the context in which they work. In exploring these dimensions of traders’ working lives, the chapter addresses the importance of the choices that the traders make about which routes to use or avoid for understanding the transformations that Afghanistan’s status as a so-called “trade corridor” has seen over the past two centuries.

Chapters 4 compares the U.S. borderlands of Canada and Mexico to illuminate the threat that icons of intertribal Native resistance such as Tecumseh, Tenskwatawa, and Black Hawk (and the “intellectual trade routes” upon which they relied) embodied for Harrison, Cass, McKenney, and Hall within the national dialogue surrounding Indian Removal. Emphasizing the confrontation of Tecumseh and Harrison at Vincennes in 1810, this chapter considers evidence that Tecumseh knew American Indian Sign Language and may have incorporated elements of it into his oratory—a possibility that has significant implications for the linguistic and cultural histories of intertribal resistance movements and the politics of Pan-Indianism. The chapter closes with the Fredonian Rebellion, Hunter, and Téran in the wake of the Colonization Laws and the widespread displacement of Native peoples into Texas, highlighting the shifting national and racial loyalties of a U.S./Mexico borderlands region undergoing political and demographic upheaval.

This chapter examines the political and administrative developments in Punjab after 1715 in relation to the changing economic scenario. It highlights the change in the nature of the Sikh movement from one of relatively strong peasantry for raising themselves socially in the seventeenth and the early-eighteenth century to the one of impoverished zamindars and peasants struggling for survival and maintenance of their existing positions in the eighteenth century. The jama figures had plummeted in Punjab from the later years of Aurangzeb’s reign. This shortage had been overcome by the prosperous trade with West and Central Asian countries. However, due to political disturbances these trade routes suffered in the years after 1715 leading to degradation of Punjab’s economy and shortages for zamindars and peasants. The Sikh movement regrouped in the period after Banda and kept posing challenges to Mughal administration. The hill chiefs too asserted their authority in their localities. As the Mughals failed to contain the Sikhs and the zamindars, their uprisings succeeded in dispelling the fear of Mughal power. Unlike Awadh where the governors worked towards an alliance with the local potentates and ensured stability, the governors of Punjab tried to quell the dissent but failed in their attempts. Also, the jagir administration developed further cracks when the subadar contested the claims of the provincial diwan to assert their authority. As crisis enveloped the region and the threat to the Mughal power increased from the peasants, the Mughals grew more dependent on the Khatris and the other trading communities.

This chapter shows how in early antiquity the universal appeal of silk spread across Eurasia through a trade network known as the Silk Roads. Silk inspired the economic exchange of trading goods, which produced a network of trade centers and cities. The value of silk was so great that traders endured harsh conditions as they passed through the great mountain ranges of the Tien Shan, Karakorams, and Hindu Kush and skirted inhospitable deserts, such as the Taklamakan and Gobi. Caravanserais, rest stops along the Silk Roads, allowed travelers to exchange ideas and innovations and created awareness of different cultures and religions. The product of the domestic silkworm figured prominently in the development of dominant Central and Western Asian empires and Chinese dynasties and produced significant historical figures, such as Timur and Mongol leader, Genghis Khan. As this chapter shows, that rich, arcane history developed because of the domestic silkworm.

This chapter examines the conditions created by the Mongol conquests, summed up in the phrase Pax Mongolica, and the role of the Silk Roads in the transcontinental travel andcommunication to which the Mongols had given impetus. It begins with a discussion of commodities traded in Mongol Asia, including spices, silks and other luxury textiles, pearls, precious stones, bullion and furs. It then considers the Mongols' diversion of trade routes within Western Asia and their role in the emergence of new termini, along with the steps taken by Mongol khans to foster trade. It also analyses the obstacles and risks involved in overland trade and travel in the era of the successor-states, the growth in the maritime trade of Asia during the Mongol epoch, and the limits of cultural diffusion brought by transcontinental trade across Mongol Asia.

In this chapter, I analyze the Acts of Thomas, a third-century attestation of a missionary narrative that attributes the conversion of India to St. Thomas the apostle. I analyze the text’s main narrative typologies and show how the story’s motifs work together to portray the formation of Christian societies. I discuss how the trade route culture forms the backdrop of Thomas’s activities.

This chapter follows the expansion of the container industry throughout the 1970s, into a fully worldwide system. The success of containerising cargo liners propelled the industry forward at a rate nobody in the field could accurately predict. It charts the histories and growth of established container companies, plus the surge in establishment of new companies to meet the industry’s needs and to establish ‘national carriers’ to meet the desires of each maritime nation. It examines statistics pertinent to the industry, such as market shares, trade group membership details, and the dates of container shipping introduction across major routes. Of particular interest is the activities of the influenctial TRIO group (Britain-Germany-Japan) in relation to the industry’s expansion

It examines the relation of contemporary polity to overseas commerce. An overview of the overland exchange networks in the Mauryan Empire, subsequent Deccan and beyond against the political formations has been provided. It shows how the statecraft under the Mauryas protected trade and trade routes. A critical review of the structure of polity in the Deccan, the role of the Sātavāhanas as the lords of the southern trade routes and of the political formation of contemporary Tamil region is made. This is followed by an analysis of the relation between contemporary polity and overseas exchanges. At the end, it examines the feasibility of political control of contemporary exchanges by the chiefdoms.