Environment
This chapter introduces the structure and organisation of caravan trade. Focusing on the environment, it opens by connecting the wave of political flux and state-building to the shock of the Little Ice Age, which hit Afro-Eurasia around the mid-seventeenth century. It then sketches the broad geography and circulatory pattern along the north-south routes from the Eurasian interior to the Indian subcontinent. It shows that exchange was based on specialisation and interdependence between the arid zone that stretched from central Asia to the Indo-Afghan frontier and the wet zone of monsoon south Asia, and was subject to seasonal rhythms, with climate shaping when—and through which routes—it was hospitable to pass. It also demonstrates that ecological change—as well as economic and political factors—could shift patterns of specialisation and thereby affect trade, illustrated through a case study of the Indo-central Asian horse trade.