Conclusion

The endurance of terrestrial forms of connectivity over the Eurasian continental interior lies at the heart of this book. By reviewing the life of such connections in the twentieth century, this chapter draws out this book’s four major interventions. The first concerns the value of examining long-term patterns of change and the virtue of thinking across such divides as Mughal and British, pre-colonial and colonial. The second relates to the way this book thinks about empires in novel ways, whether by taking a trans-imperial framework or by focussing on the ways non-political entities—such as merchant networks—persisted through periods of imperial flux and the rise and fall of empires. The third is the focus on space, particularly interior or inner-continental space, and its place within global history. The final contribution is to provide an impetus to scholars to think of the synchronicity of multiple forms of globalisation and their interrelation.

Colonial Conquest

The final three chapters scrutinise the impact on Indo-central Asian trade on the conquest and incorporation of the Eurasian interior into the British and Russian empires, typical of the penetration of European political or commercial regimes into the continental interiors of Afro-Eurasia and America during the era of the New Imperialism. The advent of new railway and shipping routes, as well as the development of new and existing roads, was integral to this process. The result was the revitalisation of a range of routes criss-crossing and connecting the inner continental spaces and their greater integration into the larger world economy. This chapter surveys these developments, focusing on maritime and overland routes from India across the Arabian Sea, over the Karakoram, and those along the Grand Trunk Road through Afghanistan to central Asia.

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.

Introduction

The recent return to terrestrial forms of connectivity over long distances, not least in the wake of China’s inauguration of the ‘Belt and Road Initiative’, has renewed interest in the Silk Roads. This chapter explains that the web of routes which connected various parts of Afro-Eurasia persisted throughout the rise of trans-oceanic networks after circa 1500, at which time north-south routes from the Eurasian continental interior into the Indian subcontinent and the Indian Ocean world became more prominent. The history of this remarkable survival is one of the themes of this book. To introduce these themes, this chapter sketches the contours of those states and empires—Mughal, Sikh, Afghan, Safavid, Uzbek, British and Russian—whose fates were tied up with the history of Indo-central Asian caravan trade.

Exchanges

By tracing the flow of goods from sites of production to sites of consumption, this chapter shows that long-distance trade was made up of numerous exchanges. Closely examining these exchanges, it demonstrates how caravan trade integrated the lives of even relatively remote peasants and pastoralists—not to mention bureaucrats, bankers and craftsmen—into larger economic and political structures. In the eighteenth century, the hub of caravan trade in north India shifted to Multan in western Punjab, its environs the site of trade-related production and home to the kinsmen of the pastoralists who plied the caravan routes, and its cities containing the workshops of artisans and the business houses of north-Indian magnates heavily involved in long-distance exchange. By comparing similar but very separate phenomena in Punjab and Bengal, this chapter reveals that globalisation was not a single process but a multiplicity, and one that could create disconnection just as much as greater connectivity.

Knowledge

Over the nineteenth century, imperial rivalry and fears over the security of India’s northern borders led to the steady accumulation of knowledge about caravan trade and the trading world. This chapter shows that the Indo-Afghan frontier and central Asia were of critical significance to the testing of scientific mapping and modern intelligence, ethnography and genealogy, making the spaces and networks of caravan trade fundamental to the finessing of the British Indian state’s technologies of power. Yet, the epistemic anxiety resulting from information asymmetry and the flows of mobile agents through this space—especially during the ‘Great Game’—precipitated schemes to sedentarise populations and transform them into cultivators and soldiers, in turn integrating western Punjab’s economy more deeply into that of the British Empire at the cost of connections into the Eurasian interior.

Power

By introducing the idea of economies of violence, this chapter explains the connection of seasonal movements from the dry zone of mercenaries, horse traders, and nomadic pastoralists and their herds to the production and exercise of hard power in monsoon south Asia. Zooming in, it then examines the rise of the Durrani Empire in the northwest borderlands of the Mughal Empire in the eighteenth century. It shows how this process of expansion—alongside the expansion of the Qing and Romanov empires deeper into Eurasia around the same time—brought into this space more of the liquid wealth derived from the increasingly globalised economy which was emerging along the continental seaboards. This wealth was used to bolster a different form of power: that deriving from the management of the state’s material resources (the land and its productivity, not least) and the expansion of the state’s fiscal base.

Material Culture

The goods brought into urban emporia and periodic rural markets through caravan trade were not only luxuries for elites (fine horses, for example), but also high-value items consumed in small and affordable quantities (such as silk as well as turquoise or other medicinal, talismanic or apotropaic items) by a broader range of groups. There were also necessities (cloth) and raw materials or productive inputs (raw silk, indigo). This chapter examines the social, cultural and spiritual power deriving from the possession of things, illuminating the role played by goods in processes of self-fashioning, sociability and the expression of changing tastes in ways characteristic of ‘early modernity’ in other global settings.

Technology

By the latter decades of the nineteenth century, caravan trade first showed signs of growth before entering a period of decline and reorientation. This chapter evaluates the causes of the relative and absolute decline of trade, focusing on productive and transport technologies (including railways, steamships and telegraph lines), the rapid development and diffusion of which were the hallmarks of the era of the New Imperialism. The impact of technological change was ambivalent, with the modern nowhere supplanting more archaic motilities; instead, the existing pattern of trade was undermined where new technologies interacted with wider economic changes, particularly the institution of protectionism in Russian Central Asia. This is examined by returning to three of the most important commodities flowing through the networks of caravan trade: indigo, silk and textiles.

Traders

The eighteenth-century expansion of the Durrani, Qing and Romanov empires deeper into Eurasia brought liquid wealth from the increasingly globalised economy into this space, stimulating commercial opportunities and the closer integration of the continental interior. This chapter uncovers one of the outcomes of this process as the empowerment of new commercial groups. Afghans, Pashtuns and Muslims from the Indo-Afghan frontier—generally seen by scholars only as pastoralists and peddlers—were the entrepreneurial lynchpins of the developments examined in this chapter. As former peddlers harnessed market opportunities and channelled the benefits accrued from political patronage into new business ventures, they accumulated capital and widened the geographic scope of their operations. In so doing, they posed serious competition to established north-Indian magnate groups, while also changing the character of commerce itself.