It’s Week 2 of Nonfiction November, hosted by Frances at volatilerune.blog. The topic this week is journeys:

This week choose a book that reflects a journey for its author/protagonist or for the reader or both. This can be a physical journey, an emotional, psychological or spiritual journey or a combination of these. Any nonfiction title that leaves it’s author/protagonist and/or reader in a different place at the end from the start point is good for this challenge.

I believe every book is a journey. Every book should take you to a different place than where you started. It should leave you with new knowledge, new perspectives and/or new emotional experiences. Some do this better than others, of course, some take you farther, but every book should change you. After all, isn’t that the point of reading?

With that little caveat, I’m going to pick The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World. What better way to take a journey than to travel a road?

The Golden Road:
How Ancient India Transformed the World
By William Dalrymple
Bloomsbury, New York, 2024

The Golden Road is the name historian William Dalrymple has given to the sea routes that connected ancient India to the Roman Empire to the west and to China and Southeast Asia to the east. These routes, made possible by trade winds, were quicker and safer than the much-fabled overland Silk Road. In The Golden Road, Dalrymple tells the little-known history of how ancient India influenced a huge part of the world he calls the Indosphere for over 1,400 years.

Vast quantities of people, goods and gold traveled the Golden Road, but Dalrymple makes it clear the most important things making the journey were ideas. Hinduism, Buddhism, mathematics and science spread throughout the Indosphere, brought by merchants and monks. The Indosphere was held together, not by conquest and force of arms, but by the power of ideas.

These ideas made their way to Europe too, through translators, influencing the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution.

The Golden Road is like a couple of other history books I’ve read in recent years: Josephine Quinn’s How the World Made the West and Richard Fidler’s The Book of Roads and Kingdoms. The central point all three make is that history and ideas advance through contact and trade across geographies and across civilizations.

They also remind us that important history happened all over the world, not just in Europe.

You can find my full review of The Golden Road here.

Thanks for reading.