Caravans
About This Book
Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, tens of thousands of merchants from Multan and Shikarpur left home for years at a time to seek their fortunes abroad. They traveled long distances and lived as foreign 'guests' in cities and villages across Afghanistan, Central Asia, Iran and Russia, taking real risks in the hope of profit. Scott Levi follows these traders and tells the story of the lives they built far from home. Levi rejects the old picture of caravan traders as simple peddlers. He looks closely at the methods these merchants used to turn a small stock of goods into large and varied holdings, spread across trade and moneylending. Their success rested on skill and organization, and the book shows how that skill worked in practice. The book also takes on a widely held view of the period. According to that view, growing European trade across the Indian Ocean drew business away from the overland Silk Road and left Central Asia economically cut off. Levi argues the opposite. At the very time European sea trade was expanding, thousands of Multanis were heading to Central Asia, and their journeys tied the Indian and Central Asian economies together more closely than before.
ISBN: 9780143426165
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