The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World

The internationally bestselling author of The Anarchy returns with a sparkling, soaring history of ideas, tracing South Asia’s under-recognized role in producing the world as we know it.

For a millennium and a half, India was a confident exporter of its diverse civilization, creating around it a vast empire of ideas. Indian art, religions, technology, astronomy, music, dance, literature, mathematics and mythology blazed a trail across the world, along a Golden Road that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific.

In The Golden Road, William Dalrymple draws from a lifetime of scholarship to highlight India’s oft-forgotten position as the heart of ancient Eurasia. For the first time, he gives a name to this spread of Indian ideas that transformed the world. From the largest Hindu temple in the world at Angkor Wat to the Buddhism of China, from the trade that helped fund the Roman Empire to the creation of the numerals we use today (including zero), India transformed the culture and technology of its ancient world - and our world today as we know it.

William Dalrymple is the author of nine books about India and the Islamic world. The Anarchy, a finalist for the Cundill History Prize, was selected as one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2019. Dalrymple’s Return of a King won the Hemingway Award and was shortlisted for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman and Duff Cooper Prizes. He writes regularly for the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, andthe Guardian and is one of the founders and a codirector of the Jaipur Literature Festival. He lives in Delhi.