Author: Ranabir Chakravarti
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-06-09
Total Pages: 271
ISBN-13: 1000170128
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Highlighting diverse types of market places and merchants, this book situates the commercial scenario of early India (up to c. ad 1300) in the overall agrarian material milieu of the subcontinent. The book questions the stereotypical narrative of early Indian trade as exchanges in small quantity, exotic, portable luxury items and strongly argues for the significance of trade in relatively inexpensive bulk commodities – including agrarian/floral products – at local and regional levels and also in long distance trade. That staple items had salience in the sea-borne trade of early India figures prominently in this book which points out that commercial exchanges touched the everyday life of a variety of people. A major feature of this work is the conspicuous thrust on and attention to the sea-borne commerce in the subcontinent. The history of Indic seafaring in the Indian Ocean finds a prominent place in this book pointing out the braided histories of overland and maritime networks in the subcontinent. In addition to three specific chapters on the maritime profile of early Bengal, the third edition of Trade and Traders in Early Indian Society offers two new chapters (14 and 15) on the commercial scenario of Gujarat, dealing respectively with an organization of merchants during the early sixth century ad and with the long-term linkages between money-circulation and overseas trade in Gujarat c. ad 500-1500). A new preface to the Third Edition discusses the emerging historiographical issues in the history of trade in early India. Rich in the interrogation of a wide variety of primary sources, the book analyses the changing perspectives on early Indian trade by taking into account the current literature on the subject.
Author: Elizabeth A. Cecil
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2020-03-09
Total Pages: 285
ISBN-13: 9004424423
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In Mapping the Pāśupata Landscape: Narrative, Place, and the Śaiva Imaginary in Early Medieval North India, Elizabeth A. Cecil explores the sacred geography of the earliest community of Śiva devotees called the Pāśupatas. This book brings the narrative cartography of the Skandapurāṇa into conversation with physical landscapes, inscriptions, monuments, and icons in order to examine the ways in which Pāśupatas were emplaced in regional landscapes and to emphasize the use of material culture as media through which notions of belonging and identity were expressed. By exploring the ties between the formation of early Pāśupata communities and the locales in which they were embedded, this study reflects critically upon the ways in which community building was coincident with place-making in Early Medieval India.
Author: Lallanji Gopal
Publisher: Motilal Banarsidass Publishe
Published: 1989
Total Pages: 402
ISBN-13: 9788120803022
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The vogue for economic history has increased in the post-Independence decades. But economic history is an exceedingly difficult discipline. The historian often gets lost in producing an inventory of static facts or else is committed to confirm a conceptual and interpretational framework copied from western history. The present monograph, approved for the Ph.D. degree of the University of London, is among the pioneering studies which have helped determine the scope, nature, methods and ideals for economic history. It delineates the details of economic life in a developmental manner taking due notice of the complex of terms and concepts in the sastric texts. In selecting the early medieval period as its subject of study the present work has inspired many other studies, and, by illuminating a much neglected period, has shed light alike on the ancient and medieval periods. It places the period in the total span of Indian history and hence has been the model for students of economic history and is recognised by historians in general as one of the most significant contributions on the socio-economic history of India.
Author: Claude Markovits
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2000-06-22
Total Pages: 345
ISBN-13: 1139431277
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Claude Markovits tells the story of two groups of Hindu merchants from the towns of Shikarpur and Hyderabad in the province of Sind. Basing his account on previously neglected archival sources, the author charts the development of these communities, from the pre-colonial period through colonial conquest and up to independence, describing how they came to control trading networks throughout the world. While the book focuses on the trade of goods, money and information from Sind to the widely dispersed locations of Kobe, Panama, Bukhara and Cairo, it also throws light on the nature of trading diasporas from South Asia in their interaction with the global economy. This is a sophisticated and accessible book, written by one of the most distinguished economic historians in the field. It will appeal to scholars of South Asia, as well as to colonial historians and to students of religion.
Author: Tansen Sen
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2015-09-11
Total Pages: 327
ISBN-13: 1442254734
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Relations between China and India underwent a dramatic transformation from Buddhist-dominated to commerce-centered exchanges in the seventh to fifteenth centuries. The unfolding of this transformation, its causes, and wider ramifications are examined in this masterful analysis of the changing patterns of the interaction between the two most important cultural spheres in Asia. Tansen Sen offers a new perspective on Sino-Indian relations during the Tang dynasty (618–907), arguing that the period is notable not only for religious and diplomatic exchanges but also for the process through which China emerged as a center of Buddhist learning, practice, and pilgrimage. Before the seventh century, the Chinese clergy—given the spatial gap between the sacred Buddhist world of India and the peripheral China—suffered from a “borderland complex.” A close look at the evolving practice of relic veneration in China (at Famen Monastery in particular), the exposition of Mount Wutai as an abode of the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī, and the propagation of the idea of Maitreya’s descent in China, however, reveals that by the eighth century China had overcome its complex and successfully established a Buddhist realm within its borders. The emergence of China as a center of Buddhism had profound implications on religious interactions between the two countries and is cited by Sen as one of the main causes for the weakening of China’s spiritual attraction toward India. At the same time, the growth of indigenous Chinese Buddhist schools and teachings retrenched the need for doctrinal input from India. A detailed examination of the failure of Buddhist translations produced during the Song dynasty (960–1279), demonstrates that these developments were responsible for the unraveling of religious bonds between the two countries and the termination of the Buddhist phase of Sino-Indian relations. Sen proposes that changes in religious interactions were paralleled by changes in commercial exchanges. For most of the first millennium, trading activities between India and China were closely connected with and sustained through the transmission of Buddhist doctrines. The eleventh and twelfth centuries, however, witnessed dramatic changes in the patterns and structure of mercantile activity between the two countries. Secular bulk and luxury goods replaced Buddhist ritual items, maritime channels replaced the overland Silk Road as the most profitable conduits of commercial exchange, and many of the merchants involved were followers of Islam rather than Buddhism. Moreover, policies to encourage foreign trade instituted by the Chinese government and the Indian kingdoms contributed to the intensification of commercial activity between the two countries and transformed the China-India trading circuit into a key segment of cross-continental commerce.