The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World

by William Dalrymple

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781639734153
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	04/29/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	432

About the Author

William Dalrymple is the bestselling author of nine books, including the Duff Cooper Prize-winning The Last Mughal, the Hemingway and Kapuscinski Prize-winning Return of a King, and, most recently, The Anarchy, a finalist for the Cundill History Prize and one of Barack Obama's favorite books of 2019. A frequent broadcaster, he has written and presented three television series, in addition to writing regularly for the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and the Guardian. In 2018, he was presented with the British Academy's prestigious President's Medal for his outstanding literary achievement and for co-founding the Jaipur Literature Festival. Dalrymple currently cohosts the podcast Empire with Anita Anand. He lives with his wife and three children on a goat farm outside Delhi.
William Dalrymple is one of Britain's great historians and the bestselling author of the Wolfson Prize-winning White Mughals, The Last Mughal, which won the Duff Cooper Prize, and the Hemingway and Kapuscinski Prize-winning Return of a King. A frequent broadcaster, he has written and presented three television series, one of which won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA. He has also won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award, the Foreign Correspondent of the Year at the FPA Media Awards, and been awarded five honorary doctorates. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Asiatic Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and has held visiting fellowships at Princeton, Brown and All Souls, University of Oxford. He writes regularly for the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker and the Guardian. In 2018 he was presented with the prestigious President's Medal by the British Academy for his outstanding literary achievement and for co-founding the Jaipur Literature Festival. He is the co-host of chart-topping podcast Empire with Anita Anand. William lives with his wife and three children on a goat farm outside Delhi.

Editorial Reviews

Dazzling . . . Not just a historical study but also a love letter.” —Guardian

“An outstanding new account . . . The most compelling retelling we have had for generations.” —Financial Times

“Superb . . . A vivid and richly detailed story . . . worth reading by everyone.” —The New York Times Book Review on THE ANARCHY

“A great story told in fabulous detail with interesting, if at times utterly rapacious or incompetent, characters populating it.” —NPR on THE ANARCHY

“Rampaging, brilliant, passionate . . . Mr. Dalrymple gives us every sword-slash, every scam, every groan and battle cry. He has no rival as a narrative historian of the British in India.” —The Wall Street Journal on THE ANARCHY

From the Publisher