The Golden Road How Ancient India Transformed The World William Dalrymple by William Dalrymple 9781639734146, 1639734147 instant download after payment.

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.

Major religions that rose to dominate Earth's largest continent. Trade networks stretching from Japan to Hadrian's Wall. Innovations such as the numeral system and the very concept of zero, laying cornerstones for all of mathematics and science to come. Music, dance, and visual arts of stunning sophistication: pre-modern India gifted all these and more to the world. Yet today, obscured by the dominance of China and other powers, the subcontinent's extraordinary part in global history as the economic, spiritual, and cultural hub of Asia is too often overlooked.

In The Golden Road , revered historian William Dalrymple corrects the record, telling the captivating story of ancient India's ascent through a swift and breathtaking tour of the ideas and places Indians created. Treks into the sunless depths of cave monasteries illuminate the origins and spread of Buddhism. Far-flung archaeological expeditions-from the sand-blown Red Sea coast of Egypt, to Afghan mountain refuges, to verdant Cambodian jungles-reveal the impact of Indian commerce. Drawing on a lifetime of scholarship and acclaimed narrative skill, Dalrymple paints a vast canvas populated by merchants and monks, surgeons and sculptors, astronomers, kings, queens, missionaries, and more. The result is an unforgettable book-part historical epic, part globe-hopping present-day travelogue-that reasserts India's pride of place among the great pillars of human civilization.

“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

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.