On the book "When Asia Was The World"

I have been reading When Asia Was the World: Traveling Merchants, Scholars, Warriors, and Monks Who Created the "Riches of the "East" by Stewart Gordon. I recommend it highly. It is a short book, easy to read, and divided into chapters each of which can stand alone (although they add together to make the authors point).

Most of the chapters recount the stories of historical travelers, and can be read as travel naratives. Others deal with the path of conquest (as told by Babur, the founder of the Mogul empire in India) or shipping routes (based on the archaeological record of an ancient shipwreck found in Asia). The last chapter puts the earlier ones in an overall historical perspective.

What I found most interesting is that Gordon puts the entire book in the perspective of network theory. He discusses the network of Buddhist monasteries that facilitated the travel (and learning) of Buddhist monks, forming a network over what are now India, Asia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and South East Asia. He discusses the network of Islamic courts that allowed Muslim scholars to travel from Morocco to China, and the Shiite schools and inns that provided accommodations during their travel. He describes the trade networks, more elaborate than I had realized. He describes some of the familial networks that existed and the more general network of ethnic communities in trading networks. He also describes the "salt" system in Mongol society that allowed people from different ethnic groups, speaking different languages to serve in the army of a Mongol prince.

These networks served to transmit not only people, money and goods, but also information and customs. Gordon quickly gives a picture of the ways in which the complex web of networks worked in Asia for more than 1000 years. it explains why courtly etiquette was similar in courts of kingdoms that were ethnically very different one from another. It also shows how travelers willing to learn that etiquette could move successfully from court to court, while the Portuguese travelers who first visited Asia and were scornful of local customs did so poorly.