In a new accessible narrative, Andre Wink presents his major reinterpretation of the long-term history of India and the Indian Ocean region from the perspective of world history and geography. Situating the history of the Indianized territories of South Asia and Southeast Asia within the wider history of the Islamic world, he argues that the long-term development and transformation of Indo-Islamic history is best understood as the outcome of a major shift in the relationship between the sedentary peasant societies of the river plains, the nomads of the great Saharasian arid zone and the seafaring populations of the Indian Ocean. This revisionist work redraws the Asian past as the outcome of the fusion of these different types of settled and mobile societies, placing geography and environment at the centre of human history.

‘Professor André Wink offers a thrilling survey of two millennia's worth of history across the Indo-Islamic world. He presents a model of transnational and environmental history writing. It will be a valuable resource for scholars and teachers of South Asian, Central Asian and Islamic world history.'

Nandini Chatterjee - University of Exeter

‘Bold, ambitious and iconoclastic. Wink's sweeping history tackles big questions head-on in an important and often daring re-casting of the Indo-Islamic world.'

Peter Frankopan - University of Oxford

‘This is an impressive masterpiece of synthesis. By integrating the histories of settled and nomadic societies, the steppes and the seas, Islamic empires and European trading companies, Wink makes a momentous intervention in the field of global history.'

Jos Gommans - Leiden University