The geography of commerce

Akshay Chavan's ‘The Wealth Networks’ seamlessly weaves together archaeology, mythology and commerce

- Sundeep Khanna

Some books should not be reviewed, just read and savoured. Akshay Chavan has written exactly such a book in The Wealth Networks, which leaves this reviewer in something of a bind.

The reason becomes clear with the first sentence on the very first page: “We begin our journey on the cracked black soil of the Western Deccan, where each step feels like walking on cooled lava, dark, dense, and full of memory.” This is history writing as immersive travel, and with it Chavan carries the reader without pause into Sopara, the land of cotton, and the first of the wealth networks the book explores.

He isn’t telling us anything entirely new, because Sven Beckert’s 2014 classic Empire of Cotton already gave us a detailed global account of how, till the 1780s, India was the cotton capital of the world. But it is the joining of the dots, the alchemy of narrative that weaves archaeology, mythology and commerce into a single, seamless tapestry that separates this book from many others on Indian economic history.

Over the course of its pages, we are introduced to 15 such networks through 108 stories. While each vignette is compelling, this structural choice does occasionally feel fragmented. By breaking the narrative into so many distinct pieces, the book sometimes slips into a rapid-fire catalogue of historical trivia, where each story becomes a world unto itself rather than part of a consistent and singular argument. To be fair, the broader economic themes remain connected like beads on an invisible thread of trade.