Rethinking Classical Indo-Roman Trade: Political Economy of Eastern Mediterranean Exchange Relations

by Rajan Gurukkal

The book is a critical rethinking of the nature of the classical eastern Mediterranean exchange relations with the coasts of the Indian sub-continent. It examines in the light of the extant source material and theoretical insights whether the expression aIndo a Roman tradea is tenable. The book characterizing the nature of contemporary exchanges in detail, maintains that the expression, aIndo-Roman tradea is inappropriate. It starts off with the theoretical premise that the term atradea if applies uniformly to all kinds of transactions in time and place, will lead to many anachronistic correlations, causations and generalisations about the nature of early forms of exchange.

An important factor is that contemporary Mediterranean exchange of goods from the eastern world was a combination of multiple forms of exchange in which trade was just one and confined to Rome. The management of this ensemble was a heavily collaborative, extensively networked, document based, enterprise, with precise notions of weights, measures, rates of rent, interest, price and profit accounted in terms of money. It had necessitated a stratified society, aristocracy, state system and the entailing political economy of demand for luxury goods from far off lands. The book dismisses the claims in the South Indian historiography for the early historic Tamil Chieftains to have conducted overseas commerce, on the ground that such institutional and structural pre-requisites were absent in the social formations of contemporary Peninsular India. It was not possible for the merchant bodies to conduct independent overseas trade for there was no naval technology in the sub-continent efficient
enough to conduct cross-oceanic voyages. There was no need for it either.

336 pages, Hardcover

Published December 17, 2015

Reviews

[Koen Crolla · Rating 1 out of 5]

Brazen academic fraud. Gurukkal is incapable of evaluating any kind of evidence, manages to be ignorant of basic terms and concepts in a way that would be embarrassing in a middle-schooler, and writes as if he doesn't believe words can have meaning. Rampant typos and grammatical errors confirm this book hasn't even seen a proofreader, much less the peer review the Oxford University Press assures readers all of its books go through. I suppose taking it apart for its contents would be beside the point, anyway: those contents are largely effectively automatic writing, and the only reason they aren't literally lorem ipsum is that Gurukkal wanted the book to look plausible to someone just flipping through it skimming section titles and looking at illustrations, not just standing on a shelf.
(Those illustrations, incidentally, are all labelled "Source: Author", presumably because someone told him he had to have a source for them; two of them appear to be scans of print-outs of low-res bitmaps of drawings of "Graeco-Roman" ships Gurukkal found somewhere—you can see the creases in the printer paper, but also the individual pixels in the drawings—that I don't doubt he physically handed to some poor editor, three are different crops of the same map, otherwise apparently unedited, and the final one is a map bizarrely labelled "not to scale", which I think is an admission that the lines added on by Gurukkal don't correspond to any kind of reality, because it's just a standard relief map of southern India otherwise.)
No conclusions are reached, nothing is synthesised; no rethinking—or indeed thinking—of any kind happens. That this garbage managed to get published by, again, the Oxford University Press is absolutely disgraceful, and the fact that Gurukkal apparently has a career as an academic—especially as a historian!—is an indictment of India's entire system of higher education.

(Someone at the OUP seems to have noticed eventually, because they're very reluctant to sell this book outside of India. I ordered it from their website, and it took over a year to get here; when it finally did, it had a price tag in rupees (₹1655, which is less than half the list price).)

[Nicole · Rating 1 out of 5]

It is absolutely embarrassing that this was published by Oxford University Press! The author does not know the difference between sherd and shard (crucial if you’re writing about archaeology), turtle and tortoise, astronomy and astrology! He also does not seem to understand the assigned meaning behind terms like “neoclassical”. It is full of citation mistakes, typos, and huge contradictions in the author’s own argument. And he conveniently ignores that the South Indian kingdoms traded and colonized parts of South East Asia (because it contradicts his argument which at times seems to ramble on just for the sake of arguing). I read the entire thing while doing dissertation research and the only thing I used was the bibliography.

[Kandachamy Vijayakumaran · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read for all those interested in the exchange relations between India and the west before the modern age.