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Christopher I. Beckwith: Warriors of the Cloisters: The Central Asian Origins of Science in the Medieval World . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. $29.95. ISBN 978 0 691 15531 9.

of inland peasant empire. The period 1200–1800 is allotted two chapters, one looking at land-borne trade, especially in horses, and the other sea trade after the arrival of Europeans in Asian waters. Roy offers a persuasive discussion of the technological and organizational advantages that Europeans possessed for several centuries. These culminated in the creation of the British imperial state by 1850. Roy takes a benign view of empires as agents of market integration, with the British being the most effective in this regard. Four chapters are devoted to it. Roy points to the revolutionary effects of the introduction of railways on the economic gradients that had hitherto dominated economic activity in India (pp. 161–5). He also rebuts the idea current among “left nationalists” that the effects of the transport revolution were largely negative pointing, for example, to the transfer of embodied technology and human skills from Britain and the USA that gave India its precocious lead in modern industry, with the first railway and cotton mill being built simultaneously with the “opening” of Japan in 1854. In general the thrust of his narrative is to undermine the “development of underdevelopment” model that remains current among many Indian historians long after East and South-East Asian economies decisively exploded it. Roy points to the conceptual and factual weaknesses of the model even for the nineteenth-century Indian setting (earlier established in S. Guha, “Commodity and credit in upland Maharashtra 1800–1950”, Economic and Political Weekly, 26 December 1987). Roy notes that it is extremely difficult to demonstrate that free and integrated markets have uniformly negative economic effects unless one adopts it as an article of faith. This was, however, as he astutely notes, an article of faith among the leadership that took office in 1947. It was their vision of economic management that took centre-stage from the 1950s to the early 1980s (with generally negative effects on the Indian economy). But there was a pragmatic constraint to the policies that is ignored here. As B. R. Tomlinson (“Historical roots of economic policy” in Subroto Roy and William E. James (eds), Foundations of India’s Political Economy, New Delhi, 1992) noted, the Nehruvian planned economywas institutionally a direct descendant of the British imperial war economy of 1941–46. Finally, two chapters look at the Republic post-1950 and a concluding one offers a retrospect and prospect at the threshold of the twenty-first century. These are written with the elegant force that characterizes much of Roy’s work, scrupulously avoiding the shallow binaries that have so dominated much discourse on globalization and its effects. In conclusion therefore, this book despite certain shortcomings represents an unprecedented effort that must be the foundation for further advances in our understanding of the long history of India as a global entity.