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The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World
The wealth of India had been a legend in the Mediterranean since the fourth century BC, enhanced by Alexander the Great...
Tacitus grumbled that ‘for promiscuous dress and the sake of jewels, our wealth is transported to alien and hostile countries.’ In economic terms, silk may have been no big deal, but its slithery, see-through quality outraged fogeys such as Seneca. Its author, Vigila, frankly admitted: ‘We must know that the Indians have a most subtle talent and all other races yield to them in arithmetic and geometry and the other liberal arts.’ Fibonacci, apart from bequeathing his sequence, also imported the latest Arab accounting methods, which he learned as a boy travelling with his merchant father in Algeria, and which became the basis of double-entry book-keeping and modern commerce. Nor can we ignore the persistence of those qualities in the remarkable success stories of the Indian diaspora today: not just the billionaires and politicians and novelists – the Tatas, Ambanis and Mittals, the Sunaks, Patels and Varadkars, the Naipauls, Rushdies and Desais – but also the tech geeks in Silicon Valley, the countless GPs and pharmacists, the convenience stores which are always open.
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