For broad and suggestive overviews on cross-cultural exchange, see Philip D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (1985), and C. G. F. Simkin, The Traditional Trade of Asia (1968).
Readable overviews of the Silk Road include Luce Boulnois, The Silk Road (1966), and Irene M. Franck and David M. Brownstone, The Silk Road: A History (1986). For products traded across Central Asia based on an eighth-century Japanese collection, see Ry-oichi Hayashi, The Silk Road and the Shoso-in (1975). Xinru Liu, Silk and Religion (1996), covers one specific product. Owen Latti-more gives a first-person account of traveling by camel caravan in The Desert Road to Turkestan (1928). More generally on Central Asia, see Denis Sinor, Inner Asia, History-Civilization-Languages: A Syllabus (1987), and Karl Jettmar, Art of the Steppes, rev. ed. (1967). Richard Foltz, Religions of the Silk Road (1999), is an excellent brief introduction.
For a readable but sketchy historical overview see August Tous-saint, History of the Indian Ocean (1966). Alan Villiers recounts what it was like to sail dhows between East Africa and the Persian Gulf in Sons of Sinbad (1940).
On a more scholarly plane, see K. N. Chaudhuri’s Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (1985). Archaeologist Pierre Verin treats the special problem of Madagascar in The History of Civilisation in North Madagascar (1986). For Rome and India see E. H. Warmington’s The Commerce Between the Roman Empire and India (1974); J. Innes Miller’s The Spice Trade of the Roman Empire, 29 B. C. to A. D. 641 (1969); and Vimala Begley and Richard Daniel De Puma’s edited collection of articles, Rome and India: The Ancient Sea Trade (1991), along with the primary source The Periplus Maris Erythraei: Text with Introduction, Translation, and Commentary (1989), edited and translated by Lionel Casson. George F. Hourani’s brief Arab Seafaring in the Indian Ocean in Ancient and Early Medieval Times (1975) covers materials in Arabic sources.
Richard W. Bulliet’s The Camel and the Wheel (1975) deals with camel use in the Middle East, along the Silk Road, and in North Africa and the Sahara. Early evidence of the lifestyles of Central Asian nomads is contained in Renate Rolle, The World of the Scythians (1989). For a well-illustrated account of Saharan rock art, see Henri Lhote, The Search for the Tassili Frescoes: The Story of the Prehistoric Rock-Paintings of the Sahara (1959). Additional views on Saharan trade and politics appear in E. Ann McDougall, “The Sahara Reconsidered: Pastoralism, Politics and Salt from the Ninth Through the Twelfth Centuries,” History in Africa 12 (1983): 263-286, and Nehemia Levtzion, Ancient Ghana and Mali, 2nd ed. (1980). For translated texts see J. F. P. Hopkins and Nehemia Levtzion, eds., Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History (1981).
On prehistoric Africa see Christopher Ehret, An African Classical Age: Eastern and Southern Africa in World History, 1000 b. c. to a. d. 400 (2001), and J. F. A. Ajayi and Michael Crowder, A History of West Africa, vol. 1 (1976). See also G. Mokhtar, ed., General History of Africa II: Ancient Civilizations of Africa (1981), for many articles by numerous authors. On early metalworking see Michael J. Bisson et al., eds., Ancient African Metallurgy, the Sociocultural Context (2000). Jacques Maquet’s views on culture are contained in Africanity: The Cultural Unity of Black Africa (1972).
Of special importance on Christianity in Asia and Africa is Garth Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity (1993). For specific topics treated in this chapter see Stuart Munro-Hay, Aksum:AnAfrican Civilisation of Late Antiquity (1991); Xinru Liu, Ancient India and Ancient China: Trade and Religious Exchanges, a. d. 1-600 (1998); Rolf A. Stein, Tibetan Civilization (1972); Tilak Hettiarachchy, History of Kingship in Ceylon up to the Fourth Century a. d. (1972); and Yoneo Ishii, Sangha, State, and Society: Thai Buddhism in History (1986). Sally Hovey Wriggins, The Silk Road Journey with Xuanzang (2003), vividly describes the experience of a Chinese Buddhist pilgrim.
World History
