The area studies paradigm has been dominant in South Asian studies for half a century, but in the past decade has given way to more globally oriented frames that emphasize less the cultural uniqueness of South Asia, and instead the manifold ways that it has been tied to larger world systems for more than two millennia. The names of key world‐systems theorists such as I. Wallerstein, A. Frank, and J. Abu‐Lughod do not appear in the bibliography of this short monograph, but it is nonetheless firmly located within the fruitful scholarship of world‐systems analysis. Davis borrows from N. Chanda a four‐part framework for interpreting South Asian interactions with a first‐century CE world system that stretched from Britain to China, in which traders, preachers/missionaries, warriors and adventurers constituted the four (largely male) social groups that traveled wide and far and created the flows and connections that stitched the system together. He uses narrative texts and archaeological remains to trace the trade connections. To trace the missionary connections, he looks at the spread of Buddhism to East Asia along what scholars from the late nineteenth century have termed the Silk Road. Under the framework of warriors he discusses the entrance of the Kushanas into South Asia from Central Asia, and the subsequent Kushana support for the spread of Buddhism. Finally, in the most interpretive chapter, he interprets the epic tale of Prince Rama as an exemplar of the travels of an adventurer beyond the traditional bounds of Aryavarta, the north Indian “homeland” of the Brahmanical civilization. He then contrasts these four types of travelers to the parochial “localist” vision of Manu and his distinctively conservative attitude toward the wider world, a vision that has inaccurately dominated European and American understandings of South Asia for far too long. This short book will make an excellent text for any undergraduate course on Indian religion and history, and also whets this reviewer's appetite for Davis's forthcoming larger cultural history of early South Asia.
