The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World - Hardcover

by William Dalrymple (Author)

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

USA TODAY BESTSELLER

Winner of the Mark Lynton History Prize 2026 * A Kirkus Reviews Best History Book of 2025 * A Library Journal Best Book of the Year * An NPR Book We Loved This Year

The instant New York Times bestseller and international sensation-a sparkling, soaring history of ideas, tracing South Asia's underappreciated role in producing the world as we know it.

For a millennium and a half, India was a confident exporter of its diverse civilization. Indian art, religions, technology, astronomy, music, dance, literature, mathematics, and mythology blazed a trail across the world, along a Golden Road that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific.

In The Golden Road, William Dalrymple gives a name to this spread of Indian ideas that transformed the world, drawing from a lifetime of scholarship to highlight India's oft-forgotten position as the heart of ancient Eurasia. From the largest Hindu temple in the world at Angkor Wat to the Buddhism of China, from the trade that helped fund the Roman Empire to the creation of the numerals we use today, India transformed the culture and technology of its ancient world-and our world today as we know it. And in this magisterial account, Dalrymple restores ancient India as a cultural and economic superpower.

Author Biography

William Dalrymple is the bestselling author of ten books, including The Golden Road, the Duff Cooper Prize-winning The Last Mughal, the Hemingway Prize-winning Return of a King, and The Anarchy, a finalist for the Cundill History Prize and one of Barack Obama's favorite books of 2019. He has written and presented three television series, and writes regularly for the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and the Guardian. In 2018, he was presented with the British Academy's prestigious President's Medal for his outstanding literary achievement and for co-founding the Jaipur Literature Festival. Dalrymple currently cohosts the podcast Empire. He lives with his wife and three children on a goat farm outside Delhi.