At the moment, you can't move for books and exhibitions about the Silk Road,

the overland trading corridor between Europe and China powered by Chinese silks, gunpowder and paper.

But, not to be too crude about it, ships are bigger than camels. They can carry a lot more stuff.

And India, slap bang in the middle between China, West Asia and Europe,

was at the centre of a massive maritime trade powered by the monsoon winds. What kind of cultural and intellectual

impact did India have outside of its borders? I'm joined by William Dorrimple, author of the

Golden Road, to discuss how India was at the epicentre of the ancient world. We talk about

the Roman appetite for pepper, goodness gracious me, and how one

lucky rhinoceros stopped Jingas Khan from conquering the subcontinent. Okay, William Dorempel,

thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me. Big pleasure. So I had so much

fun reading this book. And as I got into it, I had a lot of fun writing it, actually, including one of the nicest six-month-long holidays of my entire life after COVID going around. No one ever says they had a nice time writing a book. Did you not have the pit of self-loathing? Well, the nice bit, of course, is not actually writing, writing the book, but going off on the travel before writing, writing the book. But it was great because I spent kind of 20 years writing the same book about the East India Company and the moguls, four different books about that.

And this was a complete release into what had always been basically a hobby, something I've loved but never actually specialised in.

And it's also sort of connected me with when I was a kid, I used to love archaeology.

And I used to spend all my teen holidays on archaeological digs.

Oh, wow.

And then ended up going down another rabbit hole and studying something that would have amazed my teenage self,

which was the 18th century,

which I thought was very boring and very late.

And this is coming back to the stuff I always loved, which is archaeology, early history,

the ancient world.

But with this new angle, to me, of...

What was the first seed of the idea for this book?

...