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.
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • USA TODAY BESTSELLER

A Kirkus Reviews Best History Book of 2025 • An NPR Book We Loved This Year

For a millennium and a half, India was a con?dent 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 Paci?c.

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.
 
Contributor Bio(s)
 
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, 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. He currently cohosts the podcast Empire. He lives with his wife and three children outside Delhi.