Caravans tells the fascinating story of countless Punjabi Khatri merchants who built great business empires through their ingenuity and spirit of adventure. Operating during the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, these merchants risked everything and travelled across Afghanistan, Central Asia, Iran and Russia. They used sophisticated techniques to convert a modest amount of merchandise into vast portfolios for trade and moneylending ventures. Caravans challenges the belief that the rising tide of European trade in the Indian Ocean usurped the overland ‘Silk Road’ trade, and demonstrates how thousands of Punjabis created a booming market in Central Asia at precisely this historical moment.
In the first half of the eighteenth century, Central Asia’s Bukharan Khanate descended into a crisis from which it would not recover. Bukharans suffered failed harvests and famine, a severe fiscal downturn, invasions from the north and the south, rebellion, and then revolution. To date, efforts to identify the cause of this crisis have focused on the assumption that the region became isolated from early modern globalizing trends. The Bukharan Crisis exposes that explanation as a flawed relic of early Orientalist scholarship on the region. In its place, Scott Levi identifies multiple causal factors that underpinned the Bukharan crisis. Some of these were interrelated and some independent, some unfolded over long periods while others shocked the region more abruptly, but they all converged in the early eighteenth century to the detriment of the Bukharan Khanate and those dependent upon it. Levi applies an integrative framework of analysis that repositions Central Asia in recent scholarship on multiple themes in early modern Eurasian and world history
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Since its inception, Scott has grown from a small farming community to the second-largest city in Lafayette Parish. Early settlers provided land to the Louisiana Western Railroad Company for a new route to Texas that passed through Scott Station, named after a Mr. Scott associated with the railroad. The town's slogan, "Where the West Begins," is based on the different train fare charged to passengers headed beyond Scott to the West. The murder of merchant Martin Begnaud by the Blanc brothers was news that traveled from Scott to New Orleans to France. The railroad enabled the community to transport cotton, corn, sweet potatoes, and other produce across the country and to Canada. Today, several renowned musicians and artists call Scott home. The city, which is located on Interstate 10, combines small-town hospitality with a growing center of commerce.
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