This book is a study of commercial relations between north India, the Uzbek
Khanate of Bukhara and Russia between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.
Studies of India s foreign trade have tended to overlook commercial flows
passing through the north-western frontier, destined for Afghanistan, Central
Asia and Russia. This volume attempts to redress this imbalance. It does this by
initially identifying the geographical and political factors that complicated
the trade as well as afforded merely tentative estimates of its volumes. In the
chapters that follow, the economic power of Sindhi bankers from Shikarpur over
most of south Central Asia is explained and the reliance upon nomad Afghan