For most of its modern history, India was fated to be on the receiving end of cultural influence from other civilisations. But this isn't the complete story. A full millennium earlier, India's major cultural exports - religion, art, technology, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, language and literature - were shaping civilisations, traveling as far as Afghanistan in the West and Japan in the East.

Out of India came pioneering merchants, astronomers and astrologers, scientists and mathematicians, surgeons and sculptors, as well as the holy men, monks and missionaries. In The Golden Road, legendary historian William Dalrymple highlights India's oft-forgotten position as a crucial economic and civilisational hub at the heart of the ancient and early mediaeval history of Eurasia.

From Angkor to Ayutthaya, The Golden Road traces the cultural flow of Indian religions, languages, artistic and architectural forms throughout the world. In this ground-breaking tome, Dalrymple draws from a lifetime of scholarship to reinstate India as the great intellectual and philosophical superpower of ancient Asia.

William Dalrymple is one of Britain's great historians and the bestselling author of the Wolfson Prize-winning White Mughals, The Last Mughal, which won the Duff Cooper Prize, and the Hemingway and Kapuscinski Prize-winning Return of a King. A frequent broadcaster, he has written and presented three television series, one of which won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA. He has also won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award, the Foreign Correspondent of the Year at the FPA Media Awards, and been awarded five honorary doctorates. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Asiatic Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and has held visiting fellowships at Princeton, Brown and All Souls, University of Oxford. He writes regularly for the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker and the Guardian. In 2018 he was presented with the prestigious President's Medal by the British Academy for his outstanding literary achievement and for co-founding the Jaipur Literature Festival. He is the co-host of chart-topping podcast Empire with Anita Anand. William lives with his wife and three children on a goat farm outside Delhi.