Finally, a question for me! Amidst the West-oriented questions that deluge this sub every day.

So, from your wording, it appears that you also subscribe to the widely-held assumption that Central Asia owed its prosperity primarily to the mediatory role it played in China’s westward trade with Europe-and that it fell into decline when the Europeans discovered the sea route to Asia. Consider this passage:

In Europe, trade with China through Central Asia was associated with luxurious wealth and exotica long before Marco Polo returned from his travels to the Yuan court at the end of the thirteenth century. But the scholarly image of Central Asia as a center for Silk Road commerce dates only to 1877, when the German geographer Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen (1833–1905) first coined the term Seidenstrasse (Silk Route or Road) in reference to China’s overland caravan trade through Central Asia. It did not take long before mention of the Silk Road conjured romanticized images of dusty, dark-skinned merchants with thick beards, turban-­wrapped heads, and razor-sharp sabers strapped to their sides. Leading long caravans of ornately decorated camels heavily laden with packs full of fine silks, spices, porcelains, and other luxury goods, these intrepid, nameless figures were imagined traversing rugged mountain passes and a vast rolling landscape of grassy steppe, skirting deserts as they made their way from city to city the full distance from China to the Mediterranean. Exchanging their silks for gold and silver, the traders would then lead their camels back to the East and repeat the process over again.

Needless to say, this is a gross oversimplification. In the first place, Richthofen devised the term “Silk Road” purely in the context of Han China, which has been misinterpreted and romanticized by later historians. Secondly, although he does point out the multiplicity of caravan routes and the wide variety of merchandise aside from silk, recent scholarship notes that Richthofen exaggerates the importance of silk.

Adding further clarification to this point, Vaissière has observed that “a trickle of Chinese silk” may have passed along the Central Asian caravan routes prior to the Han period, but at that time silk itself was a relatively unimportant commodity in Eurasian trade. Rather, Vaissière finds that archeological and textual evidence strongly suggests that trade across the region included a much wider variety of merchandise and that, for example, precious stones such as lapis lazuli that originated in Central Asia were traded widely from India to Mesopotamia and beyond already in the fourth millennium BCE. In addition to silk, the Sogdian traders of antiquity also dealt in “musk, slaves, precious metals and stones, furs, silverware, amber, relics, paper, spices, brass, curcuma, sal ammoniac, medicinal plants, candy sugar and perfumes, etc.” Such a perspective leads to a quite different understanding of just what constituted overland Eurasian trade in antiquity. But this is a recent revelation.

Fueling this misunderstanding of Central Asian trade is the dearth of commercial records owing to the secretive nature of premodern merchant groups. Another reason was the alleged cultural superiority of Europe, through whose rosy lens premodern historians peered, claiming that European imperialism was an improvement for the backward civilizations it conquered. Consider the renowned Russian Orientalist, Vasilii Bartold, “the founding father” of modern Central Asian study:

In his own words, he considered the eighteenth century to have been “a period of political, economical and cultural decadence for all of Muslim Asia.” And referring specifically to Central Asia, he found that “in the nineteenth century, when Europe had definitely assumed cultural leadership, Turkestan stood lowest of all Muslim lands, being as it was the part of Muslim Asia farthest removed from Europe.”

Documentary evidence examined by Valerie Hansen (in her 2012 publication) indicates that relatively small quantities of merchandise came from China. No giant trains of Bactrian camels bearing Chinese luxuries are apparent. Furthermore, most of the residents of the towns in Turkestan were illiterate peasants who worked the land, not cosmopolitan merchants. Hansen’s research also shows that merchandise such as paper, spices, glass, and metals held more commercial importance than silk.

Over the centuries from antiquity to the early-modern era, many of the routes that made up the exchange network centered on Central Asia (with branches flung towards Mongolia and China, southwards to India, northwards into the steppe, and westwards to the Caucasus and Mediterranean) declined in importance, while others rose to take their place. Bulkier goods were the dominant articles of trade, as opposed to luxury ones. Silk from China itself lost much of its importance in trade. So, by the sixteenth century, traders dealt mainly in cotton textiles, livestock, chemicals, manufactured items, precious metals, and medicinal herbs amongst others.

The increase in trade of bulkier commodities like cotton textiles and tea in the early modern period suggests that Central Asia pulsed in response to the patterns of seaborne commerce, integrating even more closely with the trade of the wider world.

Let us then look towards the wider world - more specifically, India. Following the discovery of the Americas, Europeans extracted vast quantities of New World silver which were destined for Asia in exchange for Asian cotton textiles, and spices among others. This intensified India’s economy, opening more opportunities for Indian business groups. Contrary to academic supposition (only relatively recently corrected), however, these groups focused not only on the maritime trade, but also on the overland one, both arenas complementing each other. Thus, the Central Asian overland trade experienced sustained increase. From a 1973 study by Niels Steensgaard:

In 1639, V.O.C. (Dutch East India Company) officials expressed profound disappointment that the company had failed to meet its objectives and that, despite efforts to profit by importing Indian textiles to Persia, caravan traders still transported to Persia some 25,000 to 30,000 camel loads of Indian cotton textiles each year. Considering that dromedaries are known to have commonly carried some 400 pounds and that 32.5 yards of cloth weighed 5 pounds, such a number of camels could easily have transported more than 70 million yards of cloth.

While at first glance, this figure seems large, consider that ~5 yards of cloth are needed to make an outfit; that the Safavid Empire had 7-10 million people, and that much of the cloth would be exported yet westwards; and that India was the largest producer of cotton cloth at the time.

Moreover, the Mughals actively encouraged the overland trade with Persia and Central Asia, working in a (commercial) threeway ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) with the Safavids and Uzbek rulers to build caravanserais, welcome foreign subjects, and create a safe environment. This bustling activity was hardly impacted by wars and antagonistic relations between these partners. A pertinent point at this stage is that both Persia and Central Asia, being relatively sparsely populated, were primarily important as transit routes to larger markets in the Ottoman territories and the wider Mediterranean.

Thus, thousands of agents of Indian merchant houses made their way to Balkh, Samarqand, and many other Central Asian towns, well-armed with capital which they used to advance loans to local actors such as artisans and peasants, entering partnerships with Bukharan and Tatar merchants. The trade was of course not a one-way street. If India sent textiles, spices, dyes, and rice; then Central Asian merchants shipped fruit (both fresh and dried), precious stones, silk, leather items, furs and other goods - especially horses. Horses were a perennial requirement for the giant Mughal armies that were always fighting somewhere. They had to be imported since India’s climate, population and land were not conducive to horse rearing. It is suggested that some sixty thousand Central Asian horses passed through Kabul on their way to Indian markets each year. Near the end of Aurangzeb’s reign, Manucci gives the highest estimate of one hundred thousand horses annually, twelve thousand of which were destined for the imperial stables.