India’s trade routes and intra-Asian ties flourished long before Europeans arrived, William Dalrymple outlines in The Golden Road.
If the 19th century was defined by European power, and the 20th century by the rise of the US, the 21st century is increasingly understood to be the “Asian Century” — one in which the global enter of gravity is shifting yet again. And if you accept that assertion, the next logical question is: Who will lead the Asian Century? The two natural candidates are the region’s historical powers, China and India, which were the world’s largest economies from 1 A.D. to 1820, before the rise of the industrial west. They are once again among the planet’s preeminent economies.
By most measures, China is currently outperforming India. Its $18.5 trillion GDP is more than four times larger than India’s, and it accounted for $6.64 trillion in global trade in 2023 — 11% of the global share, to India’s 2.7% ($1.64 trillion). Its military is mightier, and it has greater influence in international affairs. In 2013, China launched the Belt and Road Initiative, an attempt to revive the ancient web of trade routes, known as the Silk Road, that connected the Middle Kingdom to all parts west.
But in his masterful new work, The Golden Road (Bloomsbury, April 29), historian William Dalrymple argues that India has both the potential and the historical track record to catch up with its former peer to the northeast. Citing compelling evidence, Dalrymple notes that many of the great advances in human history originated from Indian civilization, particularly in mathematics (including the concept of zero), religion (Hinduism and Buddhism) and philosophy, astronomy, medicine, literature and art. He argues that the world overlooked India’s vast influence, and that trade routes emanating from India may have had an equally substantive impact on Asian and world history as the Chinese silk route.
India was “a crucial economic fulcrum, and civilizational engine, at the heart of the ancient and early medieval worlds,” Dalrymple writes, describing the country as “one of the main motors of global trade and cultural transmission.”
The Golden Road fills an important gap in our understanding of the intra-Asian relations that predated the arrival of European colonizers. While one modern conceit is that globalization is a recent development, the book demonstrates how much of Asia was for centuries connected through a common lingua franca, Sanskrit. Ideas of Hindu-Buddhist kingship and cosmology were prevalent throughout these regions; Buddhism also took root in Japan, Korea and Southeast Asia. In the Middle East, Indian ideas in mathematics and medicine led to further advances during the Islamic Golden Age. From the Arab world, these Indic concepts were transmitted to Europe, where they also helped spur the European Renaissance.
Dalrymple suggests the world overlooked India’s influence because it was “undermined, misrepresented and devalued” by Victorian Indologists such as Thomas Babington Macaulay. In 1835 Macaulay wrote that it would be “no exaggeration to say that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England.”
But that was then. To compete with Beijing now, New Delhi needs to develop economic muscle, though it can also draw a great deal of competitive soft power from the history of its “Golden Road,” the ancient routes that connected India to the rest of Asia and the wider world. Dalrymple outlines three ways for India to leverage its history to enhance its competitive position vis-à-vis China and stake its claim to leadership of the Asian Century.
The first is to rediscover the great virtues of openness to international trade. While India’s current economy may in relative terms be more closed than that of China, Dalrymple shows that India’s trade with the rest of the world matched, if not exceeded, that of China for millennia. This resulted in prosperity at home, which in turn enabled Indian culture to shine.
“In the crucial period between the end of antiquity and the onset of the high Middle Ages, you can make [a] case for India being the cultural and intellectual center of Asia, influencing and changing the course of religious, artistic and cultural life,” Dalrymple writes. “This after all was why [Chinese scholars] risked their lives to make the dangerous journey to what was then the Harvard or MIT of ancient Asia: the great Buddhist university of Nalanda.”
Many Indians believe that the country’s large domestic market means it doesn’t need international trade to grow faster. While few officials state this view out loud, the Indian government’s actions indicate an underlying belief in continued reliance on domestic consumption for economic growth, encouraging companies to focus on the Indian market rather than exports. India backed out of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership in 2019, for fear of Chinese goods flooding the domestic market. It is in no hurry to enter into free-trade agreements with Western countries — despite long-standing negotiations with the UK and the European Union — apparently because it wants to protect sensitive sectors like agriculture, which employs close to half of the working population.
This is short-sighted. If China is leveraging the $100 trillion global economy to grow while India relies on its $4 trillion domestic market, India will remain at a disadvantage. Arvind Subramanian, former chief economic advisor to the Indian government, argued in a recent interview with the Financial Times, “You cannot do [it] based on domestic demand and a domestic market.”
As for fears of being swamped by imports from China, a study by the Peterson Institute for International Economics shows that India’s economy would in fact gain $60 billion annually from more openness. It also makes economic sense to encourage foreign investment, particularly in the manufacturing sector. In theory, New Delhi’s ‘Make in India’ initiative — which encourages manufacturing in the country — is meant to do just this. In practice, it has been slow in encouraging investment.
The second takeaway for India’s current rulers from their country’s history is the importance of India’s traditional links with Northeast Asia. The most successful and dynamic economies of Asia are now found in that region, with Japan, South Korea and China outperforming the rest of the continent. As Dalrymple notes, a significant part of the DNA of their civilizations comes from India.
These days, there are deep suspicions between China and India, just as there are between China, Japan and South Korea. Geopolitical differences explain these suspicions, but their shared cultural history might help overcome them. While Dalrymple’s book pits India’s Golden Road against the China-dominated Silk Road, the way forward for both countries may well be a concomitant and cooperative revival of both ancient routes, repurposed for economic and scientific cooperation through the Global South.
China has launched its Health Silk Road initiative — through which it aims to improve international cooperation in health care — and India has been providing pharmaceuticals and medical equipment to the developing world at low or no cost, simultaneously sharing its expertise. At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, when the West was reluctant to share vaccines with the Global South, China and India stepped up and filled the gap. There is great opportunity for them to continue to collaborate in enhancing health-care access, especially in the poorer countries of the Global South.
The third, and arguably best, opportunity for leverage in India lies in Southeast Asia, the region most influenced by Indian civilization, as Dalrymple documents in great detail. One of the curious anomalies in history is that even though Southeast Asia is geographically closer to China, nine of its 10 countries have an Indic cultural base, most obviously expressed in religious and cultural practices. Only Vietnam has a Sinic base.
That cultural base was built on economic ties. In the 4th and 5th centuries, when western supplies of gold dwindled due to the fall of the Roman Empire, Indian traders turned to Southeast Asia. Their ships sailed to what would eventually become Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia. The traders also exported their faith, seeding Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms across the region. Few Indians today know that one of the strongest Hindu kingdoms in history emerged in Southeast Asia.
Although Hinduism is now a minority faith in the region, its cultural influence lingers: The Hindu epics Ramayana and Mahabharata are still performed in many corners of Southeast Asia. Buddhism is the largest of the major world religions in six of the region’s 10 countries. Given these ties, there should be a close cultural relationship between India and Southeast Asia matching the cultural closeness between Europe and the US. But no such closeness exists.
One reason is that India became part of the ‘Persianate World’ during the second millennium (as the historian Richard Eaton demonstrates in his writings) and turned away from Southeast Asia. Another reason is present-day India’s relative economic and political insularity, particularly in comparison to China.
If India is to provide leadership in the Asian Century, the most natural starting place would be Southeast Asia. And the first step would be to restore the close trading links of old. This would require catching up with China, no easy task. As of 2023, the most recent year for which definitive figures are available, Southeast Asia’s goods trade with China was $697 billion, almost seven times larger than that of India. But as recently as 1980, Indian goods trade with Southeast Asia was $1.3 billion, only half that of China’s.
India is expected to become the third largest economy in the world by 2030. Given that it was one of the poorest countries in the world upon achieving independence in 1947, this would be a remarkable achievement. But to create opportunities for its enormous population, it needs to do more. In that respect, Dalrymple’s book couldn’t be more timely. The Golden Road is not only a reminder of a glorious past; it can also inspire Indians to match the sterling record of their ancestors in engaging a new rejuvenated continent — and claim the leadership of the Asian Century.
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To most people, a solar farm or a geothermal plant is an important source of clean energy. Scientists and engineers see that plus far more potential.
They envision offshore wind turbines capturing and storing carbon beneath the sea, and geothermal plants producing essential metals for powering electric vehicles. Electric vehicle batteries, too, can be transformed to power homes, saving their owners money and also reducing transportation emissions.
With scientists worldwide sounding the alarm about the increasing dangers and costs of climate change, let’s explore some cutting-edge ideas that could transform how today’s technologies reduce the effects of global warming, from five recent articles in The Conversation.
1. Solar canals: Power + water protection
What if solar panels did double duty, protecting water supplies while producing more power?
California is developing the United States’ first solar canals, with solar panels built atop some of the state’s water distribution canals. These canals run for thousands of miles through arid environments, where the dry air boosts evaporation in a state frequently troubled by water shortages.
“In a 2021 study, we showed that covering all 4,000 miles of California’s canals with solar panels would save more than 65 billion gallons of water annually by reducing evaporation. That’s enough to irrigate 50,000 acres of farmland or meet the residential water needs of more than 2 million people,” writes engineering professor Roger Bales of the University of California, Merced. They would also expand renewable energy without taking up farmable land.
Other countries including China and India are also testing the solar farms over water. Solar Aquagrid LLC, CC BY-ND
Research shows that human activities, particularly using fossil fuels for energy and transportation, are unequivocally warming the planet and increasing extreme weather. Increasing renewable energy, currently about 20% of U.S. utility-scale electricity generation, can reduce fossil fuel demand.
Putting solar panels over shaded water can also improve their power output. The cooler water lowers the temperature of the panels by about 10 degrees Fahrenheit (5.5 Celsius), boosting their efficiency, Bales writes.
2. Geothermal power could boost battery supplies
For renewable energy to slash global greenhouse gas emissions, buildings and vehicles have to be able to use it. Batteries are essential, but the industry has a supply chain problem.
Most batteries used in electric vehicles and utility-scale energy storage are lithium-ion batteries, and most lithium used in the U.S. comes from Argentina, Chile, China and Russia. China is the leader in lithium processing.
Geologist and engineers are working on an innovative method that could boost the U.S. lithium supply at home by extracting lithium from geothermal brines in California’s Salton Sea region.
Brines are the liquid leftover in a geothermal plant after heat and steam are used to produce power. That liquid contains lithium and other metals such as manganese, zinc and boron. Normally, it is pumped back underground, but the metals can also be filtered out.
“If test projects now underway prove that battery-grade lithium can be extracted from these brines cost effectively, 11 existing geothermal plants along the Salton Sea alone could have the potential to produce enough lithium metal to provide about 10 times the current U.S. demand,” write geologist Michael McKibben of the University of California, Riverside, and energy policy scholar Bryant Jones of Boise State University.
President Joe Biden invoked the Defense Production Act on March 31, 2022, to provide incentives for U.S. companies to mine and process more critical minerals for batteries.
3. Green hydrogen and other storage ideas
Scientists are working on other ways to boost batteries’ mineral supply chain, too, including recycling lithium and cobalt from old batteries. They’re also developing designs with other materials, explained Kerry Rippy, a researcher with the National Renewable Energy Lab.
Concentrated solar power, for example, stores energy from the sun by heating molten salt and using it to produce steam to drive electric generators, similar to how a coal power plant would generate electricity. It’s expensive, though, and the salts currently used aren’t stable at higher temperature, Rippy writes. The Department of Energy is funding a similar project that is experimenting with heated sand.
Renewable fuels, such as green hydrogen and ammonia, provide a different type of storage. Since they store energy as liquid, they can be transported and used for shipping or rocket fuel.
Hydrogen gets a lot of attention, but not all hydrogen is green. Most hydrogen used today is actually produced with natural gas – a fossil fuel. Green hydrogen, in contrast, could be produced using renewable energy to power electrolysis, which splits water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen, but again, it’s expensive.
“The key challenge is optimizing the process to make it efficient and economical,” Rippy writes. “The potential payoff is enormous: inexhaustible, completely renewable energy.”
4. Using your EV to power your home
Batteries could also soon turn your electric vehicle into a giant, mobile battery capable of powering your home.
Only a few vehicles are currently designed for vehicle-to-home charging, or V2H, but that’s changing, writes energy economist Seth Blumsack of Penn State University. Ford, for example, says its new F-150 Lightning pickup truck will be able to power an average house for three days on a single charge.
Blumsack explores the technical challenges as V2H grows and its potential to change how people manage energy use and how utilities store power.
For example, he writes, “some homeowners might hope to use their vehicle for what utility planners call ‘peak shaving’ – drawing household power from their EV during the day instead of relying on the grid, thus reducing their electricity purchases during peak demand hours.”
5. Capturing carbon from air and locking it away
Another emerging technology is more controversial.
Humans have put so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere over the past two centuries that just stopping fossil fuel use won’t be enough to quickly stabilize the climate. Most scenarios, including in recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, show the world will have to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, as well.
The technology to capture carbon dioxide from the air exists – it’s called direct air capture – but it’s expensive.
Engineers and geophysicists like David Goldberg of Columbia University are exploring ways to cut those costs by combining direct air capture technology with renewable energy production and carbon storage, like offshore wind turbines built above undersea rock formations where captured carbon could be locked away.
The U.S. had seven operating offshore wind turbines with 42 megawatts of capacity in 2021. The Biden administration’s goal is 30,000 megawatts by 2030. AP Photo/Michael Dwyer
The world’s largest direct air capture plant, launched in 2021 in Iceland, uses geothermal energy to power its equipment. The captured carbon dioxide is mixed with water and pumped into volcanic basalt formations underground. Chemical reactions with the basalt turn it into a hard carbonate.
Goldberg, who helped developed the mineralization process used in Iceland, sees similar potential for future U.S. offshore wind farms. Wind turbines often produce more energy than their customers need at any given time, making excess energy available.
“Built together, these technologies could reduce the energy costs of carbon capture and minimize the need for onshore pipelines, reducing impacts on the environment,” Goldberg writes.
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