Description
Book SynopsisThis book argues that long-distance trade in luxury items such as diamonds, gold, cinnamon, scented woods, ivory and pearls, all of which require little overhead in their acquisition and were relatively easy to transport played a foundational role in the creation of what we would call global trade in the first millennium CE. The book coins the term dark matter economy to better describe this complex though mostly invisible relationship to normative realities.
The first full integration of dark matter economy with the emerging global flows took place in South India and Sri Lanka at the beginning of the millennium. The book then moves to other places in the world sweet spots where a particular type of affluence was generated through the trade in luxury goods. This upstream affluence manifested itself in the creation of shrines, palaces, temples and engineering works that all thickened the landscape of memory, control and extraction and also served as a defense mechanism ag
Table of Contents
Introduction: Leading Questions
Part 1
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- The Case of Musa I
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- Dark Matter Affluence and Sweet Spot Systems
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- Cross-Ecological Delivery Economies
Part 2
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- "The Most Outlying Lands"
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- The Sri Lanka Wealth Rush
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- South Indian Emergence
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- The Central Role of Borneo
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- The Indonesian Seaway
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- The Sub-Himalayan – Yungui Plateau Sweet Spot
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- The East Africa Coastal Sweet Spot
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- The North Sea Lattitude Sweet Spot
Part 3
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- Beyond the Binary
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- Structural Assymetries
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- Institutions Without Institutionality
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- Crossing Chieftain Geographies
Part 4
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- Shrine Landscapes
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- Feast and Dance
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- Great Works
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- Palace Universes
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- Looking and Sounding the Part
Coda: Death by a Thousand Cuts
