This book contains nine stories in nine chapters, each about twenty pages in length, depicting various famous travellers across Asia in the millennium before 1500. The common thread among chapters is of real people traversing real routes among sites across Afro-Eurasia, and the mingling of personal narratives with accounts of commodities, science, technology, and everyday life in various cultures and regimes.

Eight chapters provide details of major travellers, some more famous than others – Xuanzang, 618–632; Ibn Fadlan, 921–922; Ibn Sina, 1002–1021; Abraham bin Yiju, 1120–1160; Ibn Battuuta, 1325–1356; Ma Huan, 1413–1431; Babu, 1494–1526; and Tome Pires, 1511–1521 – and the most surprising, novel chapter concerns a shipwreck in the Java Sea in 1000 CE, endeavouring to reconstruct the origins of its cargo. This is the only chapter that gives a feeling for the spatial complexity of the interactive social lives of things that travelled on routes described in the volume. A summary chapter describes Asia before 1500 as a vast domain of mobility, where these travels make sense and illuminate features of everyday life generally lost in historical studies.

All the other chapters are nicely written and well researched. There is no high theory here, only description, anecdotal and illuminating. Though the landscapes of travel remain vague, narratives appear with abundant material to indicate their context and background, so that each chapter effectively stands alone. Spread out as they are across a millennium, and threaded as they are along routes distant and largely disconnected from one another, each travel becomes a microcosm. The arrival of the Portuguese in the fifteenth century appears to be one little travel among so many others.

Many major imperial regimes of this period are described as the context for travels, and many minor regimes receive some mention. Major religions and cultures get their due. The result is kaleidoscopic, fragmentary, and intriguing. The reader is left wanting to know more about medieval travels and their environments. Notes provide guidance for further exploration.

The book will be useful in college teaching and stimulating for general readers. In the classroom it will need to be supplemented, for it opens up territory for new thinking without even trying to map it authoritatively. The overall sense of Asian geography here is actually quite confusing. The book takes the fragmentary travel accounts for which we have substantial documentation to represent travel or mobility in general, and then proposes implicitly that mobility and travel account for the wealth of pre-modern Asia. These are hefty propositions, which only appear implicitly in the midst of narrative anecdotes. How these travels and travellers ‘created’ the riches of the East, an idea proposed in the very misleading title, is not answered, except through an argument, made with a light hand throughout, that travels reflect the inventiveness and commerce that made Asia rich. There is nothing much here on the production of commodities that moved along the Asian routes, or on the finance or money, or on the warehousing, insurance, credit, taxation, workers, and many other subjects that pertain to the production of riches. To make sense of the wealth of medieval Asia described here, readers need to consult many economic histories that do not appear in citations or bibliography.

All those lie in the background; in the foreground are intriguing stories, composed in effervescent prose, designed to pique the imagination and stimulate further study, not only in libraries, but also in museums, which, as the illustrations indicate nicely, need to be on the reader's itinerary.