In this volume, Andre Wink analyzes the beginning of the process of momentous and long-term change that came with the Islamization of the regions that the Arabs called "al-Hind" - India and large parts of its Indianized hinterland. In the 7th to 11th centuries, the expansion of Islam had a largely commercial impact on al-Hind. In the peripheral states of the Indian subcontinent, fluid resources, intensive raiding and trading activity, as well as social and political fluidity and openness produced a dynamic impetus that was absent in the densely settled agricultural heartland. Shifts of power occurred, in combination with massive transfers of wealth across multiple centres along the periphery of al-Hind. These multiple centres mediated between the world of mobile wealth on the Islamic-Sino-Tibetan frontier (which extended into Southeast Asia) and the world of sedentary agriculture, epitomized by brahmanical temple Hinduism in and around Kanauj in the heartland.
The growth and development of a world economy in and around the Indian Ocean - with India at its centre and the Middle East and China as its two dynamic poles - was effected by continued economic, social and cultural integration into ever wider and more complex patterns under the aegis of Islam.