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Many structural features of the early modern economy governed the working practices of the book trade. Diversity and interconnectedness marked the broader economic structure of publication and bookselling, of capitalization, productive capacity, of supplies of paper and other materials, of demand, of distribution and of trade regulation. The history of publication and its patronage ultimately begins and ends with the resources of the land and its population as a whole and, deriving from this, the wealth of particular individuals. Beyond these basic economic factors, the responses of the different crafts to the changes in economic conditions and to the changing profiles of the market were also affected by the cultural, religious and political cast of the practitioners themselves. Publishing was driven by two economic incentives during this 140-year period: first, by the obvious possibility of immediate returns on work in hand, and second (and increasingly by the late seventeenth century), by investment opportunity. Crucial in both cases was the source of the capital to set up the business and to sustain it, and added to the early scarcity of venture funds, the difficulties in raising and managing credit heightened the importance of cash flow and steady turn-over. Even where publication can be considered as a form of speculation, the rate of sale of the products remained a primary determinant in the economic development of book and allied trades. Shared operations also became the most obvious form of risk limitation, especially where profitability was threatened by excess productive capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the fourteenth century, South Asia became a region of travel and transport connecting Central Asia and the Indian Ocean. This redefined the location of all its agrarian territories. In the wake of the Mongols, overland corridors of routine communication extended from the Silk Road to Kanya Kumari and branched out to seaports along the way. Connections among distant parts of Eurasia became numerous and routine. New technology, ideas, habits, languages, people and needs came into farming communities. New elements entered local cuisine. People produced new powers of command, accumulation, and control, focused on strategic urban sites in agrarian space. By 1600, ships sailed between China, Gujarat, Europe, and America. Horses trotted across the land between Tajikistan and Egypt, Moscow and Madurai. Camels caravaned between Syria and Tibet, Ajmer, and Agra. A long expansion in world connections occurred during centuries when a visible increase in farming intensity was also reshaping agrarian South Asia. In the dry, interior uplands, warriors built late-medieval dynasties, on land formerly held by pastoralists and nomads; and sultans established a new political culture, whose hegemony would last to the nineteenth century. Slow but decisive change during late-medieval centuries laid the basis formore dramatic trends after 1500, when agricultural expansion accelerated along with the mobility and the local agrarian power of warriors and merchants. Regional formations of agrarian territory came into being, sewn together by urban networks, during a distinctively early modern period of agrarian history, whose patterns of social power, agricultural expansion, and cultural change embrace the empires of Akbar and the East India Company. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]