New Delhi, June 21 -- Some books should not be reviewed, just read and savoured. Akshay Chavan has written exactly such a book in The Wealth Networks, which leaves this reviewer in something of a bind. The reason becomes clear with the first sentence on the very first page: "We begin our journey on the cracked black soil of the Western Deccan, where each step feels like walking on cooled lava, dark, dense, and full of memory." This is history writing as immersive travel, and with it Chavan carries the reader without pause into Sopara, the land of cotton, and the first of the wealth networks the book explores.

He isn't telling us anything entirely new, because Sven Beckert's 2014 classic Empire of Cotton already gave us a detailed global ...