Inner Asian Muslim Merchants at the Closure of the Silk Routes in the Seventeenth Century

The ‘decline’ of the overland Silk Roads is commonly considered to have taken place in the seventeenth century and to have gone hand-in-hand with the rise of the maritime trading routes.  However, it may be more accurate to speak of a change rather than a decline in overland trading patterns – traders did not cease to transport goods overland, but evolving political and social circumstances encouraged trade to become ‘intracontinental’ rather than transcontinental at this time.