This work evolved from a critique of the unitary notion of one South Asian diaspora. I felt that the existing literature, by laying too much emphasis on permanent migration and by concentrating almost exclusively on the study of Indian communities in a few selected countries, tended to ignore more widespread phenomena of circulation between South Asia and the rest of the world. I proposed to shift the focus of inquiry at least partly from the place of arrival or sojourn of the so-called migrants to their place of origin and to the circulation between the two locations. The rationale for this shift was that I felt that most circulating migrants kept close links with their home towns or villages and that their identities were defined much more in relation to these places of origin, to which they regularly returned, than in relation to the places where they happened to be sojourning. I thought it necessary, in order to understand the dynamics of this circulation, to descend to the level of particular regions and even localities within South Asia. More specifically, my focus of interest was the circulation of merchants and commercial employees. The choice of two particular localities in Sind was dictated first, by the exceptionally wideranging travel of their merchants and, second, by the discovery of a wealth of detailed empirical material available in official records, which partly compensated for the unavailability of private records, a major obstacle to the study of merchant communities.