This chapter looks at two issues: one, the groups and people that made and managed the transport infrastructure; two, the commodities that travelled along these lines. While the first set of concerns tells us how roads were made and how the river transport infrastructure operated, the focus on the second informs us how these roads and rivers were used. Obviously, there were diverse usages of these communication lines, some of which we have seen earlier in relation to peripatetic trading groups; the thrust of the argument in this chapter is to look at the nature of networks – commodity spread, mercantile ties, sites of exchange such as melas and so on – to understand the relationship between means of communication and patterns of exchange. By doing so, this chapter aims to stimulate thinking about emerging spatial configurations, especially along trade networks, in terms of a more diverse and vibrant field of activity of which colonial necessities, which for a want of a better descriptive term can be called the ‘macro-networks’ of communication, were a part. This vivid field of activity has been characterized here as ‘nested networks’. The nexus of capital investment, prioritization of certain routes (as seen in Chapter 4) and interest in long-distance imperial commodities' trade obviously highlighted the primacy of macro-networks but they were both adapting to and changing the existing nature of trading networks.