Apart from organizational matters, recent scholarship has also focused usefully on the routes and networks of premodern trade. The silk roads and other land routes have attracted attention, but the most prominent spaces featured in recent studies are maritime regions organized around sea and ocean basins. In light of Fernand Braudel's analysis of the Mediterranean, it is clear that many bodies of water, such as the Baltic Sea, the China seas, and the Indian Ocean basin, also served to integrate surrounding lands in premodern times. The most extensive studies of premodern trade in maritime regions are those of K. N. Chaudhuri, who portrayed the Indian Ocean basin as the commercial heart of Asia. For more than a millennium, from the rise of Islam to the establishment of British hegemony in India, Chaudhuri's Indian Ocean basin pulsated to the rhythms of commercial agriculture, industrial production, and maritime trade.