40 years in shipping gave me one unusual qualification as a historian: I had no academic orthodoxies to protect. When I began researching the history of maritime trade, I followed the sea lanes backwards into deep antiquity. Without exception, they converged on the Indian subcontinent. This was not the book I had intended to write. I must give credit to my editor, who gave an unknown author with a controversial approach, an opportunity. His first attempts to find peer reviewers encountered significant resistance. The argument that India sat at the centre of ancient world trade, not its periphery, was considered, to put it gently, inconvenient. What I found, and what I could not stop finding, is that placing India at the centre of world history does not simply revise one chapter. It cascades. Correct the starting assumption and you are forced to reconsider the origins of mathematics, medicine, philosophy, linguistics, religion. Each conclusion leads to another. I came to call these the collateral heresies. My three books explain the architecture of how they connect. If you work in a field where received wisdom is protected by institutional interest rather than evidence, you will recognise the pattern. The question is whether the evidence eventually wins.