Magnus Marsden has unprecedented access to Afghan commercial networks that criss-cross China, the former Soviet Union, and many parts of South and West Asia. He’s led an international team of scholars that has spent much of the past four years visiting the Chinese international trading city of Yiwu. Maurizio Marinelli is a leading expert on the legacies of one of the most lucrative of Silk Road corridors of interactions: Italy-China relations. Diana Ibanez Tirado’s studies of Central Asian merchants in China has brought attention to the gendered aspects of mobility across the societies of the New Silk Road. James McMurray and Tang Man are addressing what China’s most recent step to the West means for the region’s ethnic groups and trading communities through innovative studies of mobile Uyghurs and Qinghai’s carpet traders.