Product Description

For anyone who loved Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel comes this vividly written, brilliantly original history of trade, the first for a generation.Few historical enquiries tell us as much about the world we live in today as the search for the origins of world trade. As Adam Smith observed, man has an intrinsic 'propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another.' From the dawn of recorded history there has been vigorous long-distance commerce. Archaeologists have even found evidence of the prehistoric conveyance over long distances of strategic materials such as obsidian and stone tools. To demonstrate how profoundly trade influences our lives try to imagine Italian cuisine without the tomato, or a cafe anywhere in the world beyond coffee's birthplace in Yemen."A Splendid Exchange" sets out to establish just what drove early man to trade and to examine its profound influence on the world we know today. William Bernstein goes on to suggest that an analysis of one of the globe's most ancient forms of communication might teach us about how to avoid seemingly new anxieties about globalisation and the flattening of the world. "A Splendid Exchange" challenges assumptions on both sides of the great ideological divide over free trade.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #208736 in Books
• Published on: 2008-07-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 400 pages

Review
A timely and readable reminder that the desire to trade is not only one of the oldest human instincts but also the cause of many of the most important developments in our shared history. --The Economist

Review
A highly entertaining read. Bernstein's enthusiasm for his subject and impressive organisation of a wealth of material enable him to plot with pace and verve a largely chronological account of man's trading history.

From the Publisher
SHORTLISTED FOR THE FINANCIAL TIMES / GOLDMAN SACHS BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2008

Customer Reviews

Trade: A History
The book is a fine primer in trade and the ideas of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and more recent economists, such as Paul Samuelson.

The entertaining and lively writing style of the author should not obscure the underlying strength of the book which rests on its analytical rigour and the way in which the author weaves in the theoretical and the practical.

The book is a timely reminder of the benefits accrued by trade in an era in which globalisation gets a bad press. People tend to focus on the undesirable effects such as the threat to the environment by the phenomenal growth of Chinese manufacturing exports, the outsourcing by corporations and the re-emergence of inflation as oil and food prices soar. At the same time they underplay the benefits such as the boost to Western living standards from inexpensive Chinese goods and the lifting of literally hundreds of millions of Asians above poverty level.

We follow the author as he unfolds his story to show how trade evolved and shaped the world. The story begins with Sumerian farmers in the third millenium BC who bartered grain surpluses generated in the Mesopotamian fertile crescent for copper obtained from Sinai several hundred miles to the West to make weapons to repel nomadic raiders.

The author discusses the Peloponessian war between Athens and Sparta to highlight the wider point about the importance and vulnerability of sea-lanes.

The story continues with the rise and fall of Venice and Genoa, the devastation caused by the Black Death, the Portuguese-led age of discovery, the establishment of the Dutch and British East India trading companies, the golden period of the late 19th century in which trade flourished under the British empire and the 20th century's descent into protectionism.

The author emphasizes the role of technology in promoting trade, especially the advent of steam and refrigeration.

Finally the author articulates the fringe benefits derived from trade such as exchanges of art, science and ideas and in promoting understanding among peoples in different lands.

More Sustenance for Addicts of Economic History
This is, quite simply, a superb book, combining the virtues of Findlay and O'Rourke's Power And Plenty (my top book of 2008) and Landes's Prometheus Unbound, and better in many ways than Ferguson's The Ascent Of Money and Maddison's Contours Of The World Economy, and unlike the latter manages to steer clear of significant errors (on p155 he puts Aceh in India, not Indonesia, and on p216 he manages to render "Cyprus" as "Cypress").

Its subject matter crisscrosses all of the aforementioned works, with some pretty well inevitable overlap, even down to a quote from Jan Pieterzoon Coen - "We cannot carry on trade without war, nor war with out trade" - also used by Findlay and O'Rourke. But whilst Bernstein cannot avoid the viability of the central thesis of Power And Plenty - that trade and might are irrevocably conjoined - the emphasis is less on the martial than on the ineluctable urge, in Bernstein's thesis, of human beings to treat with each other in the exchange of goods or their proxy, money.

Reaching back initially to the fourth millennium BCE, Bernstein's story strictly speaking begins around 2500 BCE with the first known use of silver as a means of exchange in Sumeria (see also Ferguson's book and Cynthia Stokes Brown's Big History) and traces the history of Trade thenceforward through numerous nations and empires.

En route he throws in some enlightening asides. He speculates that the tendency of the channel between the Great Bitter Lake and the Gulf of Suez to occasionally dry up was the origin of the story of the Israelites' escape across the Red Sea. He tells us that Aden's name derives from the Arabic for Eden. And he reveals that, like the Christians, the Muslims were not above adopting existing traditions, such as the hajj.

Perhaps one of the highlights of the book is his exposé of the story of how the great plague was able to propagate, with the aid of trade. Something my old history teacher never told me was that the bacillus's victim of choice was a ground rodent called the tarabagan. The black rat, commensal with (living alongside) tarabagan and humans, acted as a bridge between the two courtesy of the vector, the flea, and all of those unfortunates were likely to fall victim to the bacillus. The fleas, which took longer to die than their sources of nutrition, would also use horses and camels as "hotels" after the rats had died, but were also likely to find sustenance in other creatures: Bernstein reports accounts of the ground littered with plague-infected birds.

Later he explains in detail the provenance of the Spanish dollar, or piece of eight, which was so unwieldy that it was often divided into its eight parts, hence the origin of the US quarter as "two bits". The Spanish dollar was legal tender in the United States until 1857. He also covers the origins of the coffee trade (a subject close to my heart - plenty was imbibed as I read), the reason why cotton is so widespread globally (because of its buoyancy and saline tolerance), and how, in the 17thC, the East India Company effectively invented the fashion industry, and product placement, by gifting wardrobes of cotton-based product to the most influential stars of the day, the royal family.

To finish, Bernstein warns of the dangers of a repeat of such excrescences as the Smoot-Hawley act, admits nevertheless that the benefits of global trade are not as clear cut as some would have us believe, but also contends that, on balance, the world is maybe a better, and more completely known, place for it.

World Trade
In addition to the wide range covered by this book, as reviewed clearly elsewhere, I found that it gives a new perspective of world history and how considerations of trade affected historical events to an extent that I had not realized. I have learnt a great deal from this clearly written account that I have greatly enjoyed reading.