A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World

“Globalization,” it turns out, was not one event or even a sequence of events; it is a process that has been slowly evolving for a very, very long time. The world did not abruptly become “flat” with the invention of the Internet, and commerce did not suddenly, at the end of the twentieth century, become dominated by large corporations with worldwid

In the early empire, a greedy person was commonly referred to as being “the first to take the fresh-bought pepper from the camel’s back.”37 The poet Persius wrote: The greedy merchants led by lucre, run To the parched Indies, and the rising sun; From thence hot Pepper, and rich Drugs they bear, Bart’ring for Spices, their Italian ware.

two deceptively simple notions anchor this book. First, trade is an irreducible and intrinsic human impulse, as primal as the needs for food, shelter, sexual intimacy, and companionship. Second, our urge to trade has profoundly affected the trajectory of the human species. Simply by allowing nations to concentrate on producing those things that the

The price of tin was about ten times that of copper, a ratio that held well into the early twentieth century. But where did tin come from? Brittany and Cornwall began producing tin well before 2000 BC, but no record of navigation beyond the Pillars of Hercules (the Strait of Gibraltar) exists until about 450 BC, when a Phoenician navigator, Himilco