A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World

"This was fascinating. We had read several books by Roger Crowley, who writes about the Mediterranean in the Renaissance period, more or less. Inevitably you’re talking about trade. We’ve looked at trade in various periods of time: under the Romans, under the Ottoman Empire, and so forth. I thought it’d be great to have another big history book, an overarching look at trade. And I came across this book and I thought, ‘this would be lovely!’ This is a big history done incredibly well. It covers the history of trade from 3000 BCE to 2000 CE. He traces patterns and does not drown you in factoids, or minutiae. It’s beautifully done. By the time that you finish, you really do have a big picture. The fascinating thing about the patterns is that they don’t change. He says it’s almost as though humans are hardwired to trade. We have done it naturally from the very beginning. How we go about it is virtually the same. No matter what time period, the problems that you encounter in trade are virtually the same, and the way that you solve those problems is virtually the same. It starts with two groups of people. One of them has lots of grain, and the other has lots of metals. You could go and conquer the other guy, or you could just trade. So lesson number one is that it’s better to trade with your neighbor than to annihilate them. However, in the process of doing that, you start to want to do more trading. And that means trade routes. And that means expanding, which means that inevitably you run into someone else. You may or may not fight, you may just trade or, probably, you do a little bit of both. As you work that out, there is an inevitability to trading, and an inevitability to the conflict that goes along with it. It’s just fascinating. It’s full of amazing things, like the earliest peoples exploring the Mediterranean. They knew that the winds blew really hard at certain times of year, and so they would just head out into the wind and let it slingshot them to wherever it took them. I thought, ‘that’s either totally crazy, or incredibly clever!’ Some people never came back, and others would come back with all kinds of things. That’s his other theme, that trade rewards risk-taking and ingenuity. Both risk-taking and ingenuity have, in their own ways, fuelled society to move up, to do things it wouldn’t have done otherwise, to try things out or invent things. So trade becomes really foundational to all of civilization. One of the things that you learn in history is that the Egyptians traded. What Bernstein does is to say, ‘this is why it’s important. This is what it did for Egyptian society. This is how it changed them. This is what they then contributed to all the people that came and traded in Alexandria’ and so on. One of the things that you need to learn reading history is that historians write long books. Almost all the history books are going to be long books, it’s rare that you don’t have one. The thing that I tell the group is, ‘before you look at a big book and freak out, look and see whether it actually is. Because you’re going to have pages and pages of footnotes and so forth. And you’ll often find that it’s not nearly as long as you think.’ The other part of it is the readability. This is wonderfully readable, partly because, again, with the big history, he focuses on these patterns and keeps repeating them. That makes it go really quickly. So you have these fascinating stories that reinforce the pattern. And the pattern is what ties the book together."