|
A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World | 
 enlarge | Author: William J. Bernstein
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
Category: Book
List Price: $30.00
Buy New: $18.46
You Save: $11.54 (38%)
New (37) Used (8) from $18.46
Avg. Customer Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 239
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 494
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.7
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.4 x 1.6
ISBN: 0871139790
Dewey Decimal Number: 382.09
EAN: 9780871139795
ASIN: 0871139790
Publication Date: April 11, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand new item. Over 3.5 million customers served. Order now. Selling online since 1995. Order with confidence. Code: B20080721215920T
|
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Adam Smith wrote that man has an intrinsic “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.” But how did trade evolve to the point where we don’t think twice about biting into an apple from the other side of the world? In this sweeping narrative history of world trade, William J. Bernstein tells the extraordinary story of global commerce from its prehistoric origins to the myriad controversies surrounding it today. He transports readers from ancient sailing ships that brought the silk trade from China to Rome in the second century to the rise and fall of the Portuguese monopoly in spices in the sixteenth; from the American trade battles of the early twentieth century to the modern era of televisions from Taiwan, lettuce from Mexico, and T-shirts from China. Lively, authoritative, and astonishing in scope, A Splendid Exchange is a riveting narrative that views trade and globalization not in political terms, but rather as an evolutionary process as old as war and religion--a historical constant--that will continue to foster the growth of intellectual capital, shrink the world, and propel the trajectory of the human species.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews...
 A Disappointing letdown July 18, 2008
4 out of 8 found this review helpful
Unfortunately, this is not a serious work of history, and is full of contradictions of 'facts' in addition to mistakes. The list of references is impressively long, but often irrelevant. There were many passages in which the author seemed to have suspended incredulity of his references. The subtitle "How Trade Shaped the World", while perhaps not chosen by the author, leads the reader to believe that the explanation will be found in the book. However, those expectations were dashed. There are major international trade goods that are not even mentioned, nor is there any attention given to the development of currencies and the impact on the barter system of trade. It also becomes apparent that global trade and transportation are joined at the hip, yet the author doesn't seem to understand how sails and ships operate, contradicting himself regarding the merits, and thus trade advantages of owners of square-rigged ships versus dhows (relating to the ability to sail into the wind, very important for 2,000 years of sailing). Then there are the nitpicking things that a good editor should have caught, like rounding the Cape of Good Hope and sailing westward to the Spice Islands.
Great theme, but not well executed.
 I like this fact filled book on the origins of trade, its influence on people/societies July 12, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
This possibly is one of the best books i read on influence of trade on society as a whole. This book traces trade back to thousands of years BC. What is so revealing is how smart decisions and dumb decisions by leaders/societies have such profound impact. What we see in today's world have lots of parallels to older times . This is very useful book and i recommend this to any one interested in business
Free Trade Polemics: Nothing New on the Horizon June 30, 2008
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
William Bernstein convincingly shows that trade is inseparable from human nature and has played a pivotal role in the history of mankind (pp. 15, 18, 89). Any effort to stifle trade is doomed to failure in the long run, to do so would invite smuggling, retaliation, and eventually a real war (pp. 261-65, 356, 367, 376).
Bernstein begins his history of trade around 3000 B.C.E. in Sumer in what is today Iraq and ends with the contemporary ambivalence about globalization. Climate, geography, natural resources, germs, openness to outside influences, technological advances, economically efficient institutions, political stability, and consumer preferences have all played a role in influencing trade (pp. 10-11, 34, 41-42, 53, 75-79, 86, 96-99, 103, 106-09, 129-51, 155-57, 167, 170-73, 187, 189-95, 199, 208, 215, 221-26, 232, 240, 243, 248, 254, 263, 270, 278, 286-87, 294, 307-12, 319-37, 356, 375-83).
Bernstein notes that in the absence of any authority beyond the tribe, entrepreneurs will prefer to raid instead of either trading or protecting trade (p. 67). Few things excite the envy and belligerence of the ruling elites of a nation as much as wealth derived from commerce (pp. 43-53, 90, 103-06, 116-29, 174-97, 214, 238-40, 284, 314, 354, 376).
Bernstein also shows with much conviction that the controversy about a positive trade balance has been around since the Antiquity (pp. 41-42, 258, 264, 279, 287, 290). Prominent Roman citizens such as Pliny the Elder and Seneca were complaining in the 1st century C.E. that Romans were wasting precious metal on fleeting luxuries such as silk and pepper imported from China and India.
The perception that one nation's gain comes only at the expense of another pleads for both a positive trade balance and mercantilism. Ideally, a nation should import raw materials and export finished manufactured products, which has a positive impact on employment. Bernstein correctly points out that nations grow wealthy mainly by improving their industrial and agricultural productivity. A nation's true wealth is also defined by how much it consumes (p. 258).
Like Erik Reinert, Bernstein emphasizes that most industrial countries first industrialize behind a protectionist wall and are then slowly and systematically integrated economically with nations at the same level of development. The United States followed the example of England to industrialize behind such a wall for about 150 years based on Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (pp. 319-20, 349-51, 372-75).
Bernstein also reminds his audience that anti-globalization rallies are nothing new (pp. 199, 256-59, 270, 283, 302-05). Think for example about the dumping of tea into Boston harbor on December 16, 1773, under the pretext of "no taxation without representation." In reality, local smugglers and tea merchants feared the competition of the English East India Company that could import tea directly from Asia into America for the first time based on the Tea Act of May 1773. These local players couched their arguments in the predictable protectionist language of national interest. Protectionism benefits the economic agents who predominantly own a relatively scarce resource, say, labor, land, or capital, and harms those who own a relatively abundant one (p. 342).
Unsurprisingly, the losers of the Boston Tea Party were the end consumers who ended up paying more for their tea in the absence of more robust competition (pp. 241-43). Protectionist trade legislation usually strikes hardest at the weak and powerless (p. 307).
In addition, Bernstein cogently demonstrates that the Western powers, leveraging their superior military and maritime technologies, gave up on their armed monopolistic ways and embraced free trade, regardless of the wants and needs of non-western powers such as India and China (pp. 198-240, 294-95). The elites of these two countries have not forgotten how badly western-inspired free trade hurt their countries in the preceding centuries (pp. 297-300, 363, 383-84). To be fair, other factors unrelated to western trade policy also played a major role in the troubles of both nations (pp. 75, 99-103, 285, 300).
Although free trade benefited western powers in their interactions with one another, it also produced losers before WWI. Bernstein correctly points out that free trade offers modest benefits for most of the population while greatly harming small groups in specific industries and occupations (p. 358).
Before WWI, decreasing shipping costs led not only to the global convergence of commodity prices, but also to the leveling out of wages (labor), rents (land), and interest rates (capital) (pp. 338-42). Trade losers, who could not be expected to passively accept the situation, turned the tide against free trade between the 1880s C.E. and the middle of the 20th century C.E. (pp. 312-15, 337, 343-49). However, that increased protectionism did not stop the growth in international commerce until WWI (p. 349). The U.S. learned the hard way that protectionism and isolationism invite retaliation and can start a real war (p. 356).
The U.S. has spearheaded globalization through an American-dominated system, based on Pax Americana, since the end of WWII (pp. 356, 376). Contemporary existence is supported by ever-rising trade flows (p. 18). Bernstein reminds his audience that free trade and democracy have been hand in hand in most developed countries since that time (p. 361). However, agriculture and textiles, two economic heavy-weights, remain largely protected from foreign competition around the world for a variety of reasons (pp. 356-65, 376). Furthermore, resistance to free trade has increased in the U.S. since 1945 C.E. because some farmers, workers, and capitalists have more to fear from foreign competition than in the past (p. 357). Not treating these losers fairly and compassionately undermines the consensus needed to sustain free trade (pp. 377-83).
Finally, Bernstein draws the attention of his readers to the enduring importance of what he calls the maritime choke points such as the straits at Malacca, Hormuz, and Bab el Mandeb, on top of the two man-made Suez and Panama Canals. Guaranteeing freedom of the seas is a vital U.S. interest since about 80% of world commerce is carried on ships (pp. 367-71). Today's greatest threat to free trade comes from terrorism based in the world's failed states (p. 376).
To summarize, Bernstein compellingly demonstrates that for all its shortcomings, free trade is the worst form of trading except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time to paraphrase Winston Churchill (pp. 384-85).
 Not a Historian's Book June 18, 2008
7 out of 13 found this review helpful
Unlike Mr. Saperstein I find the book somewhat right of center. I became very uneasy when reading in the introduction, "Few readers found the books basic premise--that the recent wealth of the modern world was underpinned by the development of property rights, rule of law, capital market mechanisms, and scientific rationalism -at all controversial. The failure of the communist experiment and the current wealth and poverty of individual nations testify to the power of these critical institutions.
This book enjoys no such ideological shelter."
I thought this was indeed a shelter for the book and that I was going to read the history of the world as trade. I felt justified in my assumption when facile connections were drawn beteen events millenia apart, ancient and contemporary--one can always find similarities between distant things without proving anything. The implication that business lies at the basis of world history is too simplistic, despite the interesting anecdotal (and abbreviated) information, which, by the way, a historian largely knew already. Little things get to me: on p. 22 "Europe's first HOMO SAPIENS, probably fresh from wiping out their Neanderthal rivals....." Cro-magnon and Neandertal existed side by side for tens of thousands of years and there was no "wiping out" as the author indicates. On p. 23, I don't like reference to "the Yucatan," rather than "Yucatan." It is not the Yucatan any more than it is THE Mexico. The style is occasionally limping and prolix, for example in the sentence, p. 29, "This abundance mandated a shift toward the use of silver as a medium of exchange, or as we call it today, "money." His reference to Moses' "probably mythical crossing (p.37) reminds me of the old WORLDS IN COLLISION of Velikovsky mood several decades ago.
But what really got me was (p. 51) "Athens became the first of a long line of senescent Western empires to suffer the ignominious transformation from world power to open-air theme park, famous only for its arts, its architecture, its schools, and its past." What about its mathematics, its writing of history, its philosophy, its politics, its ethics, its literature, its drama cum religion (which provided a Dionysus for the later figure as Nietzsche would use him) That's not chopped liver. The power of Periclean Athens lasted long after the military collapse of the city-state. These are terrible things to say about a man who spent so much time relating so many good things. But I felt as if I might as well be reading H.G. Wells HISTORY OF THE WORLD.
Good but flawed June 6, 2008
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
This book consists of a series of snapshot descriptions of world-wide trade (international in modern terms, although nations in the modern sense did not exist in most of history) at various historical epochs from pre-history to the present. There is an extensive bibliography of secondary sources. The author is an economist, not a historian, and it shows: the economic discussion is excellent, but the history is often speculative in the poorly documented ancient period and contains embarrassing errors (for example, Lincoln did not run as an abolitionist in 1860). There is a cogently argued economic thesis that free trade is generally beneficial, but no unifying historical theme or thesis beyond that.
There are a number of curious slips: ancient dates are inconsistently referred to as "after Christ" (a translation of the Christian "A.D.") and "C.E." (common era, the term preferred by non-Christians and many modern historians). The author confuses east with west, both in the ancient Agean and in American exports.
This is a thoroughly enjoyable work of popular economics and economic history, with much interesting color and detail. It isn't as good as some of the reviews (including one in the Wall Street Journal) indicate, but for the non-expert it is well worth reading.
|
|
|
Powered by Associate-O-Matic
| |
