A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World

Features

• Cover Type: Hard Cover with 494 pages
• Published by: Atlantic Monthly Press April 11, 2008
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0871139790
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0871139795
• Book Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.4 x 1.6 inches
• Weighs: 1.7 pounds

Product Review
"Entertaining and greatly enlightening . . . Mr. Bernstein is a fine writer and knows how to tell a great story well . . . A Splendid Exchange is a splendid book." -- John Steele Gordon, The New York Times

"Excellent . . . Bernstein is equally at home plumbing the romantic dawn of trade or untwisting the mind-wracking complexity of modern international commerce." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Superb . . . [A] significant contribution . . . A Splendid Exchange is a work of which Adam Smith and Max Weber would have approved." -- Paul Kennedy, Foreign Affairs

"Timely and informative . . . Fascinating and surprisingly exciting . . . A saga of epic proportions." -- Booklist

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 amazing 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.

Reader Reviews
I loved this book when I read it in manuscript form, and I loved it even more when I read the beautiful published version, well-edited and laced with explanatory maps and lovely illustrations. Begin with the long sweep of world trading history;add its remarkable relevance to the global issues in the headlines today; revel in the plethora of entertaining anecdotes of personalities and events, large and small; then mix with a graceful writing style that turns an educational treatise into a suspenseful page-turner. Result: a book as good as--if not better than--any other book you'll read in 2008. John C. Bogle