RALEIGH – If you’re looking for an informative, entertaining history of world trade – and I can’t imagine anyone who wouldn’t be – then financial theorist William Bernstein has written just the book you need.
A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World was for me a serendipitous find. While I’ve read a number of works on narrower, related subjects, I’ve never seen anyone pull together a comprehensive trade history that spans the globe, spans the timeline, and discusses the economic, cultural, religious, political, and military implications of the universal impulse to truck and barter. I wouldn’t have run across A Splendid Exchange either if the Flame and I hadn’t been at the bookstore together one recent evening.
As usual, after entering we split up to check our respective sections for new offerings. She visited the magazine rack and the new-books table. I made a beeline for the philosophy section that just happens to be next to the comic books. Yeah, it was all about philosophy.
Anyway, when we reconnected, I had a couple of, uh, philosophical animations to offer. The Flame had A Splendid Exchange under her arm. I got the better end of the deal.
Throughout history, Bernstein writes, human beings have journeyed far and braved much for the sake of the new, the rare, and the luxurious. Until relatively recently in human history, few of the necessities of life – food, fodder, basic clothing, or timber – were the subject of long-distance trade. The transport cost and spoilage rate never allowed it.
The goods that inspired Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Phoenicians, Persians, Indians, Greeks, Jews, Arabs, and other travelers to develop the world’s main trade routes were small, dense, and highly valued – such as incense, precious metals, jewels, and spices. Later, ambitious seafarers developed the technology to trade other goods in bulk along the main waterways of world commerce: the Mediterranean, the monsoon winds of the Indian Ocean, major rivers, and the key straits of Gibraltar, the Bosporus (Black Sea), Hormuz (Persian Gulf), Bab el Mandeb (Red Sea) and Malacca (linking the Indian & Pacific oceans via the Spice Islands). Their ships frequented these routes filled with the likes of grain, textiles, pepper, tea, coffee, sugar, and slaves – primarily from Slavic Europe at first (hence the term), later from Africa.
Bernstein is at his strongest when he’s describing these developments with humor, evocative images, informative maps, and revealing statistics. He’s at his worst, I’m afraid, when seeking to draw out larger economic and political lessons. I don’t just mean the gratuitous swipes at modern-day politicians – they’re rare. I mean Bernstein’s tendency to fall for some of the now-outdated conspiracy theories surrounding key events in commercial history.
For example, he portrays the Fourth Crusade as essentially a plot by the wily Venetians to destroy their commercial rivals in Constantinople. Modern scholarship has pretty much eviscerated this explanation of the events of that foolhardy and destruction military excursion, in which Christian Europeans succeeded in fatally weakening the only major power standing between them and Turkish invasion, the Byzantine Empire. The result? Repeated Turkish invasions of Europe, of course. It was a major league screw-up, not a dastardly plot.
Another example is Bernstein’s treatment of the Boston Tea Party and the American colonists’ revolt against what they perceived to be unjust treatment by the British Empire. He repeats the usual twaddle about how British policy on tea had actually turned in favor of colonial consumers by the early 1770s, only to be thwarted by American tea smugglers and their propagandists who feared being undercut by lower-cost tea from the East India Company.
Again, it is usually a mistake for modern writers to assume that they are better judges of events than the people actually involved in them centuries before. In this case, the Americans knew exactly what they were doing – the British were, indeed, trying to undercut competitors temporarily by selling EIC tea at a steep discount, but it still included the hated tax on tea. British officials were trying to create a source of revenue for their colonial governors independent of elected colonial legislatures. The American colonists were properly having none of that.
If you set aside the (very) occasional lapses and editorials, A Splendid Exchange remains a fascinating and invaluable account of the origins of world commerce, the economics of imperialism, and the case for free trade. My copy is dog-eared with passages I’ll be returning to again and again. And all for just $17 in paperback. What a splendid exchange!
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation