Books as glossy as this are seldom as good as this. It is a sort of economic miracle in itself: fat, quarto-size, packed with illustrations, maps and plans, wide-margined, legibly typeset, efficiently proof-read, Hong Kong printed and priced under £25 hardback. It would almost be worth buying if it were a politician's memoirs or a cookery book. The difficulty is to explain that late mediaeval commercial history can be worth reading about at any price, even with the assurance that this is the distillation of a life's work by a much-admired master of the subject.

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