A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World
William Bernstein
Atlantic Books £9.99, 464 pages
ISBN 9781843548034
The great Scottish economist Adam Smith noted that, of all the Earth’s creatures, it is only humans that are endowed with ‘a propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another’. In A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World, published in paperback in May, William Bernstein gives an engrossing account of this propensity, starting in ancient Sumer and ending in modern Seattle.
For as long as resources have been unevenly distributed, people have found the need to trade with each other. The Sumerians, for example, had fertile land, but few trees and no metals, so they traded their excess barley for copper. Copper was handy for making maces to bash raiders over the head with – local herders having taken to raiding the farmers’ grain stores. And there we have the other human propensity: the propensity for violence.
Over the centuries, goods were conveyed over ever greater distances – sometimes by camel, sometimes by ship – and violence advanced from scuffles with herders into a full-blown state-sanctioned activity. Privateers were given the blessing of their kings and queens to rob the merchant fleets of opposing nations. In the bad old days of commerce, when they said ‘heads will roll’, they meant it literally. Trade was a bloody enterprise. Even the great explorers such as Francis Drake, Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama were little more than violent thugs.
When da Gama set sail from Portugal – in the hope of using the route discovered by Bartholomew Diaz to bring back spices from the East – his vessels weren’t exactly groaning with goods to barter. But that wasn’t a problem for the Iberian explorer; he had his own unique way of conducting commerce. He would wait for foreign vessels to approach his flotilla for a friendly exchange of greetings. Once they were within reach, his crew would grab a few hostages before beginning ‘trade negotiations’. Needless to say, da Gama often negotiated some pretty sweet deals.
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