The title is the least interesting thing about this book by Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik, professors of History at UC Irvine and two people who know how to tell fascinating stories. It is a wonderful collection of historical vignettes about the global trade that shaped our world; short stories that form brightly colored threads woven into an impressionistic and painfully realistic tapestry of our global economic system. The modern world we know and love emerges brightly in the foreground with its prospering advanced societies, abundant and varied foods, and self-congratulatory cultural myths about how we earned it with open markets and free trade. But in the darker background, formed by the same threads, are pictures of poverty, slavery, drug addiction, and desolation wrought by economic winners onto economic losers usually through government sponsored monopolies, force and intimidation.
The World that Trade Created is a world in which we have learned how to trade with strangers, a world powered as much by drugs, greed, force of arms and dumb luck as by wind, water, coal and oil. It is a world largely built by indentured servants and slaves: mainly native slaves in the silver, gold and copper mines of Central and South America and African slaves in cotton, sugar, rubber and coffee plantations around the globe. It is a world in which the majority of slave holders and slave traders were members of Christian churches; Dutch Calvinists, Portuguese and Spanish Catholics, as well as British and American Protestants, people and church leaders who successfully rationalized their religious beliefs to support a pernicious practice that made them wealthy.
It is a world in which “Marco Polo claimed that public safety and commercial honesty were far better maintained in China than in Europe; without Christianity as the basis for morals” ―a claim that undermined his credibility and didn’t win him any friends. Continue reading