Category: Commodities
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Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology (2022) by Chris Miller
In Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology (2022) historian Chris Miller delivers a comprehensive and urgent account of how the semiconductor has become the most critical – and contested – resource in the modern world. His central insight is that microchips are not merely the foundation of the digital economy but…
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Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World (2024) by Roger Crowley
Roger Crowley is a faithfully entertaining and informative popular historian. His latest effort – Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World (2024) – is not everything I hoped it would be, but it was certainly a worthwhile and enjoyable read. Spice chronicles the six-decade struggle between Spain and Portugal – and later Britain…
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Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (1985) by Sidney W. Mintz
Sidney W. Mintz’s Sweetness and Power (1985) is widely regarded as a classic in cultural history and economic anthropology, not because it tells an engaging and sweeping political story, but because it takes something as seemingly ordinary as sugar and uses it to illuminate the foundations of the modern world. Where other historians have traced…
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Salt: A World History (2002) by Mark Kurlansky
Mark Kurlansky’s “Salt: A World History” (2002) is a sweeping chronicle of how a single mineral – sodium chloride – has profoundly shaped human history. Like his earlier success, “Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World” (1998), Kurlansky uses a single commodity as a narrative lens through which to examine millennia of…
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Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World (1998) by Mark Kurlansky
I find books about commodities to be oddly satisfying. How have oil, sugar, salt and cotton changed our lives for better and worse? In “Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World” (1998), Mark Kurlansky combines maritime adventure, culinary anthropology, economic history, and environmental warning into a single compelling narrative about a once…
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The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession (2000) by Peter Bernstein
God bless Peter Bernstein, may he rest in peace. No one else could make arcane and seemingly dull topics (e.g. the history of gold or of statistics) so fascinating and accessible. In 2009, the year of Bernstein’s death, the celebrated academic economist Niall Ferguson published a bestseller, “The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of…
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Empire of Cotton: A Global History (2014) by Sven Beckert
At the heart of Harvard history professor Sven Beckert’s award-winning book, “Empire of Cotton: A Global History,” is a simple but compelling syllogism: the wealthy, capitalist world we Americans live in today was created by the Industrial Revolution; the Industrial Revolution was driven by massive productivity gains in textile manufacturing; cotton was the essential raw…
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The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (2014) by Edward Baptist
The year 2014 witnessed the publication of two weighty historical works on the seemingly mundane subject of cotton: Sven Beckert’s “Empire of Cotton” and Edward Baptist’s “The Half Has Never Been Told.” The former was better critically received, winning the prestigious Bancroft Prize and being named as a Pulitzer-Prize finalist; the latter arguably generated more…
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The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King (2012) by Rich Cohen
I loved this book. In fact, Rich Cohen’s “The Fish that Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King” just might make it into my non-fiction book Hall of Fame, an honored group of the best, most engaging pieces of history and biography that I’ve ever read. Why such high praise? Well,…
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