In this book two historians offer a lucid account of how trade connected and changed the world over the last few centuries. Avoiding the narrow interpretation of trade by economists and economic historians, the authors attempt to incorporate political, socio-cultural, and environmental implications into the main framework of their discussion. Since its first edition appeared in 1999, the book has been widely used by history teachers. The second (2006) and the third (2012) editions added new essays and increased the coverage of modern and contemporary periods. This latest edition consists of more than eighty short essays with introduction and epilogue. Essays are organized into seven chapters, each with a more specific introduction to give a theme and context. The chapter introductions allow readers to pick and choose the essays of interest and/or study the text as a whole.

In this review I concentrate on identifying the direction in which the authors try to move the historiography. As the title suggests, the book argues for the centrality of trade as an agent of change in global history. The suggestion that long-distance trade became important by the fifteenth century is not new, but to argue that the character of trade found in the early modern period persisted into the present and created the world is rare. In Trade and civilization in the Indian Ocean (1985), K. N. Chaudhuri characterized pre-industrial trade as demand-driven, in a way similar to this book's emphasis on consumption. But then he described the shift to industrial (and colonial) trade in the nineteenth century, in which the rhythm of mass production and its resource needs dominated, and the nature of trade became supply-driven. For this book's authors, in contrast, the themes of consumption changes and cultural interactions embodied in commodity trade are at the heart of the career of globalization down to today. In this sense they cleave to a continuity thesis. Modern international economic history textbooks typically deal with money and capital flows and migration, whereas works on economic globalization in the more recent period discuss the movement of information, technology, and management. In most cases, attention centres on supply-side changes. This book addresses these topics, but the main referent is always the commodity trade, and the dynamics it created – and creates – between production and consumption.

Justifications for this approach are found throughout the book. Not only drugs and violence feature as chapter titles (‘immoral trade’ is an integral part of the story), but political, socio-cultural, and environmental implications of trade are discussed under the heading of more usual subjects such as market conventions and institutions, and transport. In the authors’ words, ‘we must take into account moral economy – what people perceive to be just, and the cultural orientations that influence the value they assign to goods and labour – as well as market economy’ (p. 304, emphasis in original). The result is a wide-ranging search for evidence of interactions and conflicts between different cultures through the lens of trade history, which may well have had a deeper impact on global history than quantitatively spectacular changes caused by population growth and industrialization.

The chapters are organized in a loosely chronological manner, so that the emergence of modern markets and industrialization, and the changes they brought with them, are described in the latter part of the book. This generates tension with the continuity thesis in interesting ways. Coming from the author of The Great Divergence, emphasis on contingency (such as the discovery of resources or disasters) is not surprising. Keen attention is paid to colonialism, exploitation, and war-making, as well as to de-industrialization, though in relation to the broader theme of cultural negotiations and changes in social values. The authors suggest that the diffusion of technological and institutional innovations does not occur automatically. It occurs as a result of successful negotiations between different values. Thus the growth of world trade was a result not of convergence to the dominant culture but of multi-headed regional changes in diverse directions. The two authors specialize in China and Latin America respectively, so their coverage is complementary. As US-based global historians, they do their best to reach out to other regions, while holding to an integrated perspective.

I think that it is possible to go further. In this book the relative weight is heavily in favour of European-dominated long-distance trade (and territorial expansion). Non-European merchants and producers often appear as passive movers or the exploited. But if we go by the number of people and the size of the economy, non-European economies, especially Asian ones, ought to figure much more than this book allows. It is not clear how important Asian trade was relative to world trade before about 1800, but one-half to two-thirds of the world population, industrial production, and GDP was probably in Asia at the beginning of the nineteenth century. We also have a reasonably hard set of trade data to show how this Asian dominance was replaced by the Western one during the long nineteenth century. In the early modern period both China-centred trade in East and Southeast Asia and Indian Ocean trade spanned large regional areas, and Asian (especially Chinese and Indian) merchants engaging in regional trade influenced regional paths of development. The size of the population under the influence of each trading area was probably larger than that of Atlantic trade. Outside the European trading posts, Asian peoples who were actively engaged in local trade were loosely connected to, and affected by, European trade (an extreme but not exceptional example of this is the merchants of Tokugawa Japan). It is implausible to assume that the terms of cross-civilizational interactions – especially intra-Asian ones – were dominated by European agency. If we are to describe the growth of world trade – by which we mean all cross-cultural trade – we need to bring in much more fully local and regional trade carried out by Asian and other non-European merchants, as well as their political counterparts, and discuss the nature of the world that diverse trade networks created.

Asian and other non-European trading activities continued into the era of industrialization, even under colonial rule. A greater recognition of the influences of local and regional networks and their two-way relationships with Western-dominated long-distance trade would further enhance our understanding of the significance of the history of cultural interactions on a global scale. Furthermore, this would help explain the resurgence of Asia in the second half of the twentieth century, particularly as high-speed economic growth has derived from massive interactions between Western technology and institutions on the one hand and Asian languages and cultures on the other. Again, key intermediaries were often Asian merchants, who once again feature prominently in world trade, in the field of computers and automobiles, of course, but also in the ‘immoral trade’ of arms and endangered species.