Trade Book Reviews

Unrefined: How Capitalism Reinvented Sugar is a deeply researched book, exploring every avenue of the history of sugar. It is a book that historians, academics, and scholars alike will appreciate, as it does...

In The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World, Virginia Postrel expertly demonstrates how the history of textiles is the story of human progress. Although textiles have shaped society...

Written in engaging language, Smoke and Ashes is a scholarly follow-up to the author’s famous Ibis trilogy, a collection of fiction that uses the opium trade as its backdrop. In Smoke and Ashes, the author...

Centered around the story of the Sassoons, a Jewish family in Ottoman Baghdad that spanned two continents, this book is not only a family story but also a story of global trade and...

While granulated sugar was produced in India as early as the 6th century BCE, its usage for a long time remained limited to royalty or ceremonial purposes...

Jonathan Barth argues that England expanded its empire overseas throughout the 1600s in order to collect precious metals and wealth. Barth’s thesis is that colonists tolerated...

Over the last 20 years, there has been quite a boom in the publication of books about the Silk Road. The Silk Road would more accurately be referred to as the plural "Silk Roads," since it was a network of roads...

Before he passed away in 2020, David Ringrose was Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, San Diego. He was an expert on the history of Spain while also having an interest in world...

This book on trade and commerce in antiquity is a blend of papers that originated from a conference at the University of St Andrews on 11 and 12 July 1995. Additional contributions were also made by several scholars...