From simple barter to globalization; with a four-city tour, of course. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

In this well-written volume, Bernstein (financial theorist, historian; The Birth of Plenty, CH, Sep'04, 42-0409) leads readers on a fascinating journey through space and time from around 6000 BCE in ancient Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent to the January 1999 Third Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization. From the first evidence of trade, readers travel in ever-expanding horizons to Egypt, thence to Greece, the Mediterranean Basin, Arabia, India, China, and the east coast of Africa. Later attention turns to the west coast of Africa, the New World, and finally the entire globe. In the course of the journey, Bernstein describes the rise and fall of city-states, kingdoms, empires, and nations and how their fates are influenced if not determined by world trade patterns, command over key trade routes, mastery of technologies needed to take advantage of them and to produce tradable goods, and the development of institutional arrangements needed to expedite commerce. Throughout he emphasizes a common theme that trade through the ages has promoted the common welfare and is often achieved at a cost to particular individuals or groups of individuals. Globalization and resistance to trade is nothing new, the author finds. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels. E. L. Whalen formerly, Clarke College

A prominent twentieth-century European historian once asserted that an examination of merchants' ledger sheets could tell him more about history than a study of the lives and deeds of kings and politicians. In that spirit, Bernstein, a historian and financial theorist, has written a fascinating and surprisingly exciting survey of human exchange of goods and services from primitive barter in ancient Mesopotamia to today's global marketplace. Bernstein employs substantial data to illustrate the importance of trade in human progress. But this is no dreary, figure-laden account aimed at the green-eyeshade crowd. Rather, this is a saga of epic proportions that ranges across vast expanses of land and water. The heroes include anonymous traders who faced constant danger on the ancient Silk Road, intrepid mariners who faced treacherous weather and pirates, and, of course, rapacious capitalists and imperialists. Regarding contemporary globalization, Bernstein sees it as the logical consequence of centuries of market expansion, but he acknowledges that it must bring pain as well as prosperity. Timely and informative.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2008 Booklist

How trade has evolved to impact nations and cultures in ways that are always dynamic but not always predictable. Financial theorist and historian Bernstein (The Four Pillars of Investing, 2002, etc.) is equally at home plumbing the romantic dawn of trade or untwisting the mind-wracking complexity of modern international commerce. Evidence of trade's inevitable origin shows Stone Age nomads settling by an obsidian quarry, where no food could be found; they bartered the raw material for tools and weapons to a tribe with agricultural abundance. Confusion and controversy over trade began early. Romans, the author notes, believed that silk obtained from overland caravans came from one place, silk arriving by sea from another. (It all came from China.) While trade has always been based on the notion of fair exchange, temptations to stack the deck have been unceasing. For example, when 18th-century Britain found its craving for tea was exhausting the exchequer of silver, and China had little appetite for British goods, the infamous East India Company began to trade in opium. The narcotic, harvested in colonial India, created a social problem that still haunts East-West trade negotiations, Bernstein claims. At about the same time, British thinkers like Adam Smith and David Ricardo advanced the basic free-trade argument that persists unchanged. Politics always muddied the water, the author reminds us: The Boston Tea Party, celebrated as a patriotic act, was committed by tea merchants and their allies against a British open-market move that would have lowered the price for all colonial consumers. Bernstein doesn't believe that high tariffs (Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act) precipitated the Great Depression, as often claimed. The challenge for free traders, as he neatly outlines it, is convincing the inevitable damaged minority to take a smaller piece of a bigger pie. Or else--and he doesn't shrink from the word--"bribing" them with subsidies as the most efficient remedy. An excellent exposition of key factors in a perennial economic conundrum. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.