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June 27 - July 11, 2021
Of all the plant and animal passengers on the second expedition, none had more immediate impact than the pig.
Few readers found the book’s basic premise—that the recent wealth of the modern world was underpinned by the development of property rights, rule of law, capital market mechanisms, and scientific rationalism—at all controversial.
In plainer English, the incentives and equal opportunity afforded by free trade simultaneously improve the overall welfare of mankind and increase socially corrosive disparities of wealth. Even if trade slightly improves the real income of those at the bottom, they will feel the pain of economic deprivation when they fix their gaze at the growing wealth of those above them.
Few stories from classical antiquity stir the modern soul as does that of the destruction of the Athenian expedition to Sicily during the Peloponnesian War. On the plains above and in the harbor below the eastern Sicilian port of Syracuse, the Spartan-led forces of that far-flung outpost of Greek civilization picked off soldier after Athenian soldier and ship after Athenian ship.
Thus the Greek farmer depended on trade not only to feed his family, but also to allow him enough excess income to afford the time and resources needed for participation in the assembly and in the basic local military unit, the hoplite formation.5
Camels do not store water in their humps, as is commonly supposed, but rather distribute it uniformly throughout their bodies. They are easily able to go days and, in exceptional circumstances, weeks, without water by drinking huge amounts—up to fifty gallons at a time. They conserve fluid through the remarkable ability of their kidneys to efficiently concentrate urine.
Only a few animals qualify on all counts. Goats and sheep were the first livestock to be domesticated, around ten thousand years ago, followed by chickens, pigs, cattle, and finally, camels. (The donkey, horse, and dog were domesticated primarily for their transport, hunting, and military usefulness, but often wound up in the food chain as well.)4
The ultimate configuration, the north Arabian saddle, has been in continuous use in the Middle East for the past two thousand years.
Although an exceptional animal and driver might cover as much as sixty miles per day, a more typical day’s span is approximately thirty miles.
Incense is the general term for frankincense, myrrh, and rarer exotic aromatics that have grown for millennia in Arabia Felix. The earliest Sabaean and Minaean inhabitants, as well as peoples across Bab el Mandeb in Somalia, pioneered its cultivation and export.
Amid such stenches, and where regular bathing in clean water and regular changes of clothes were reserved for only the wealthiest citizens, few substances were as prized as myrrh oil, easily applied as a body lotion and capable of hiding the rank smells of everyday life. Physicians used myrrh liberally in medicinals, and it was also the ancient world’s embalming fluid of choice. In addition, incense was the aroma of eros, as attested in this come-on from a well-known, wicked, and deadly biblical adulteress: I have decked my bed with coverings of tapestry, with carved works, with fine linen of
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Exactly how Mecca became a bustling commercial center is something of a mystery; it produced nothing of value, was not a great center of consumption or of government, and had little strategic worth.
The real reason for the early prominence of Mecca in pre-Islamic Arabia may lie in the Kaaba stone and the several nearby shrines to the other desert gods. Each year, the faithful made the pilgrimage, known as the hajj (which was only much later adopted by Islam), to venerate and circumambulate the Kaaba stone and black stone. The hajj in no small part contributed to Mecca’s wealth and power.
Unlike the Tin Islands of Herodotus, there really were Spice Islands. Cloves, the unopened flower bud of Syzygium aromaticum, a tall fir, until recently grew only in the volcanic soil of five tiny islands—Ternate, Tidore, Moti, Makian, and Bacan—in the north Moluccas, an island group in eastern Indonesia. Nutmeg and mace come from different parts of the fruit of Myristica fragrans, a tree that grew only on nine fly specks—the Bandas—in the southern part of the Moluccas.
The term “plague” itself causes much confusion. Almost certainly, none of the outbreaks recorded in ancient sources were the work of Yersinia pestis. Sumerian sources mention epidemics as far back as 2000 BC, and the first books of the Old Testament, written between 1000 and 500 BC, described divine retribution in the form of outbreaks among the populations of the Fertile Crescent. Modern translators fell on the word “plague” to describe these episodes, but the Bible and other ancient sources rarely gave enough clinical detail to identify the responsible bacteria or viruses.
Like many single-minded men, Columbus deluded himself at almost every turn. The feasibility of the westward route depended on its being short. Although the westward distance from Europe to Asia had of course never been directly measured, it could be estimated by subtracting the approximately known eastbound distance from the estimated circumference of the earth. For example, today we know that the eastbound distance from Lisbon to Malacca, as the crow flies, is approximately 7,000 miles. Since the earth’s circumference is 25,000 miles, it follows that the westbound distance (at least along the
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What drove Columbus on his journey into the great unknown over the western horizon? Was he really looking for new worlds, or “merely” a faster way to China, India, and Japan? Was he propelled by a hunger for gold and spices? Was he motivated by the desire for respectability that suffuses the personalities of those of great ability and ambition but humble birth? Or was he looking for souls to save? For hundreds of years scholars have debated the provenance and meaning of the documents and marginalia he left behind, and the truth will probably never be known.
In early 1492, the Spanish court informed Columbus that his mere presence in the kingdom was no longer welcome. Then, just before he disappeared over the horizon with his worldly belongings and donkey, a messenger commanded him to return. At the last minute, one of his staunchest supporters in Ferdinand’s retinue, Luis de Santangel, convinced the queen that funding the voyage west was a low-cost proposition and that it carried the possibility of enormous gain. Further, Santangel offered to underwrite the voyage himself. It appears that Isabella did indeed proffer her jewels as collateral, but
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Columbus, Santangel, and Isabella had all been right, but for all the wrong reasons. Contrariwise, the scholarly advisers to the crowns of Portugal, England, France, and Spain were far better informed than Columbus about geography, and must have been astounded when Columbus returned after his momentous first voyage from “the Indies.”23 None could imagine that a vast new world, whose outlines had been dimly and fleetingly perceived by Norse explorers, and perhaps by others from Europe and Asia centuries before, now lay within their grasp.
In Europe, peaceful trade was the province of rich and powerful nations such as Spain and the Netherlands, who had a vested interest in keeping the seas free from piracy. Like many poor, weak, backward states, Britain in the late sixteenth century could not afford the luxury of permitting foreign merchantmen to sail undisturbed; there was simply too much profit in plunder. The majestic, liberal, and free-trading British Empire was more than two centuries in the future; Tudor England was a nation of bankrupt monarchs, crown monopolies distributed to court favorites, and royal letters of marque
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with a sly, “Voilà votre religion.”33) During the more than two centuries that the Tokugawas locked Japan away from the outside world, Deshima served as its sole window to the West. Initially, the Dutch at Deshima received only the basics, “provisions and prostitutes,” but before long, curiosity got the better of the Japanese. The lure of Western culture and technological knowledge, or “Dutch learning,” would help open Japan long before the appearance of Perry’s black ships in 1854.34
The signing of the Treaty of Münster in 1648, which ended the Eighty Years’ War between the Dutch and the Spanish and granted the Netherlands its independence, unleashed the full potential of Dutch trading capacity, which before then had been restrained by the threat of Spanish seizure and blockade.
As long as only Yemenis grew the berries, coffee remained scarce and expensive. In the first decades of the eighteenth century, an increasing number of European traders converged on Yemen, first at Mocha, then at the dusty highland town of Beit-el-Fakih in the growing district north of the port. Agents of the VOC and EIC were joined by representatives of French, Flemish, and German trading companies, and an even larger number of Muslim merchants.
Of all the islands, Barbados held the firmest grip on the British imagination. Its fertile soil yielded cane in abundance, and its cool, rolling uplands reminded homesick settlers of England. One early settler, Richard Ligon, rapturously described his first visit:
Few subjects carry the emotional freight of the slave trade, and until very recently most of the approximations of its volume, nationality, and mortality reflected the ideological needs of the estimators more than objective reality. Only after 1950 did the subject become an object of serious historical inquiry, as scholars such as Philip Curtin and David Eltis strove to obtain a meaningful and accurate census of the trade. The picture their data draw is stunning.81 Between 1519 and the end of the slave trade in the late 1860s, 9.5 million African slaves arrived in the New World; Figure 10-2
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The transatlantic commerce of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries—coffee, cotton, sugar, rum, and tobacco
from the New World to Europe; manufactured goods, particularly textiles, from Europe to Africa; and slaves from Africa to the New World—has been described as the “triangular trade pattern” and taught to most schoolchildren. This oversimplified picture neglects the real-world reality of shorter hauls. An English ship might carry indigo from Jamaica to Philadelphia, then corn from there to London, then wool cloth from there to Le Havre, then French silks to Africa’s slave coast, and so on.
both scholarship and journalism. Like many bright young merchants of his day, he adopted the free-trade ideology espoused by Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations. In 1827 Matheson founded the first English-language newspaper in China, the Canton Register, a broadsheet that printed local shipping news, tabulated opium prices, and editorialized against the tyranny of the EIC. That same year, after the death of his original partner, a Spaniard, Xavier Yrissari, he informed his Chinese customers that henceforth the overall management of the business would be undertaken by William Jardine.
At its birth in 1776, the United States was a small agrarian confederation strung along the eastern seaboard of North America, huddled hard by the Appalachian range. The northern and southern states were divided not only by the peculiar institution of slavery, but also by deep and abiding differences in trade policy. It is not much of an exaggeration to consider the fight over tariffs equal to that over abolition as a cause of the Civil War. Only a minority of southerners owned slaves, and an even smaller minority of northerners were abolitionists, but nearly all Americans either consumed or
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Before the adoption of the income tax during the twentieth century, import duties financed 90 percent of American government.7 This meant that tariffs had to be raised during economic depressions, precisely the wrong thing to do during a downturn. These three elements—the fear of British manufacturing, frequent economic downturns, and the need to raise revenue—drove the protectionism of the North, which would last well into the twentieth century.
The first order of business was to get the British on board. By 1945, the positions of England and the United States had completely reversed; heavily indebted Britain sought to choke off imports so as not to erode its scarce currency reserves, whereas the U.S. State Department wanted to open up world commerce as rapidly as possible. After tough negotiations, the victors reached a compromise: multilateral trade talks would proceed, but with all participants allowed an “escape clause” if they determined that lower tariffs might produce “sudden and widespread injury to the producers concerned.”
During the war between Iran and Iraq in 1981-1988, these two nations engaged in a “tanker war”: both combatant and neutral shipping (particularly Kuwaiti shipping) was attacked. Most ominously, the Iraqis repeatedly attempted to put Iran’s main export facility at Kharg Island out of commission. When Lloyd’s of London sharply increased insurance premiums on Gulf-bound vessels, both the Soviet Union and the United States chartered tankers and “reflagged” them under their own colors to force the combatants to think twice about continued assaults.
When governments erect tariff barriers, Samuelson asserts, the result is industrial stagnation; it is far better to protect workers than to protect industries. Even so, Samuelson is not overly optimistic about the ability to “bribe the suffering factor” in a nation where a majority of people are worse off. (Neither is Rodrik, who notes the difficulties of paying for such social welfare schemes with taxes in a world in which corporations can easily move their capital and factories across national borders.)
