A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World

by William J. Bernstein

Petra,

571 became known in Arabia as the "Year of the Elephant." 28 That same year saw the birth of the Prophet Muhammad into a lesser branch of the Quraish, and his arrival was imbued forever after by Muslims with the mythic elephantine event.

"Had [Constantinople] fallen, the Balkan Peninsula would have been

overrun, the Arabs would have sailed up the Danube into the heart of Europe, and Christianity might have lingered, an obscure cult, in the forests of Germany."35

Jabil Tariq: the mountain of Tariq, or, as it later became pronounced, Gibraltar.

the most momentous Muslim acquisition at Talas was not territory or silk, but a commodity at once prosaic and precious. Among the Chinese prisoners taken at Talas were papermakers, who soon spread their wondrous craft into the Islamic world, and then to Europe, changing forever human culture and the course of history.

of exchange, sophisticated lending institutions, and futures markets, no Islamic state ever established the bedrock financial institution of the modern world: a national or central bank.41

the brutal, efficient newcomers were driven by a hunger for, of all things, culinary ingredients that today lie largely unused in most Western kitchens.

Venice, whose grand palazzi and magnificent public architecture were built largely on profits from pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, and cloves.

Did the Europeans produce any other commodity that could be traded at Alexandria and Cairo for the spices they so intensely desired? Indeed they did: slaves to fill the insatiable appetite of the Muslim armies for soldiers.

As had the Romans, Europeans became infatuated with spices. Physicians treated all manner of ailments with them, and Chaucer versified about fantasy forests filled with cloves to fumigate clothes chests and with nutmeg for flavoring ale.

Between 1519 and the end of the slave trade in the late 1860s, 9.5 million African slaves arrived in the New World;

American prohibition of the slave trade in 1808 easily passed through the southern-dominated Congress for just this reason:

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.

The Jackson coalition voted with the Adams men to pass the draconian 1828 Act, better known as the "Tariff of Abominations."

conflicting goals, he kept the nation together by maintaining a "middle and just course": the moderate Tariff Act of 1832.12

declared both the 1828 and 1832 tariffs illegal within its borders. By year's end, Calhoun had resigned the vice presidency, returned home, and been elected senator. Jackson replied swiftly, first with words (declaring that the South Carolinians were "in a state of insanity"), then by sending a naval squadron to Charleston, and even by threatening to arrest the

governor of Virginia should he be so foolish as to impede federal troops sent through his state to pacify South Carolina.

Pennsylvania, the most protectionist state in the Union, had been a pivotal one in the election, and it would remain pivotal in the election of 1860. Already under the spell of the arch-protectionist Henry Carey, Abraham Lincoln took up the cry for higher tariffs and won the Keystone State and the White House. Carey would become his chief economic advisor.'?

According to Confederate mythology, a Virginia Unionist, Colonel John Baldwin, offered Lincoln the adjournment of his state's secession convention in return for the evacuation of Fort Sumter. Lincoln is supposed to have replied, "What will become of my tariff?"ls

Had Jackson, Clay, and Madison acted less wisely, the tariff controversy of the 1830s and the subsequent nullification crisis could quite possibl...

there can be no doubting the importance of the split between free-traders and protectionists ...

precious jewel they have parted with, never to be regained. The South needs no Custom House and will thrive on free tra...