Catalog Search Results
Author
Description
"From the author of 1491--the best-selling study of the pre-Columbian Americas--a deeply engaging new history that explores the most momentous biological event since the death of the dinosaurs. More than 200 million years ago, geological forces split apart the continents. Isolated from each other, the two halves of the world developed totally different suites of plants and animals. Columbus's voyages brought them back together--and marked the beginning...
Author
Pub. Date
2017.
Description
This volume, Trade, Economic Life, and Globalization, covers the economic devastation wrought by World War II, the institutions that the Allies created to help nations recover from the war, and how the Cold War bled into the economic arena. Consumerism and the emergence of the middle class in Western countries is also a major theme, as are the challenges-and promises-created by the expansion of free trade and the collapsing of national economic boundaries....
Author
Pub. Date
2024.
Description
"When Amitav Ghosh began the research for his monumental cycle of novels the Ibis Trilogy, he was startled to learn how the lives of the nineteenth-century sailors and soldiers he wrote about were dictated not only by the currents of the Indian Ocean but also by the precious commodity carried in enormous quantities on those currents: opium. Most surprising of all, however, was the discovery that his own identity and family history were swept up in...
Author
Series
Pub. Date
1998
Description
In Merchants & Empire Cathy Matson examines the attitudes and practices of New York's wholesale merchants, a group that operated beneath the gaze of imperial traders yet made up as much as 80 percent of the mercantile community. She finds them an interesting, if opportunistic, lot - quick to flout authority to their own advantage, but also willing to enjoy the benefits of British imperial protection when it suited them. These merchants succeeded in...
Author
Pub. Date
c1995
Description
It is a story of stirring adventure, of hardship and of financial losses and profits. Webb was an unusual man, as were most of the traders of his day and since, and though thirty years elapsed from the time he began to recount his adventures, the memory of them remained undimmed.
Author
Pub. Date
[2017]
Description
The place is ancient Egypt. You need lumber to build a house. No trees grow in Egypts desert, but a ship from Lebanon regularly brings cedar logs to a nearby port. How do you get lumber for your house? You take many bundles of papyrus and a sack of frankincense to the port and offer them to the ships captain in exchange for his logs. The captain knows he can sell your goods back home at a profit. You bargain, but in the end, he takes your goods, and...
Author
Pub. Date
2003.
Description
European historian Spufford has written widely about money in the Middle Ages, and here describes the enormous expansion in European trade at local, regional, national, international, and even intercontinental scales during the 13th century, sparked by increases in population and money supply. Courts and consumers, helps and hindrances, manufactured goods, foodstuffs, slaves, and trade imbalances are among his topics.
Author
Pub. Date
[2019]
Description
"One morning in February 2001, internet entrepreneur Josh Harris woke to certain knowledge that he was about to lose everything. The man Time magazine called 'The Warhol of the Web' was now reduced to the role of helpless spectator as his personal fortune dwindled from 85 million dollars, to 50 million, to nothing, all in the space of a week. Harris had been New York's first net millionaire, a maverick genius so preternaturally adapted to the fluid...
Author
Pub. Date
2015.
Description
"Today it is the most valuable book in the world. Recently one sold for over five million dollars. It is the book that rescued the name of William Shakespeare and half of his plays from oblivion. The Millionaire and the Bard tells the miraculous and romantic story of the making of the First Folio, and of the American industrialist whose thrilling pursuit of the book became a lifelong obsession. When Shakespeare died in 1616 half of his plays died...
Pub. Date
[2015]
Description
"What does it mean to be an American? What are American ideas and values? American Enterprise, the companion book to a major exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, aims to answer these questions about the American experience through an exploration of its economic and commercial history. It argues that by looking at the intersection of capitalism and democracy, we can see where we as a nation have come from and where we...