The World That Trade Created: Society, Culture, and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present / Edition 3

The World That Trade Created was chosen as a Summer reading for an AP World History Class.

I am very pleased with this selection as my AP World History Summer read. The "World That Trade Created" was a perfect introduction for my students into Advance Placement. This novel will give my students a better understanding of world trade movements, and also movements of people, ideas and cultures.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

Entertaining and Informative

I am a history teacher and author ('American Lives: Living American History') who has begun to use this book in a world civilizations class. Students seem to hold onto the details and the chapters provide good fodder for in-class discussions. I would recommend this to general readers and to professors looking for something to use in the classroom.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

Not a shot in the world at being a good book!!!

Was forced to read this book for school and did not like it all that much. But wasn't that bad........NOT. ;(

WHAP necessity

Contrary to my fellow posters, but understandable nonetheless (ahhh, to be a kid again.), I feel the book is excellent in its discussion of trade patterns and how the global trade network was established. As a World History AP (WHAP) teacher, I read it all, but assigned parts to my sophomore students. Combined with selections from Guns, Germs, and Steel, you've got a WHAP standard.

The "World that Trade Created" is packed with fascinating stories about what really transpired between nations to generate the economic and political world we live in.

The title is the least interesting thing about this book by Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik, professors of History at UC Irvine and two people who know how to tell fascinating stories. It is a wonderful collection of historical vignettes about the global trade that shaped our world; short stories that form brightly colored threads woven into an impressionistic and painfully realistic tapestry of our global economic system. The modern world we know and love emerges brightly in the foreground with its prospering advanced societies, abundant and varied foods, and self-congratulatory cultural myths about how we earned it with open markets and free trade. But in the darker background, formed by the same threads, are pictures of poverty, slavery, drug addiction, and desolation wrought by economic winners onto economic losers usually through government sponsored monopolies, force and intimidation.
The World that Trade Created is a world in which we have learned how to trade with strangers, a world powered as much by drugs, greed, force of arms and dumb luck as by wind, water, coal and oil. It is a world largely built by indentured servants and slaves: mainly native slaves in the silver, gold and copper mines of Central and South America and African slaves in cotton, sugar, rubber and coffee plantations around the globe. It is a world in which the majority of slave holders and slave traders were members of Christian churches; Dutch Calvinists, Portuguese and Spanish Catholics, as well as British and American Protestants, people and church leaders who successfully rationalized their religious beliefs to support a pernicious practice that made them wealthy.
It is a world in which "Marco Polo claimed that public safety and commercial honesty were far better maintained in China than in Europe; without Christianity as the basis for morals" ?a claim that undermined his credibility and didn't win him any friends. A world where, in Southeast Asia, women controlled businesses and inherited wealth until the European males came and, over a century or two, used Christianity and the law to put women in their place. It is a world in which pirate captains were elected by and led at the will of their crews ?and consequently were usually more capable and more loyally served than the captains of the merchant ships they faced and the Navies that hunted them down.
The World that Trade Created is a world cobbled together and evolved from various pieces and cultures, not one engineered to a central plan. In that respect it is much like the human brain which produced it. Both are works in process, each one acting on the other's evolutionary development.
Anyone who is even slightly interested in how our world or our nation reached its present condition should read this book. It demolishes myths including the one that "Christopher Columbus knew the world was round while everyone else thought it was flat" ? in reality, he was repeatedly rejected, until Isabella, because most of the educated people knew the world was round and probably about 25,000 miles in diameter, therefore China and India were out of range for ships sailing west from Europe. Columbus incorrectly thought the world was much smaller and died still clinging to this belief.

This Book Sucks

this is the most boring, uninteresting, piece of crap i have ever been forced to read. it took me pretty much all summer to get past the first chapter. yes it is informative but it will take you forever to get that information because the thing its so boring that you will read on page and throw it away cause you are so bored. i dont not recommend this at all. dont waste your money or valuable time.

Okay book ..... I guess??.. OK/ Nevermind

This book was pretty fair from my view point. I guess I had to like it alittle because its required for school yet it's like the book suffers from multiple personalities. I can now say now I respect the Ottoman empire 'sort of'.

0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

good book

BORING book, but interesting. It shows some interesting points and perspectives, including how the drug trade was good. I would only recommend doing it 4 school but not sumthin u would def NOT read 4 pleazure.....

UGHHH!!!

This was an extremely dry and boring book! I have to read it for my AP Global class and I wish I didn't have to! The only reason it deserves two stars is because each of the sections of the chapters are short so it is easy to schedule out how fast to read the excuse of a book. But other than dull trade and how, where, and why it happened, THERE IS NOTHING ELSE! Do not read it unless you must for a class.

0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

Jo, another 10th grader

This is quite possibly the most boring thing I have been forced to read in my entire life. It is so unnecessarily longwinded that I have been reading it for well over two weeks now and am only on page 41, no I am not a slow reader but my mind refuses to retain this information, and has threatened to go on strike if I subject it to the 266 pages of rubbish which has so generously been called a book.

Student review of this book

I am taking an AP world history class: this review is going to be focused upon that fact. I want to say I can read and write well, but I cannot. I really enjoy learning about economics, thats why i took the class in the first place. What shocked me was the way it was written: long complex sentences, thrown out information, lack of organization, and depth-lacking anecdotes. I would have really like this book if I could have understood it better. For those of you who are scholarly readers and enjoy economics like I do then read this book. If not dont even try. Unfortunatly its a required read for us students so live with it.

enjoy summer!...... but first read this text book

I am in honors history and 10th grade this book was required other than its obious tendency to bore it was fine if you enjoy long dry novels then give this a shot but dont try and do it over summer cause your brain will melt witth all the heat and the 'insight' of this book

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