Table of Contents
Introduction ix
1 The Making of Market Conventions 3
1.1 The Fujian Trade Diaspora 10
1.2 The Chinese Tribute System 12
1.3 Funny Money, Real Growth 15
1.4 When Asia Was the World Economy 18
1.5 Treating Good News as No News 21
1.6 Pearls in the Rubble: Rediscovering the Golden Age of Quanzhou, ca. 1000-1400 24
1.7 Aztec Traders 29
1.8 Primitive Accumulation: Brazilwood 31
1.9 A British Merchant in the Tropics 34
1.10 How the Other Half Traded 36
1.11 Deals and Ordeals: World Trade and Early Modern Legal Culture 39
1.12 Traveling Salesmen, Traveling Taxmen 41
1.13 Going Nonnative: Expense Accounts and the End of the Age of Merchant Courtiers 44
1.14 Empire on a Shoestring: British Adventurers and Indian Financiers in Calcutta, 1750-1850 46
2 The Tactics of Transport 49
2.1 Woods, Winds, Shipbuilding, and Shipping: Why China Didn't Rule the-Waves 55
2.2 Better to Be Lucky Than Smart 57
2.3 Seats of Government and Their Stomachs: An Eighteenth-Century Tour 60
2.4 Pioneers of Dusty Rooms: Warehouses, Transatlantic Trade, and the Opening of the North American Frontier 62
2.5 People Patterns: Was the Real America Sichuan? 64
2.6 Winning Raffles 66
2.7 Trade, Disorder, and Progress: Creating Shanghai, 1840-1930 71
2.8 Out of One-Many 73
2.9 Guaranteed Profits and Half-Fulfilled Hopes: Railroad Building in British India 76
2.10 A Brief Trip Across the Centuries 78
3 The Economic Culture of Drugs 81
3.1 Chocolate: From Coin to Commodity 86
3.2 Brewing Up a Storm 88
3.3 Mocha Is Not Chocolate 91
3.4 The Brew of Business: Coffee's Life Story 93
3.5 America and the Coffee Bean 96
3.6 Sweet Revolutions 98
3.7 How Opium Made the World Go 'Round 101
3.8 Chewing Is Good, Snorting Isn't: How Chemistry Turned a Good Thing Bad 105
4 Transplanting: Commodities in World Trade 108
4.1 Unnatural Resources 115
4.2 Bouncing Around 118
4.3 Golden Misfortune: John Sutter in the Wilds of California 120
4.4 California Gold and the World 123
4.5 Beautiful Bugs 126
4.6 How to Turn Nothing into Something: Guano's Ephemeral Fortunes 129
4.7 As American as Sugar and Pineapples 132
4.8 How the Cows Ate the Cowboys 134
4.9 The Tie That Bound 137
4.10 The Good Earth? 139
4.11 One Potato, Two Potato 141
4.12 Cocoa and Coercion: Advances and Retreats for Free Labor in West African Agriculture 145
4.13 Trying to Get a Grip: Natural Rubber's Century of Ups and Downs 149
5 The Economics of Violence 152
5.1 The Logic of an Immoral Trade 161
5.2 As Rich as Potosi 163
5.3 The Freebooting Founders of England's Free Seas 167
5.4 The Luxurious Life of Robinson Crusoe 169
5.5 No Islands in the Storm: Or, How the Sino-British Tea Trade Deluged the Worlds of Pacific Islanders 172
5.6 The Violent Birth of Corporations 174
5.7 Buccaneers as Corporate Raiders 177
5.8 Looking for the Next Worst Thing: Emancipation, Indentures, and Colonial Plantations After Slavery 180
5.9 Bloody Ivory Tower Julia Topik 182
5.10 How Africa Resisted Imperialism: Ethiopia and the World Economy 184
5.11 Never Again: The Saga of the Rosenfelders 190
6 Making Modern Markets 193
6.1 Silver and Gold in Mexico and Brazil 198
6.2 Weighing the World: The Metric Revolution 204
6.3 From Court Bankers to Architects of the Modern World Market: The Rothschilds 207
6.4 Growing Global: International Grain Markets 211
6.5 How Time Got That Way 213
6.6 How the United States Joined the Big Leagues 216
6.7 Clubs, Casinos and Collapses: Sovereign Debt and Risk Management Since 1820 218
6.8 Fresher Is Not Better 222
6.9 Packaging 224
6.10 Trademarks: What's in a Name? 226
6.11 Learning to Feel Unclean: A Global Marketing Tale 229
6.12 Things Go Better with Red, White, and Blue: How Coca-Cola Conquered Europe 232
6.13 Survival of the First 234
6.14 It Ain't Necessarily So 236
6.15 Location, Location, Location: How History Trumped Geography in Andorra and Panama 238
7 World Trade, Industrialization, and Deindustrialization 244
7.1 Sweet Industry: The First Factories 254
7.2 Fiber of Fortune: How Cotton Became the Fabric of the Industrial Age 258
7.3 Combing the World for Cotton 260
7.4 Killing the Golden Goose 263
7.5 Sweet Success 266
7.6 No Mill Is an Island 268
7.7 Feeding Silkworms, Spitting Out Growth 270
7.8 From Rocks-and Restrictions-to Riches: How Disadvantages Helped New England Industrialize Early 272
7.9 Sideways Breakthroughs and Stalled Transitions: Crooked Paths from Coal to Oil, 1859-2012 274
7.10 American Oil 277
7.11 Running on Oil, Building on Sand 281
7.12 Minding the Store and Forgetting the Factory: U.S. "Fair Trade" Laws and the Rise of Offshore Manufacturing Since World War II 284
Epilogue: The World Economy in the Twenty-First Century 288
Selected Bibliography 305
Index 311
About the Authors 329
