The poor soil and scant rain of ancient Greece, for instance, meant that the terrain’s ability to grow grain was limited, but grapevines and olive trees grew in abundance. To export its wine and olive oil, Athens developed a pottery industry to supply the jars in which those products were transported. As Greek trade, and colonies, flourished across the length and breadth of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, naval power was needed to suppress piracy. To control choke points like the Dardanelles and Bosporus, which led to the rich grain lands of what is now Ukraine, the Athenian empire developed.
This succession of trade, colonies, naval power and empire repeated itself with the Venetians and Genoese, the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British. Even the strategic bottlenecks have stayed the same: Suez; the Strait of Hormuz leading to the Persian Gulf; the Strait of Malacca leading to East Asia; the Bosporus and Dardanelles. Only now, instead of slaves and spices flowing through them, it is oil.
Bernstein is a fine writer and knows how to tell a great story well. And he has many in this book, from Francis Drake’s voyage around the world (which repaid its backers, including Queen Elizabeth I, 50 pounds for every 1 invested) to the Black Death that remorselessly followed the trade routes as it worked its devastating way through Europe and the Middle East. But he never loses sight of his overall goal: to show how trade shaped the world in the past and will shape the world in the future, whether we like it or not.
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