History is famously about "maps and chaps" while economics has become obsessed with graphs and Greek letters. In a splendidly ambitious new book, two economists, one at Columbia University and the other at Trinity College, Dublin, attempt to link the two, in a 1,000-year history of world trade. For much of the past millennium, they argue, "the pattern of trade can only be understood as being the outcome of some military or political equilibrium between contending powers." This was as true of Genghis Khan, whose rampages across the steppes led to the pax Mongolia that allowed Eurasian trade to flourish in the 13th century, as it was of the British empire which imposed free trade on large parts of Asia and Africa. Trade expansion has tended to come "from the barrel of a Maxim gun, the edge of a scimitar, or the ferocity of nomadic horsemen".
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