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The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World―and Globalization Began by Valerie Hansen

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, British Empire, disinformation, Easter island, financial innovation, Google Earth, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, polynesian navigation, seigniorage, South China Sea, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

It demonstrated the feasibility of conducting trade from a coastal base to which Portuguese ships could sail directly, obtain the goods they desired, and return home. After the Portuguese established El Mina, African entrepreneurs moved existing trade routes in the interior to the coast so that traders could deliver gold and slaves to the Atlantic ports. This wasn’t the first time that Africans changed their trade routes: when, around 1000, Sijilmasa replaced Zuwila as a key node of trade in North Africa, the major trans-Saharan gold and slave trade route also shifted west. After da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope, he was no longer pioneering a new maritime route. He joined the much frequented Persian Gulf–China maritime route connecting East African port cities with Indian Ocean ports.

Abbasid empire, 16 Central Asian rulers and, 144, 146, 151 ceramics in, 183 Chinese trade with, 183 Egypt’s break from, 126–27, 129 geographic information for expansion of, 123–24 Mongol invasion and end of, 127 Muslim commonwealth and, 127–28 slave rebellions under, 118 spread of Islam under, 96, 126 unification of territory during, 9–10 Abaoji, 156–57, 168, 212 Adam of Bremen, 39–40, 49, 50, 84–85 Afghanistan, 151, 189 Islam in, 144, 150, 152, 153 slaves from, 119, 121 trade pathways in, 86, 161 Africa Almoravids’ triangular trade route in, 134–35 bead trade in, 113, 133 Cairo and trade routes across, 128 caravans across, 121, 122, 128, 132, 135, 136, 138, 140, 142 China’s trade and, 199, 225, 226, 228 crops traded by, 134 crucial role of Africans in trade and, 114 da Gama’s exploration of, 227–28 gold trade and, 114, 115, 117, 130–32, 133, 134, 135, 136–39, 141, 172 Indian Ocean trade and, 135 Jenne-jeno example of local benefits of trade in, 14–16, 133 metal goods and trade routes across, 133 Portuguese exploration of, 139–41, 142, 225, 226, 227 slaves from, 114–16, 118, 119–21, 147, 172, 203, 231 spread of Islam in, 126 system of pathways connecting outside world to, 141 trade between Europe and, 135–36 trade routes in, 112 (map), 228 trade with Islamic world and Islamicization of, 113–14 voyages to Yucatan Peninsula by, 59–60 al-Bakri, 123, 125, 130–33, 135–36, 137 al-Biruni, 17–18, 147–49, 150, 152, 153, 154, 161 al-Dukkali, 138 Alexander the Great, 19 Alexandria, Egypt, 104–5, 129–30 Alexios I, Emperor of the Byzantine Empire, 108 Algonquian peoples, 36, 38, 61 al-Hakim, 128–29 al-Idrisi, 18, 91 al-Marwazi, 160, 161 al-Masudi, 136–37 Almoravid dynasty, 134–35, 137 aloeswood, 196, 199–200, 201, 213, 214, 217, 220, 223 Alptegin, 150 al-Warraq, 123 al-Zawawi, 138–39 Amalfi, Italy, merchants, 130, 234 amber trade, 160 Americas ball games in, 53–55 climate change and, 70 Greenland, contacts with, 46–47 hide-covered canoes in, 28 indigenous peoples in, during period of Norse voyages, 35–36 Leif Erikson’s voyage to, 27–28, 81 map (1590) of, 50–51 Norse decision to abandon settlements in, 47, 50 Norse presence in, 57 Norse voyages to, 27–28, 51–52, 81 pathway networks in, 78–79 Spanish explorers in, 55, 59, 77–79, 228–29 Squanto and the Pilgrims in, 229–30 trade between Scandinavia and, 46, 47, 52 trading centers of, 54 (map) Viking exploration of, 26 (map), 27 Vinland sagas’ information on, 35 Amerindians.

By this time, Cairo was rising as a major city, marking a turning point in North African history. The Nile Delta, with its strategic location, may seem a natural choice for the capital of Egypt. But with the exception of Memphis, the capitals of the past were located far to the south of Cairo. The spread of Islam and establishment of new trade routes across Africa contributed to Cairo’s prosperity. The trade routes, whether by land or sea, converged where the Nile met the Mediterranean. Caravans and boats laden with West African goods traveled along the Mediterranean coast while goods shipped north along the East African coast were carried from the Persian Gulf ports overland to Cairo.


pages: 424 words: 108,768

Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History by Lewis Dartnell

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, bioinformatics, clean water, Columbian Exchange, decarbonisation, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, Eratosthenes, financial innovation, Google Earth, Khyber Pass, Malacca Straits, megacity, meta-analysis, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Pax Mongolica, peak oil, phenotype, rewilding, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, spice trade, Suez crisis 1956, supervolcano, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

Here these thrust faults frequently lie at the junction between low-lying barren deserts and high-rising inhospitable mountains or plateaus, and so trade routes often pass along these geological boundaries. Towns dotted along the way accommodate the travelling merchants, supported by the water springs at the foot of the mountains.43 But while tectonic movements can provide water sources in otherwise arid environments, these settlements are also vulnerable to destructive earthquakes with each new slip of the crust.44 In 1994 the small desert village of Sefidabeh in south-eastern Iran was utterly destroyed by an earthquake. The curious thing was that Sefidabeh is exceedingly remote: one of the few stops on a long trade route to the Indian Ocean, it’s the only settlement for 100 kilometres in any direction.

The growth of the southerly branch, the East African Rift, set the stage for our evolution as a species, while the deeper fracture to the north-west tore off the Arabian Peninsula as a shard from Africa, with water pooling into this 2,000-kilometre-long crack to create the Red Sea.* The major east–west Eurasian maritime trade routes and crucial straits. The Arabian Peninsula remains hanging off Africa by only a narrow sinew of land in the north–the Sinai Desert–and as the Red Sea has widened the Arabian block has swung east to slam into the southern edge of the Eurasian plate. This folded up the Zagros Mountains in Iran, and along the foot of this range, where the crust has been depressed down into a wedge-shaped foreland basin, the Indian Ocean washed in to create the Persian Gulf. The earliest trade routes from the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf to India hugged the coastline.

For centuries the dhows and caravans of Muslim merchants now dominated the three great east–west trade routes across Asia: the maritime passages from the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf across the Indian Ocean, and the Silk Road through Central Asia.27 This is the world of Sinbad the Sailor in One Thousand and One Nights, who loaded up with trade goods in Baghdad and set sail from Basra down the Persian Gulf on his seven adventurous voyages. Prior to the rise of Islamic supremacy over these trade routes, India had been well known to Greek and Roman geographers like Strabo and Ptolemy, but after the blocking of the Red Sea passage knowledge of its location faded into the obscurity of myths.28 It would be the best part of another millennium before Europeans once again sailed into the Indian Ocean, as we’ll see in Chapter 8.


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The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean by David Abulafia

agricultural Revolution, bread and circuses, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, David Attenborough, disinformation, Eratosthenes, ghettoisation, joint-stock company, long peace, mass immigration, out of africa, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, wikimedia commons, Yom Kippur War

Its rulers were often embroiled in faction-fighting, but the dynasty managed to survive for two more centuries, supported by the prosperity Cyprus derived from its intensive trade with neighbouring lands.7 Massive communities of foreign merchants visited and settled: Famagusta was the base for merchants from Venice, Genoa, Barcelona, Ancona, Narbonne, Messina, Montpellier, Marseilles and elsewhere; its ruined Gothic churches still testify to the wealth its merchants accumulated.8 From Cyprus, trade routes extended to another Christian kingdom, Cilician Armenia, on the south-east coast of modern Turkey. Western merchants supplied wheat to Armenia by way of Cyprus, and they used Armenia as a gateway to exotic and arduous trade routes that took them away from the Mediterranean, to the silk markets of Persian Tabriz and beyond. Cyprus enjoyed close links to Beirut, where Syrian Christian merchants acted as agents of businessmen from Ancona and Venice, furnishing them with massive quantities of raw cotton for processing into cloth in Italy and even in Germany, a clear sign that a single economic system was emerging in the Mediterranean, crossing the boundaries between Christendom and Islam.

The aims, however, were quite limited: ‘Amr ibn al- ‘As, the Arab conqueror of Egypt, used the canal system to convey Egyptian wheat to Mecca.4 The idea that a canal might link the trade routes of the Mediterranean with those of the Indian Ocean was not seriously broached before the nineteenth century, for good reason: Egypt was to all intents the Nile waterway, and a parallel waterway through the desert would deprive its rulers of the tax revenues on which the Ptolemies, Fatimids and Mamluks had depended so heavily. There were other ideas about how to create a trade route linking the two seas. In the 1820s the young English entrepreneur Thomas Waghorn noticed the long delays incurred when sending mail from India to England, and saw the potential of a route from Bombay to Suez, which could also carry those passengers who were willing to endure the heat and discomfort of a journey by carriage across the desert from the Red Sea to the Nile.

Early metallurgists had learned they could strengthen the relatively soft metal copper by alloying it with tin. Bringing together the ingredients of bronze and establishing a system of exchanges meant that the network of connections across the Aegean developed into what can at last be described as trade routes: links established regularly according to the seasons, from one year to the next, for the purpose of exchange, in which the intermediaries travelled by boat, though it would be going too far to assume that they were professional merchants who lived entirely from the proceeds of trade. In consequence the Mediterranean was coming alive, criss-crossed by people of varied origins, in search of or anxious to dispose of goods that were of equally varied origins.


pages: 1,993 words: 478,072

The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans by David Abulafia

Admiral Zheng, Alfred Russel Wallace, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, colonial rule, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discovery of the americas, domestication of the camel, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, land reform, lone genius, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, megacity, new economy, out of africa, p-value, Peace of Westphalia, polynesian navigation, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, wikimedia commons, yellow journalism

The word used by the Quechua Indians in South America for the sweet potato, kamote , has been imaginatively compared to Easter Island kumara and Polynesian kuumala .20 Seasonal winds made journeys to South America possible, but there is no evidence for any attempt to settle there and no evidence for active commerce between South America and any part of Polynesia.21 It might be argued that the sweet potato was diffused by the Spaniards when they gained control over trans-Pacific trade routes in the sixteenth century. However, the places where they were most actively cultivated lay some way from the Spanish trade routes – Hawai’i, New Zealand and Easter Island – and carbonized tubers of sweet potato excavated by archaeologists in New Zealand, Hawai’i and Mangaia can all be dated to the period before the arrival of the Europeans. Mangaia lies in the Cook Islands, part of Remote Oceania situated north-east of New Zealand; its specimens have been carbon-dated to about AD 1000.

More attention is paid nowadays to the environmental changes that dried out the Indus Valley and resulted in the gradual decline of the great cities, while across the wider region something of Indus culture, even the writing system, lingered for several centuries, in some places until around 1300 BC .65 The great trade with Mesopotamia became a trickle; an occasional Indus object turns up on sites in Iraq, but routes across the sea had become less important to the inhabitants of north-west India. This did not mean the end of Dilmun, which still appeared (assuming it is the same place) in a document from eighth-century Assyria. And the history of Dilmun is also the history of the first maritime trading route along the coasts of Asia – to all intents the first trade route we know about anywhere in the world that linked two great civilizations. In later centuries, there were severe contractions and long interruptions during which trade and other contact faltered and vanished; but the history of the Indian Ocean as a great seaway began in the Persian Gulf. 4 The Journey to the Land of the God I One great Bronze Age civilization of the Middle East has been left out of this account so far: Egypt.

Rostovtzeff, Social and Economic History , vol. 2, p. 927; R. McLaughlin, Rome and the Distant East: Trade Routes to the Ancient Lands of Arabia, India, and China (London, 2010), p. 24. 6. Mastering the Monsoon 1. David Abulafia, The Great Sea: a Human History of the Mediterranean (London, 2011), pp. 164–5; M. Rostovtzeff, The Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World (3 vols., Oxford, 1940–41), vol. 2, pp. 920–24. 2. Cited in R. McLaughlin, Rome and the Distant East: Trade Routes to the Ancient Lands of Arabia, India, and China (London, 2010), p. 143. 3. McLaughlin, Rome and the Distant East , p. 28. 4.


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The Power of Geography: Ten Maps That Reveal the Future of Our World by Tim Marshall

Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Sedaris, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, failed state, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, low earth orbit, Malacca Straits, means of production, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, uranium enrichment, urban planning, women in the workforce

However, all Ethiopian leaders since 1993 have faced the same geographical problem: lack of access to the sea. Modern Ethiopia has no designs on a return to the empire of the Aksum era, but knows that to survive and prosper it must be able to secure reliable trade routes. Ethiopia’s imports and exports mostly pass through its neighbours’ territory. The most important trade route is via the Red Sea, a maritime trade bottleneck which includes the narrow Bab-el-Mandeb Strait and passes along the coastlines of ten countries. Approximately 90 per cent of Ethiopia’s imports and exports travel by sea, and almost all cargo goes via the deep-water port of Djibouti.

Hence Spain is involved in training government forces in Mali and elsewhere. The other main navy base is in the Canary Islands, which also hosts army and air-force installations. The Canaries face the Gulf of Guinea, where Spain has economic interests and which is crucial for its trading routes and modern communication system via underwater cables. To achieve the defence of trade routes and shipping and fishing fleets, the navy has about 130 ships, 20,000 personnel, and can call on 11,500 troops in the Infantería de Marina – the Marines. They are backed by the army and air force, and the Americans and NATO. The USA retains two bases in Spain, Naval Station Rota near Gibraltar and Morón Air Base located about 50 kilometres south of Seville.

In 2018, a similar journey became somewhat easier when the first road across the desert was opened, connecting Oman to Riyadh, the Saudi capital. If you decide to drive it you may not need to be as intrepid as Thomas and his friends, but do bear in mind that there are no service stations along the way. Climate and the ancient trade routes shaped by geography explain most of today’s population centres. All of the high ground in Saudi is in the western half. The Red Sea coastal plains are relatively narrow, and a series of hills and mountains run inland parallel to the coast almost the entire length. Jeddah is on flat land but Mecca, 60 kilometres inland, is 277 metres above sea level, and some of the hills behind it are as high as 1,879 metres.


pages: 163 words: 47,912

A Short History of Russia by Mark Galeotti

cuban missile crisis, disinformation, fake news, hypertext link, mega-rich, Mikhail Gorbachev, trade route

The Arrival of the Ryurikids There was a Ryurik, possibly one Rorik of Dorestad, an ambitious Danish upstart whose raids so enraged Louis the Pious, King of the Franks, that he was banished in 860. This conveniently coincides with the date of Ryurik’s arrival—generally set somewhere between 860 and 862—and his disappearance from Western chronicles. Scandinavian raider-traders had long known of the lands of the Slavs, not least in their quest to find new trading routes to Miklagarðr, “Great City”—the Eastern Roman capital of Byzantium, today’s Istanbul—far to the south. The Byzantine emperor’s elite Varangian Guard was drawn from Scandinavian mercenaries, after all. Thus, when Rorik of Dorestad found himself dispossessed at home, why not carve himself a new principality in these territories?

One could, for example, sail along the Neva from the Gulf of Finland to Lake Ladoga, as Ryurik did, then make for the source of the Volga, the longest river in Europe. With just a 5–10-kilometer (3–6-mile) stretch of portage—carrying boats overland—the travelers could then sail all the way south to the Caspian Sea. In these lands there was timber and amber, furs and honey, and the most lucrative commodity of all: slaves. More importantly, there were trade routes to Constantinople and directly to “Serkland”—Land of Silk—as the Muslim territories of the east were known. Scandinavians had extracted tribute in the forms of goods and silver from the northwestern tribes until the risings in 860 forced them from their timber-walled forts and back home, but it was hard to see why they would stay away.

It was not in charge, though, and power was slipping imperceptibly through its fingers. The archaeological evidence suggests that despite sporadic dynastic conflicts, Russia was prospering. Kiev was periodically sacked, but it nonetheless always managed quickly to rebuild and rebound. The Novgorodians were busy driving new trade routes into northern Siberia and their city was host to a thriving community of Baltic traders. The principality of Vladimir-Suzdal was pushing into the Bulgar lands. Even the rise of a new nomad threat, the Cumans and the Kipchaks, whom the Russians together called Polovtsians, was manageable. They first appeared in 1055, and by 1061 were raiding Rus’ lands.


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The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan

access to a mobile phone, Admiral Zheng, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, clean water, Columbian Exchange, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, disinformation, drone strike, dual-use technology, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, financial innovation, Isaac Newton, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, South China Sea, spice trade, statistical model, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, wealth creators, WikiLeaks, yield management, Yom Kippur War

This was where critical decisions were taken in the battle for the soul of Islam.52 The Muslims had taken over a world that was well ordered and studded with hundreds of cities of consumers – taxable citizens, in other words. As each fell into the hands of the caliphate, more resources and assets came under the control of the centre. Trade routes, oases, cities and natural resources were targeted and subsumed. Ports that connected trade between the Persian Gulf and China were annexed, as were the trans-Saharan trade routes that had built up, allowing Fez (in modern Morocco) to become ‘immensely prosperous’ and home to trade that in the words of one contemporary observer produced ‘huge profits’. The subjugation of new regions and peoples brought astonishing sums of money into the Muslim empire: one Arab historian estimated that the conquest of Sindh (in what is now Pakistan) yielded 60 million dirhams, to say nothing of the future riches to be drawn from taxes, levies and other duties.53 In today’s terms, this was worth billions of dollars.

The decades that followed Alexander’s death saw a gradual and unmistakable programme of Hellenisation, as ideas, themes and symbols from ancient Greece were introduced to the east. The descendants of his generals remembered their Greek roots and actively emphasised them, for example on the coinage struck in the mints of the major towns that were located in strategically important points along the trade routes or in agriculturally vibrant centres. The form of these coins became standardised: an image of the current ruler on the obverse with ringlets held by a diadem, and invariably looking to the right as Alexander had done, with an image of Apollo on the reverse, identified by Greek letters.23 The Greek language could be heard – and seen – all over Central Asia and the Indus valley.

They also traded finely worked glass, silver and gold, as well as coral and topaz from the Red Sea and frankincense from Arabia in exchange for textiles, spices and dyes like indigo.88 Whatever form it took, the outflow of capital on this scale had far-reaching consequences. One was a strengthening of local economies along the trade routes. Villages turned into towns and towns turned into cities as business flourished and communication and commercial networks extended and became ever more connected. Increasingly impressive architectural monuments were erected in places like Palmyra, on the edge of the Syrian desert, which did well as a trading centre linking east with west.


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Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, clean water, David Graeber, demographic dividend, demographic transition, deskilling, domesticated silver fox, facts on the ground, founder crops, invention of writing, joint-stock company, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, means of production, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, zoonotic diseases

This perspective overlooks the centrality of trade and the degree to which raiding was often a means rather than an end in itself. Christopher Beckwith’s emphasis on trade routes is illuminating: Chinese, Greek and Arab historical sources agree that the steppe peoples were above all interested in trade. The careful manner in which Central Eurasians generally undertook their conquests is revealing. They attempted to avoid conflict and tried to get cities to submit peacefully. Only when they resisted, or rebelled, was retribution necessary. . . . The Central Eurasians’ conquests were designed to acquire trade routes or trading cities. But the reason for the acquisition was to secure occupied territory that could be taxed in order to pay for the rulers’ socio-political infrastructure.

The copper and tin would have been semiprocessed, as the alluvium lacked the high-quality fuel required to smelt. 14. The obvious exceptions would be the natural “chokepoints” on overland trade routes, such as mountain passes and fords and desert oases. The Straits of Melaka, an important node of state formation in Southeast Asia, is a classic example of both water transport routes and a chokepoint, in this case commanding the early India-China maritime trade route. 15. This assertion, which I distinctly recall reading in the opening paragraphs of a history of nineteenth-century Britain, was challenged by one of my readers as a possible “urban myth.”

David Wengrow (personal communication) believes that the contact via trade and exchange throughout the area would have worked against the isolation of populations that makes possible epidemics among immunologically “naïve” populations. While this is surely true for the major population centers and the trade routes between them, it may be less true for nonstate peoples off the major trade routes and living in populations small enough that many of the common infectious diseases would not have become endemic. McNeill’s conjecture remains just that and awaits further investigation. 7. THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE BARBARIANS 1. By “taxation” I mean any more or less regular charge on the production, labor, or revenue of subjects.


pages: 482 words: 117,962

Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future by Ian Goldin, Geoffrey Cameron, Meera Balarajan

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, conceptual framework, creative destruction, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, endogenous growth, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, labour mobility, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, life extension, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, machine readable, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, open borders, out of africa, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, Richard Florida, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, spice trade, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce, working-age population

By 300 CE, camel-riding pastoralists and traders were connecting West Africa with the Mediterranean—they carried gold, copper, and sometimes slaves into the north. The wealth and traffic along these trade routes eventually fostered the growth of cities and states where farmers had settled to produce sorghum and millet.59 Near the end of the millennium, the trading empire of Kanem had developed near Lake Chad, and the Wagoudu (or Ghana) Empire emerged near contemporary Mali and Mauritania. The development of the Silk Road trade routes corresponded with the consolidation of vast empires between 400 and 200 BCE. Prior to this time, merchants faced significant threats of banditry along trade routes. An increased tempo of long-distance trade required the security that was provided by large Eurasian states and the nomadic barbarians in between.

Positional value notation was adapted from the Indians in the creation of Arabic numbers (which are still used today), and Chinese inventions like the compass passed through the Arabs to Europe. Trade routes linking Europe, Africa, and Asia became increasingly significant during the Abbasid Caliphate. Islam spread widely through trade, establishing Muslim populations where Arab armies never trod—such as Indonesia and China, where the world's largest Muslim populations currently live.74 The improved security of long-distance trade routes under the Caliphate led to the expansion of trade diasporas, among the most important of which was the Jewish Radaniyya, which means “those who know the way” in Persian—the dominant trade language.

–John Stuart Mill Contents List of Illustrations and Tables Acknowledgments Introduction PART I: PAST 1 Migration from Prehistory to Columbus Early Migration Connecting Humanity Migration and Humanity 2 Global Migrations: Toward a World Economy The Age of Exploration Imperialism and Coercion Unfree Migrations: Slavery and Indentured Labor Global “Free” Migrations (ca. 1840–1914) Builders of the Modern World 3 “Managed” Migration in the Twentieth Century (1914-1973) The End of the Liberal Period The Interwar Period: Economic Decline and Regulated Migration Post-WWII Migrations Finding Reasons to Regulate PART II: PRESENT 4 Leaving Home: Migration Decisions and Processes Micro-Level: Individuals and Families Meso-Level: Networks and Systems Macro-Level: Demographic, Political, and Economic Conditions Individual, Society, and National Influences 5 Immigration and Border Control Channels and Flows of Migration Economic Migration Social Migration Refugee Migration Border Control Beyond Border Controls 6 The Impacts of Migration Impacts on Receiving Countries Impacts on Sending Countries Impacts on Migrants Impacts on Societies and Migrants PART III: FUTURE 7 The Future of Migration The Backdrop of Globalization Supply of Migrants Demand for Migrants 8 A Global Migration Agenda Thought Experiments A Long-Term Vision of Freer Movement Principles for Global Migration The Need for Global Leadership Notes References Index Illustrations and Tables ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1.1. The genetic pathways of human migration Figure 2.1. African slave trade routes, 1500-1900 Figure 2.2. Estimates of slave exports to America from Africa, 1662-1867 Figure 2.3. Annual average slave and indentured labor imports (by thousands) into the Caribbean and Mascarenes, by decade, 1801-1810 to 1911-1920 Figure 2.4. Gross migration of indentured workers by origin, 1840-1920 Figure 2.5.


pages: 566 words: 163,322

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, currency peg, dark matter, debt deflation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, Gini coefficient, global macro, Goodhart's law, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, hype cycle, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Internet of things, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, New Economic Geography, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open immigration, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population

The richest of the three Andean members, Chile, has also become a major investor in the other two, pouring $2.3 billion into Peru and Colombia in 2011, up from $70 million in 2004. That’s not to say the prospects for all three nations are equal, but a shared commitment to making the most of a location well off the major global trade routes is positive for all involved. Geography Is Not Destiny With sufficient political will and the right policies, nations can redraw the map of global trade routes to their own advantage. In the early twentieth century, the major global trade routes crisscrossed the Atlantic, but after World War II Japan and China managed to carve out a new route anchored at one end on their own coasts. Within a generation the Asian powers used cheap labor to more than make up for the cost of shipping goods all the way from the Pacific to Europe and the United States.

Geography matters for growth: Today Poland and Mexico have a big potential advantage in global competition thanks to their location on the border of the vast commercial markets of western Europe and the United States. Vietnam and Bangladesh are taking advantage of their position on existing trade routes between China and the West to take away some of the export manufacturing business that had been done mainly in China. (For a map of the current geographic sweet spots and global shipping routes, see p. 402.) But geography is not destiny; the potential advantage of proximity to the United States or China will ebb and flow with the strength of those economies, and many countries on or near major trade routes and rich markets will not take the steps necessary to prosper from their position. Morocco is taking advantage of its location, a short hop across the Mediterranean from southern Europe, to develop export industries, but nearby on the same coast Libya and Sudan are crumbling politically and economically.

A nation’s chances of economic success are greatly improved by prowess in manufacturing goods for export, which highlights the importance of location. Any nation that wants to thrive as an export power has a huge advantage if it starts with a base close to trade routes that connect the richest customers to the most competitive suppliers. It Is Partly the Luck of Location Economic growth has followed existing trade routes since well before the modern era. In the sixteenth century the nations of western Europe suddenly started to grow faster than their rivals in Asia and Latin America; for the first time in history, the inhabitants of one region clearly distanced themselves from all others in terms of average income.


pages: 618 words: 160,006

Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires and the Conflict That Made the Modern World by Andrew Lambert

bread and circuses, British Empire, classic study, different worldview, Donald Trump, joint-stock company, Malacca Straits, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, open economy, rising living standards, South China Sea, spice trade, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, UNCLOS

We forget that so soon as the mercantile marine became a recognised burden on the navy, the main lines of commerce became also the main lines of naval strategy, and the crossing of the trade routes its focal points. This, although strategists, for the purposes of commending their views to the public and Treasury, naturally write in terms of commerce, we must never forget that what they were really aiming at was the command of the sea by the domination of the great trade routes and the acquisition of focal points as naval stations.14 There would be no going back: henceforth the City of London would expect naval protection, whoever sat on the throne.

• They give the commercial classes a significant share in political power. • They prioritise naval over military power. • They enact legislation to create, secure or improve the maritime and naval resource base – be it ships, seamen, raw materials or trade routes. • They are active in suppressing piracy – which is both a hindrance to trade and the cause of higher insurance rates. • They depend on core trade routes, for which they are prepared to fight. • They use naval power to protect trade, convoying merchant shipping. • They are open to trade with other nations – but use economic measures to crush dangerous rivals. • They secure a limited portfolio of overseas bases, either as imperial outposts or through alliances, which provide critical logistics and strategic facilities for naval forces.

The first strategic commodity to be traded was timber. Both Egypt and Mesopotamia needed large, strong timbers for shipbuilding and temple projects, timbers that indigenous tree species could not supply. Not only did they import timber, but they fought for control of the cedar and resinous forests in the Lebanese mountains. The first maritime trade routes carried Lebanese timber south to Egypt, or north to the port of Byblos and then over the mountains to Mesopotamia. Economic need breached the cultural isolationism of these static riverine societies. The expansion of long-distance sea trade to include strategic metals began the process of creating Mediterranean civilisation, a cultural space defined by the sea.2 Although the sea was marginal to the great river-based civilisations, their reliance on imported resources generated maritime trade.


pages: 295 words: 92,670

1494: How a Family Feud in Medieval Spain Divided the World in Half by Stephen R. Bown

Atahualpa, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, charter city, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, Hernando de Soto, Peace of Westphalia, proprietary trading, spice trade, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, two and twenty, UNCLOS

WHEN THE walls of the ancient city of Constantinople were battered to the ground by the siege cannons of Mehmet the Conqueror in 1453, the patterns of travel and trade in the Mediterranean that had reigned for centuries rapidly changed. One of the immediate consequences, as long-standing trade routes closed, was the decline of Genoa’s influence and power. Thousands of Genoese seafarers, cartographers and merchants emigrated from their home city seeking a livelihood, and a good many were drawn by the flourishing slave trade south along the African coast. One of the beneficiaries of this great outpouring of Genoese talent was Portugal, then the pre-eminent maritime nation of Atlantic Europe. Portugal was opening new trade routes in Africa and the western Atlantic islands, secure in its monopoly by papal decree and international treaty.

Spaniards were particularly interested in the golden ornaments and jewellery worn by the kidnapped “Indians” of Cuba and Hispaniola. Gold meant wealth and power. There was, however, a complication. Columbus’s successful return infuriated King João II of Portugal, who claimed that a series of papal decrees clearly intended that any new trade routes to heathen lands belonged to him alone. The king soon began outfitting a fleet to cross the ocean and claim the “Indies” for Portugal. With war imminent, the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella sent an official envoy to the papal court in Rome to argue their case. Pope Alexander VI, also head of the notorious Borgia clan, issued the first Inter Caetera, which proclaimed “by the authority of the Almighty God” that Ferdinand and Isabella and their heirs in perpetuity were to have the exclusive right to travel in, trade with and colonize Columbus’s new-found lands.

Spain and Portugal affirmed the papal decrees of the Inter Caetera in the treaty signed in the Spanish town of Tordesillas in June 1494 . But they moved the line of demarcation between the Spanish and Portuguese zones of influence several hundred miles farther west. This placed an as-yet-undiscovered Brazil in the Portuguese half of the world, as well as protected Portugal’s African trade route from any European competition. The world was now officially divided. Although it was initially believed that Columbus had discovered the eastern extremity of Asia, it soon became apparent that the world was much larger than supposed, and that the pope had given to Spain and Portugal far more territory than anyone could have imagined.


pages: 409 words: 107,511

Antwerp: The Glory Years by Michael Pye

European colonialism, Gerolamo Cardano, moral hazard, Republic of Letters, spice trade, the market place, trade route, traveling salesman

There was a curious semicircular castle built around 980 by the German Emperor Otto II, so it was worth defending. But Antwerp had no court, no bishop, no very famous lord to help define its past, only a Margrave on the fringe of the Holy Roman Empire. Even the old-established trade routes did not explain much, because what made Antwerp rich was the change in trade routes: ships going by ocean to Asia and America. Antwerp was waiting for other histories to catch up, and meanwhile it honoured its legend Brabo.6 Reality is more mundane. All the ports in Flanders and Brabant were vying for the attention of foreign merchants and selling ease of access to Northern Europe for the trade and goods of the world.

The girls even knocked the boys’ hats into the river just like equals.1 Zoncha thought he’d found a world of liberty, very different from courtly, formal Venice but in a city which was at least its equal. Antwerp seemed to be inventing a new way to be rich, cultured and easy at the hub of the ever-expanding world that Europe knew. The very idea had worried Venetians all century. They had reason for concern, because their life and business were still organized around the Mediterranean and the trade routes that fed into it through the Red Sea. Antwerp was already dealing with India across the oceanic route that rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and with Brazil and America across the Atlantic by way of Seville and Lisbon. It belonged to a new world and a new system. One by one the Venetian ambassadors reported home.

The golden age in the minds of Antwerp’s citizens was almost the exact opposite of the civilized golden age we imagine they were living in. ‘Golden’ is our word for any period that produced things we still value – pictures, buildings, books, music, riches – but Ortelius saw civilization as where we end up when the golden times are long gone.14 The name of Antwerp was familiar all along the trade routes that came together in the queue of ships at its docks: it was city as celebrity. Its stories went out with the English wool on its way to Hungary and the Levant, with traders taking German copper and silver to Africa to exchange for gold and slaves, with the ships sailing back to Asia after dropping their cargoes of pepper, diamonds and spices.


pages: 282 words: 82,107

An Edible History of Humanity by Tom Standage

agricultural Revolution, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, carbon footprint, Columbian Exchange, Corn Laws, cotton gin, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Eratosthenes, financial innovation, food miles, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Louis Pasteur, Mikhail Gorbachev, special economic zone, spice trade, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce

One has certain proofs of this communication although no one has been able to confirm it by sight.” Al-Biruni’s informants were undoubtedly merchants. Religious beliefs were another kind of information that spread naturally along trade routes, as missionaries followed routes opened up by traders, and traders themselves took their beliefs to new lands. Mahayana Buddhism spread along trade routes from India to China and Japan, and Hinayana Buddhism spread from Sri Lanka to Burma, Thailand, and Vietnam. Tradition has it that Thomas the Apostle took Christianity to India’s Malabar coast in the first century A.D., arriving on a spice-trader’s ship in Cranganore (modern Kodun-gallur) in 52 A.D.

The production of agricultural food surpluses and the development of communal food-storage and irrigation systems fostered political centralization; agricultural fertility rituals developed into state religions; food became a medium of payment and taxation; feasts were used to garner influence and demonstrate status; food handouts were used to define and reinforce power structures. Throughout the ancient world, long before the invention of money, food was wealth—and control of food was power. Once civilizations had emerged in various parts of the world, food helped to connect them together. Food-trade routes acted as international communications networks that fostered not just commercial exchange, but cultural and religious exchange too. The spice routes that spanned the Old World led to cross-cultural fertilization in fields as diverse as architecture, science, and religion. Early geographers started to take an interest in the customs and peoples of distant lands and compiled the first attempts at world maps.

Early geographers started to take an interest in the customs and peoples of distant lands and compiled the first attempts at world maps. By far the greatest transformation caused by food trade was a result of the European desire to circumvent the Arab spice monopoly. This led to the discovery of the New World, the opening of maritime trade routes between Europe, America, and Asia, and the establishment by European nations of their first colonial outposts. Along the way, it also revealed the true layout of the world. As European nations vied to build global empires, food helped to bring about the next big shift in human history: a surge in economic development through industrialization.


Nepal Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, land reform, load shedding, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, traffic fines

Everest Region Astounding high mountain scenery and cosy Sherpa lodges, but try to visit outside of October (Click here) Annapurna Circuit Nepal’s most popular trek has lots of variety, passing Tibetan-style villages, fabulous mountain views and a challenging 5500m pass (Click here) Langtang Quieter trails, alpine valleys and lots of route combinations make this a good low-key option (Click here) Annapurna Sanctuary A straight shot past Gurung villages and bamboo groves into an incredible amphitheatre of frozen Himalayan peaks (Click here) Villages & Day Hikes Nepal’s ridges and valleys are laced with a network of footpaths travelled for centuries by traders and holy men. Bring your daypack to the following for a fine taste of rural Nepali life. Tansen Wander ancient trade routes, visit a potters’ village or explore the eerie ruins of a riverside palace, once the home of an exiled politician (Click here) Jomsom Plane and now minibus connections mean you can use this hub as a base to visit fabulous nearby Himalayan villages like Kagbeni and Marpha (see the boxed text on Click here) Bandipur Base yourself in comfortable digs at this charming medieval village and day hike out to temples, viewpoints and caves (Click here) Pokhara There are loads of options here, from a day’s stroll around Phewa Tal to cardio hikes up to Sarangkot or the Peace Pagoda, all offering superb views (Click here) Porter team ascending a ridge in the Annapurna Range (Click here) GARRY WEARE/LONELY PLANET IMAGES © Wildlife Watching Nepal’s subtropical plains hide an array of wildlife worthy of the The Jungle Book.

While the documented history of the valley goes back to the Kiratis, around the 7th century BC, the foundation of Kathmandu itself dates from the 12th century AD, during the time of the Malla dynasty. The original settlements of Yambu and Yangala, at the confluence of the Bagmati and Vishnumati Rivers in what is now the southern half of the old town, grew up around the trade route to Tibet. Traders and pilgrims stayed at rest houses such as the Kasthamandap, which later lent its name to the city. Originally known as Kantipur, the city flourished during the Malla era, and the bulk of its superb temples, buildings and other monuments date from this time. Initially, Kathmandu was an independent city within the valley, but in the 14th century the valley was united under the rule of the Malla king of Bhaktapur.

Bhimsen Temple BUDDHIST TEMPLE Offline map Google map The Newari deity Bhimsen is said to watch over traders and artisans, so it’s quite appropriate that the ground floor of this well-kept temple should be devoted to shop stalls. An image of Bhimsen used to be carried to Lhasa in Tibet every 12 years to protect those vital trade routes, until the route was closed by the flight of the Dalai Lama in 1959. Tourists are not allowed inside the temple, which is fronted by a brass lion on a pedestal, ducking under the electric wires. Start Durbar Sq Finish Durbar Sq Distance 2km Duration one hour Walking Tour South from Durbar Square Starting from the Kasthamandap in the southwestern corner of Durbar Sq, fork right at the Singh Sattal, and follow the road past a Shiva temple with a finely carved pilgrim shelter.


pages: 650 words: 203,191

After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405 by John Darwin

agricultural Revolution, Atahualpa, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, classic study, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, cuban missile crisis, deglobalization, deindustrialization, European colonialism, failed state, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, open economy, price mechanism, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade

THE OCCIDENTAL BREAKOUT The Portuguese were the oceanic frontiersmen of European expansion. The Portuguese kingdom was a small weak state perched on the Atlantic periphery. But by c. 1400 its rulers and merchants were able to exploit its one magnificent asset, the harbour of Lisbon. Europe’s Atlantic coast had become an important trade route between the Mediterranean and North West Europe. Lisbon was where the two great maritime economies of Europe – the Mediterranean and the Atlantic – met and overlapped.1 It was an entrepô t for trade and commercial information and for the exchange of ideas about shipping and seamanship.2 It was the jumping-off point for the colonization of the Atlantic islands (Madeira was occupied in 1426, the Azores were settled in the 1430s), and for the crusading filibuster that led to the capture of Ceuta in Morocco in 1415.

Lisbon was where the two great maritime economies of Europe – the Mediterranean and the Atlantic – met and overlapped.1 It was an entrepô t for trade and commercial information and for the exchange of ideas about shipping and seamanship.2 It was the jumping-off point for the colonization of the Atlantic islands (Madeira was occupied in 1426, the Azores were settled in the 1430s), and for the crusading filibuster that led to the capture of Ceuta in Morocco in 1415. Thus, long before they ventured beyond Cape Bojador on the west coast of Africa in 1434, the Portuguese had experimented with different kinds of empire-building. Their geographical ideas were shaped not only by knowledge of the great Asian trade routes that had their western terminus in the Mediterranean, but also by the influence of crusading ideology.3 Ironically, the crusading impulse assumed that Portugal lay at the western edge of the known world and that the object was to drive eastward towards its centre in the Holy Land. Perhaps it was this and Portugal’s early forays into North Africa after 1415 (where it heard of Morocco’s West African gold supplies) that pulled the Portuguese first south and east rather than westward across the Atlantic.

Most African states looked inland, regarding the ocean as an aquatic desert and (in West Africa) seeing the dry desert of the Sahara as the real highway to distant markets. In these favourable conditions, the Portuguese traversed the empty seas and then pushed north from the Cape until they ran across the southern terminus of the Indo-African trade route near the mouth of the Zambezi. From there they could rely upon local knowledge, and a local pilot who could direct them to India. Once north of the Zambezi, Vasco da Gama re-entered the known world, as if emerging from a long detour through pathless wastes. When he arrived in Calicut on India’s Malabar coast, he re-established contact with Europe via the familiar Middle Eastern route used by travellers and merchants.


Belgium - Culture Smart!: The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture by Bernadett Varga

Airbnb, Black Lives Matter, centre right, coronavirus, COVID-19, Day of the Dead, high-speed rail, lockdown, Peace of Westphalia, trade route, women in the workforce, work culture

• Written Communication • Face-to-Face • The Media • Phones and Sim Cards • The Internet and Social Media • Mail • Conclusion Appendix: Useful Apps Further Reading Acknowledgment MAP OF BELGIUM INTRODUCTION Situated on the western seaboard of Europe, Belgium is bordered to the north by the Netherlands, to the east by Germany and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, and to the south and west by France. A small country, its location at the meeting point of historically important trading routes has made it the economic and urban nerve center of Europe. Somehow, Belgium has acquired the reputation of being Europe’s most boring country, a reputation that is entirely undeserved. In fact, if you are looking for the eccentric and the surreal, Belgium is the place to find it. Perhaps this bland image is a smokescreen, the conventional exterior hiding a subversive sense of humor, a surreal imagination, and a deep-rooted disdain for authority.

Time Zone 1 hour ahead of GMT; normally 6 hours ahead of US Eastern Time, 9 hours ahead of Pacific Standard Time. CHAPTER ONE LAND & PEOPLE “It’s quite simple, really, and at the same time rather complicated.” (Captain Haddock, in Hergé, Land of Black Gold) GEOGRAPHY Small but perfectly placed, Belgium is the historical meeting point of northern Europe’s chief trading routes. It sits on the continent’s northwestern seaboard, with several important ports, and borders on the Netherlands, Germany, Luxembourg, and France. Its countryside and cities are diverse, ranging from flat polder land to densely forested mountains, and from the slightly museum-like charm of Bruges to the industrial sprawl of Liège.

The Growth of Towns and Trade Monastic communities had begun reclaiming the coastal marshland from the sea, and the medieval landscape from Bruges to the sea and along the Scheldt as far inland as Antwerp was one of polders crisscrossed by protective dikes. From the late eleventh century onward, trade routes developed along the rivers, and trading posts gradually became busy, prosperous walled towns. Industry and trade blossomed, particularly in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The towns were granted charters by the counts of Flanders. Different regions specialized in different industries: cloth (from wool imported from England) in Bruges, Ghent, and Ypres, and metalworking in the Meuse region of Wallonia.


pages: 466 words: 146,982

Venice: A New History by Thomas F. Madden

big-box store, buy low sell high, centre right, colonial rule, Columbine, Costa Concordia, double entry bookkeeping, facts on the ground, financial innovation, indoor plumbing, invention of movable type, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Murano, Venice glass, spice trade, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning

Along the way, the state taxed every transaction and the Venetian economy flourished. Safe trade routes overland had traditionally not been a concern of Venetians, who very deliberately focused their attention on the lagoon and the sea. Since northern Italy was fragmented into competing communes and petty regional powers, there was little fear that all routes could ever be closed. But by the late fourteenth century the rise of the signori had produced powerful and expansionistic states in Italy that could conceivably cut off Venice’s access to the trade routes, produce, and raw materials of the mainland. Indeed, that had been the goal of Genoa and Padua during the War of Chioggia.

The thirteenth century saw the creation of the state Arsenale, a vast workshop for the production of war vessels that would remain active for centuries—indeed, it remains a military installation to this day. Venetian expansion into the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean Seas also came at a fortuitous time. The recent victories of Genghis Khan in China and westward had allowed stable trade routes to develop along the Silk Road stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the markets of the Black Sea, Constantinople, and Syria. At the same time, the growth of towns, revival of trade, and return of capital in western Europe meant that there was now a ready market for Eastern luxury goods, which the Venetians were in an ideal position to exploit.

And eventually all those things worked. After a few years of carnage, the plague invariably faltered, unable to make headway among those who had developed antibodies against it. But new victims lived just down the road. Just as it had followed the merchants from China to Italy, the Black Death moved along the trade routes in Europe from Venice, Genoa, and Marseille to every point northward, even as far away as Iceland. Everywhere the death toll was horrendous. Millions perished—probably 50 percent of the total population of Europe died in the first decade of the disease. And this blow came only a few years after some of Europe’s worst famines, brought on by a sustained period of global cooling.


The Atlas of Disease by Sandra Hempel

clean water, coronavirus, Easter island, Edward Jenner, global pandemic, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, out of africa, trade route, wikimedia commons

Spreading from the subcontinent The disease first emerged from the Sundarbans forest of the Bay of Bengal, in the Ganges delta, where the bacterium Vibrio cholera had probably been mutating for millennia. The organism is found naturally in the environment in some coastal and brackish waters, where shellfish sometimes carry the infection. Only in the early 1800s, however, when the British were opening up new trade routes in India and moving troops across the subcontinent, did cholera begin to move out of its home territory, first across India and eventually across the world in a series of huge pandemics. In August 1817, the British government received a report of a ‘malignant disorder’ in the Sundarbans, killing twenty to thirty people a day.

Doctors in Russia, France and Britain began studying the disease as a matter of urgency and the Russian government offered a prize of twenty-five thousand roubles (more than fifty thousand pounds today) for the best essay on the subject. But finding answers proved to be a difficult business. With hindsight, it should have been obvious that cholera was contagious – that is, spread from person to person. It steadily followed the trade routes and appeared in new places only after the arrival of people from an infected area. Yet throughout most of the nineteenth century, there was huge debate about its mode of transmission. This was because of the way it killed large numbers of people very fast and broke out seemingly at random, striking dozens or even hundreds overnight and then disappearing, only to reappear a few days later in some apparently unconnected place miles away.

It began in AD 541 in Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul), before spreading east into Persia and west into southern Europe, eventually killing an estimated 33 to 40 per cent of the world’s population. While the plague’s progress after Constantinople is mapped, it is still unclear how the disease reached the city. The Byzantine historian Procopius, who witnessed the devastation, claimed plague came from Egypt, following the trade routes. More recent theories suggest it originated in sub-Saharan African, possibly Kenya, Uganda, and/or Zaire, before either moving into Egypt or taking a different route to the Byzantine capital. Other experts believe the source was from the region spanning what is now Russia and China, now generally agreed to be the source for the Black Death some eight hundred years later.


pages: 412 words: 121,164

Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World by Anthony Sattin

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anton Chekhov, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, digital nomad, Donald Trump, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, invention of writing, Islamic Golden Age, James Hargreaves, Jessica Bruder, Khartoum Gordon, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nomadland, open borders, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, spinning jenny, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, traveling salesman

The Almohads showed what nomads could achieve when they channelled the power of the asabiyya, but Ibn Khaldun’s system to explain the rise and fall of civilisations found a more significant example in the past of his own people. As with many nomad stories, this one starts with ‘open lands and pastures grazed by camels’,16 with tribes and trade routes, and with one trader in particular, from a desert city, who claimed to have been visited by an angel. Seventh-Century Messengers A messenger rode out of the Arabian Desert heading east to the Euphrates river. At the Persian capital, Ctesiphon, he delivered this message to the Sasanian ruler, Khosrow II: he had been sent by a man who described himself as ‘the slave of God’ and who called on the emperor to embrace a new religion ‘so that you may remain safe (in this life and the next)’.

In that year Abbasid and Tang forces had fought an epoch-defining battle at Talas in modern Kyrgyzstan. One result of the battle was the creation of an unofficial border that marked the limit of China’s western expansion, which effectively gave the Abbasids control over much of Central Asia and its trade routes. Another outcome was that one of the Tang prisoners showed his Arab captors how to make paper. The technique was trialled in Abbasid-ruled Samarkand that same year of 751 and by the end of the century paper was being produced and used in Baghdad. The Glorious Age of Settling Down There was a price to pay for these advances, as Ibn Khaldun knew: At the time of the first Umayyad caliphs, the Arabs continued to use the dwellings they had, tents of leather and wool.

Samarkand, which had fallen to Muhammad Shah in 1208, had quickly become Khwarazm’s political capital and one of the great trading centres of the Silk Roads. Bukhara, one of the largest cities in the Islamic world, was the empire’s religious centre and a refuge of scholarship. Gurganj had earned immense wealth from its pivotal position on the north–south and east–west trade routes. Before each city, Mongol leaders paused to demand that the city’s governor open the gates. The terms offered were always the same: acknowledge sovereignty and pay tribute, usually in the form of gold, and the city and its people would be safe. But the governors were confident that their cities could withstand the brunt of Mongol arms and they did not concede.


pages: 281 words: 69,107

Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order by Bruno Maçães

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Admiral Zheng, autonomous vehicles, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, cloud computing, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, Donald Trump, energy security, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global supply chain, global value chain, high-speed rail, industrial cluster, industrial robot, Internet of things, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, liberal world order, Malacca Straits, middle-income trap, one-China policy, Pearl River Delta, public intellectual, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, trade liberalization, trade route, zero-sum game

Vladislav Surkov, a trusted advisor to President Putin, recently argued that Russia is a “Western-Eastern half-breed nation, with its double-headed statehood, hybrid mentality, intercontinental territory and bipolar history.” In fact Moscow is also looking south to the Middle East, hoping to acquire control over all the main regions of energy production, and to the north, as global warming transforms the Arctic into an important trade route linking Europe and Asia. Eurasia is becoming smaller, more integrated, the stage for intense rivalry and competition between different poles, each of them projecting influence outwards and creating new connections. Japan is financing and building infrastructure across the Indian Ocean, all the way to Djibouti, an initiative to which it has dedicated $250 billion.

Exporters such as Russia will likely support the move, as they share the same desire to break the dollar’s global dominance. * * * The Belt and Road represents the transformation of China from a regional into a global power. Announcing the initiative in two separate speeches in September and October 2013, President Xi Jinping appealed to the spirit of the ancient Silk Road, the maze of trade routes connecting major civilizations across Europe, Asia and Africa one or two thousand years ago. Referring to a world before European hegemony, the Silk Road could be held up as symbolizing a model of global politics based on cooperation and mutual learning. Less obviously, it contained the seeds of a return to a time when China was the center of the global economy and a technological powerhouse, holding the secrets of silk production and sharp-head, flat-rear high speed junks.

Standing on the stage of the main auditorium in Nazarbayev University, Xi added: “Today, as I stand here and look back at history, I can almost hear the camel bells echoing in the mountains and see the wisps of smoke rising from the desert, and this gives me a specially good feeling.” Significantly, Xi never describes the initiative he is announcing as a “new Silk Road.” That is because the initiative is wholly new—as the scholar Wang Yiwei puts it, China used a very Chinese concept and name “to demonstrate its intellectual property.”15 It is not a trade route but an economic belt: “We should take an innovative approach and jointly build an economic belt along the Silk Road,” Xi explained. In Beijing’s eyes a Belt is a space of deep economic integration. It may well depend on the development of the necessary transport integration, but it goes much beyond that.


pages: 565 words: 164,405

A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World by William J. Bernstein

Admiral Zheng, asset allocation, bank run, Benoit Mandelbrot, British Empire, call centre, clean water, Columbian Exchange, Corn Laws, cotton gin, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, domestication of the camel, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Eratosthenes, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, high-speed rail, ice-free Arctic, imperial preference, income inequality, intermodal, James Hargreaves, John Harrison: Longitude, Khyber Pass, low skilled workers, non-tariff barriers, Paul Samuelson, placebo effect, Port of Oakland, refrigerator car, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, upwardly mobile, working poor, zero-sum game

The silk of Elagabalus was in fact one of the rare luxuries to arrive from India after that period. The dramatic increase in long-distance trade following the battle of Actium and its waning two hundred years later had nothing to do with changes in maritime technology. Certainly, the Roman, Greek, Arab, and Indian traders who plied the Indian Ocean trade routes did not suddenly lose their maritime abilities after the reign of Marcus Aurelius. Now consider the contribution of trade to our planet's agricultural bounty. Try to imagine Italian cuisine without the tomato, the highlands around Darjeeling without tea plants, an American table without wheat bread or beef, a cafe anywhere in the world beyond coffee's birthplace in Yemen, or German cooking without the potato.

During the seven centuries between the death of the Prophet Muhammad and the Renaissance, the Muslim states of Europe, Asia, and Africa outshone and towered over western Christendom. Muhammad's followers dominated the great conduit of long-range world commerce, the Indian Ocean, and in the process spread his powerful message from west Africa to the South China Sea. Then, with breathtaking speed, a newly resurgent West took control of global trade routes in the decades following the first roundings of the Cape of Good Hope by Bartholomew Diaz and Vasco da Gama. Can we understand these events under the larger banner of the history of trade? The great national trading organizations, particularly the English and Dutch East India companies, spearheaded Europe's commercial dominance and made world trade the nearly exclusive province of large corporate entities and, in the twentieth century, of the multinational corporation.

14 How, then, did we get from the world of the ancient silk trade and the Geniza papers, in which the trader's job was so solitary, expensive, and heroic that only the most precious of cargoes paid their way, to the modern corporate world of wines from Chile, cars from Korea, and apples from New Zealand? Stable countries are trading countries. Commerce between Rome and East Asia took off after Octavian's victory at Actium and ushered in nearly two centuries of relative peace throughout the Mediterranean and Red Sea trade routes. While the Romans controlled, at most, the western third of the route between Alexandria and India, their influence was felt as far east as the Ganges. Although individual merchants rarely carried goods all the way from India to Rome, there were frequent face-to-face diplomatic contacts between various Indian states and Rome.


Egypt Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

call centre, carbon footprint, Eratosthenes, friendly fire, G4S, haute cuisine, Khartoum Gordon, late fees, low cost airline, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, sustainable-tourism, Thales and the olive presses, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl

The oases enjoyed a period of great prosperity during Roman times, when new wells and improved irrigation led to the production of wheat and grapes for export to Rome. Garrisoned fortresses that protected the oases and trade routes can still be seen in the desert around Al-Kharga and Bahariya, and Roman-era temples and tombs lie scattered across all the oases. When the Romans withdrew from Egypt, the trade routes became a target for attacking nomadic tribes. Trade suffered, the oases went into gradual decline, and the population of settlements shrank. By medieval times, raids by nomads were severe enough to bring Mamluk garrisons to the oases.

Despite these setbacks, the French still maintained rule. FOREIGN INVADERS The story of ancient Egypt is the story of Egypt’s relationships with its neighbours, for its wealth attracted some and its strategic location on the Mediterranean and Red Seas, and on the trade routes between Africa and Asia, attracted others. When it was strong, it controlled the gold of Nubia and the trade route across the Levant – not for nothing was the image of Ramses II crushing the Hittites at Kadesh splashed across so many temple walls. When it was weak, it caught the attention of the power of the moment. In 663 BC, the Assyrian leader Ashurbanipal sacked Thebes.

One–Two Weeks Desert Escape Inspired by Lawrence of Arabia and The English Patient scenery, would-be desert rovers can get sand-happy in the amazing Western Desert. Begin with a bus from Cairo or Asyut to Al-Kharga Oasis, the southernmost oasis in the Western Desert loop. Spend a day here exploring the Al-Kharga Museum of Antiquities as well as the Graeco-Roman temples, tombs and other interesting traces of the trade routes that flourished here during the Roman Empire. From Al-Kharga, make your way northwest to Dakhla Oasis to see the fascinating hivelike, mud-walled settlements of Balat and Al-Qasr. Next, hop north to either Farafra Oasis or Bahariya Oasis, where you can make a two- or three-day camp in the stunning White Desert National Park.


Egypt Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

call centre, carbon footprint, Eratosthenes, friendly fire, haute cuisine, Khartoum Gordon, late fees, low cost airline, off grid, place-making, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, sustainable-tourism, Thales and the olive presses, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl

The oases enjoyed a period of great prosperity during Roman times, when new wells and improved irrigation led to the production of wheat and grapes for export to Rome. Garrisoned fortresses that protected the oases and trade routes can still be seen in the desert around Al-Kharga and Bahariya, and Roman-era temples and tombs lie scattered across all the oases. When the Romans withdrew from Egypt, the trade routes became a target for attacking nomadic tribes. Trade suffered, the oases went into gradual decline, and the population of settlements shrank. By medieval times, raids by nomads were severe enough to bring Mamluk garrisons to the oases.

He was succeeded by His Holiness Pope Theodoros II, the 118th Patriarch of Alexandria. FOREIGN INVADERS The story of ancient Egypt is the story of Egypt’s relationships with its neighbours, for its wealth attracted some and its strategic location on the Mediterranean and Red Seas, and on the trade routes between Africa and Asia, attracted others. When it was strong, it controlled the gold of Nubia and the trade route across the Levant – not for nothing was the image of Ramses II crushing the Hittites at Kadesh splashed across so many temple walls. When it was weak, it caught the attention of the power of the moment. In 663 BC the Assyrian leader Ashurbanipal sacked Thebes.

White Desert National Park For a truly mind-bending experience, schedule your overnight trip to this eerie landscape during the full moon. Great Sand Sea These picture-perfect dunes extend hundreds of miles into Libya, but you can get a taste of the emptiness even on a short trip. Monastery of St Simeon For desert beauty without the days-long trek, visit this Coptic site in Aswan. Eastern Desert Once criss-crossed by ancient trade routes, with rock inscriptions, gold mines and great landscapes, now only accessible with a guide. Souqs & Shopping Whether you’re just browsing or searching for gifts for everyone on your list, Egypt’s souqs are the perfect destination, with as much entertainment as actual products – not to mention more offers of tea than you could ever drink.


pages: 496 words: 131,938

The Future Is Asian by Parag Khanna

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Basel III, bike sharing, birth tourism , blockchain, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, energy security, European colonialism, factory automation, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, flex fuel, gig economy, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green transition, haute couture, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, light touch regulation, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, Malacca Straits, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, Parag Khanna, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

In each phase of Asian history, geopolitical competition for territory and trade routes expanded the reach and intensity of the whole system. Encounters between Arabs and Mongols pushed both each to explore new pathways (and allies), to subdue or evade each other, and to reach key markets. Already in the thirteenth century, the Mongols managed to link much of the world known at the time. For numerous Song Chinese and Southeast Asian maritime entrepôts, external trade was crucial to the survival of local economies. The Chola, Srivijaya, and Ming all jockeyed for control over Indian Ocean trade routes long before the arrival of European merchants.

Despite the region’s vast geographic and cultural diversity, Buddhism was the glue that held numerous Asian civilizations together. Bamiyan became a major center of Buddhist learning where monks nurtured a distinctive artistic style developed fusing Iranian, Indian, and Gandharan forms. Dunhuang in the Tarim basin, the site of stunning Buddhist grottoes chiseled into mountainsides, was the crossroads of several trade routes linking Mongolia and Tibet to Parthia and the Levant. As Han monks and merchants traveled the Silk Road in search of inspiration, they brought back Buddhist texts translated by Sogdians. Buddhism thus extended its reach through the Han Empire in a pincerlike movement from the west and south from India and Southeast Asia.

Indeed, the Song were the first Chinese dynasty to commercialize the “tribute system” that focused on gains from trade with secondary powers rather than heavy taxation of the populace. Meanwhile, the Kingdom of Pagan unified central and coastal Burma as well as the Malay Peninsula, strengthening overland trade routes that linked the Bay of Bengal via Yunnan to China. The Chola, Song, and Srivijaya all competed to control strategic maritime passageways such as the Strait of Malacca but also amplified the linkages between their external trade and internal economies. Meanwhile, on the other side of Eurasia, Europe had been stagnant for centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire.


pages: 500 words: 115,119

Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age by Robert D. Kaplan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, British Empire, coronavirus, COVID-19, dematerialisation, disinformation, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, geopolitical risk, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, mega-rich, megacity, open borders, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban planning

Oakley ends the third volume with the execution of Louis XVI of France in 1793, which, because of a still-remaining sacral tie to kingship, constituted a direct assault on Christianity itself, symbolizing, in Albert Camus’s words, “the secularization of our history and the disincarnation of the Christian God.”[5] Thus, the modern secular West comes into existence mainly in northern Europe, directly from obscure feudal beginnings. How I regret not continuing my formal education beyond college and toward a PhD. I am now at the age when it is common to fantasize about having lived other lives. I would have become, say, a scholar of medieval China, writing about the Central Asian trade routes of the Tang Dynasty; or a scholar of Romanian studies specializing in the imperial conflicts of the Balkans; or a scholar of the Latin Middle Ages like Francis Oakley himself. Instead of poring through grammars and acquiring a familiarity with many languages, many gradually forgotten, I would have perfected one or perhaps two of them.

Mary McCarthy writes: “those hale old doges…seem to us a strange breed of sea-animal, who left behind them the pink, convoluted shell they grew to protect them, which is Venice.”[32] The supreme calculation encouraged by this ducal system resulted in, as Norwich tells us, only three strategic blows in the course of almost 1,100 years of dogeship: the discovery of the Cape route to the Indies in 1499, which overshadowed Venice’s own trade routes to the Levant and Central Asia; the gradual spread of Ottoman power in the eastern Mediterranean following the fall of Byzantium in 1453; and the onslaught of the League of Cambrai against Venice in the early sixteenth century—none being Venice’s fault. Realism worked wonders and was the one true religion of Venice, a place and a system that worshipped Byzantium, but besieged it when it suited her, and gave the Byzantine emperors only limited help later on, in order not to antagonize the Ottomans who loomed as the successor power in Constantinople.[33] Venetian doges always had one eye cocked over the horizon.

The Ottoman Empire was still an important source of grain for Venice. For there were long periods of peace between the two empires, when Venice used the Muslim Ottomans as a source of pressure upon rival Catholic city-states in Italy. “Venice,” Malcolm says, “was the only [European] power whose naval policy was primarily concerned with the protection of trade routes; and since the trade in question was with the Ottoman Empire, the usual policy involved cooperation, not conflict.” There is an even larger point here: that geopolitics, because it is somewhat refreshingly amoral, stood above bloody religious clashes with all of their moral absolutes. For example, Catholic Poland could live with the Ottoman-ruled Romanian principalities, “but it could not accept the idea of their becoming clients and creatures of the [fellow Catholic] Habsburgs,” who were too close by for comfort.


pages: 480 words: 112,463

The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History by Kassia St Clair

Apollo 11, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, butterfly effect, Dmitri Mendeleev, Elon Musk, flying shuttle, Francisco Pizarro, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, gravity well, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Neil Armstrong, North Ronaldsay sheep, out of africa, Rana Plaza, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, spinning jenny, synthetic biology, TED Talk, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Virgin Galactic, Works Progress Administration

One strip bore the incredibly helpful inscription: ‘A roll of silk from K’ang-fu in the kingdom of Jen-ch’eng; width two feet and two inches; length forty feet; weight twenty-five ounces; value six hundred and eighteen pieces of money.’ When the Song dynasty collapsed in 1127 a new workshop for making rich damask was founded with the specific aim of making silks that could be traded with Tibetan tribesmen in return for horses. Later, silk lent its name to the network of trade routes that spread across Central Asia: the Silk Roads. While the majority of these exchanges were animated by the spirit of commerce, others were motivated by fear.22 Gifts for Enemies The Xiongnu live in the desert and grow in the land which produces no food. [They] are abandoned by Heaven for being good-for-nothing.

During the day, his ponies’ feet would sink in the sand – it is a region best traversed by camel – as would those of his dog Dash, dressed in a custom Kashmiri fur coat to save him from freezing, but who eventually submitted to being borne along in a camel basket with a hole in the lid. On 18 December 1900, Stein came upon the remains of Dandan-Uiliq, abandoned in the late eighth century, and marked only by the sun-bleached tops of a few dead fruit trees in what was once an orchard. Seven years later, he saw some even more remarkable traces of the trade route that had once stitched the desert together. This time, however, the triumph of actual discovery belonged to someone else.2 While Stein scoured desert regions for archaeological treasure, Wang Yuanlu, a Taoist monk, was the lone guardian of a series of remarkable shrines. Known as the Mogao Caves or the Temples of the Thousand Buddhas, they were situated near Dunhuang, an oasis in north-west China, on the rim of the Gobi Desert.

The midrash, the commentary that runs alongside Hebrew Scriptures, contains a parable of sorts that involves the setting aside of some valuable silk by one man after another has promised to buy it. Although the buyer doesn’t come for his purchase for a long time, the seller keeps faith. ‘Thy word,’ he says when his customer does eventually arrive, ‘is stronger in my eyes than money.’17 Buddhism flourished in China in part because of the exchange of ideas facilitated by the trade routes, eventually becoming one of the country’s three major religions. Silk embedded itself deeply within the faith’s religious practices. Silks were used to wrap important relics and scriptures – a practice later borrowed by other beliefs, including Christianity. (Benedict Biscop, the English abbot of Wearmouth and Jarrow, made five trips to Rome in the mid-seventh century and he returned to his Northumbrian monasteries bearing books, relics and rich silks with which to wrap them.)


pages: 470 words: 118,051

The Fallen Blade: Act One of the Assassini by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

invisible hand, Murano, Venice glass, trade route

The emperor of Byzantium to the south. The Pope has declared the Millioni false princes. Making them fair game for any penitent with a sharp dagger and a guilty conscience. The Mamluks covet our trade routes. The King of Hungary wants his Schiavoni colonies in Dalmatia back. Everyone offers to protect us from everyone else. Who do you think the predators are?” “So you marry Giulietta to Janus because it will help protect those trade routes? Poor child…” Finding them watching her, Giulietta turned away. “She makes no pretence to be pleased,” said Sir Richard, then shrugged. “Why would she? Janus is years older. I imagine she dreams of the Florentine.”

“He’s a monster.” “Giulietta… The Germans want Venice. The Byzantines want it too. The Mamluks want your colonies. Even my people, the Moors, would happily see your navy sunk. King Janus was Black only briefly. Cyprus is an island we can use.” “Use?” she said in scorn. “Venice’s strength rests on its trade routes. It needs Cyprus. Besides, you have to marry someone.” “It might as well be him?” The Moor nodded, and she wondered if he could read the fury in her eyes. Anger kept her fear at bay. Her fear of what being bedded by a Black Crucifer might involve. “My lord,” Josh interrupted. Atilo raised his bow.

“You know…” “He can’t be let out in public?” “Alonzo…” “It’s the truth. And, speaking of truth, are you behind this?” “Behind what?” “Giulietta’s abduction?” “Why would I do that?” “Answer me.” “If you remember,” Alexa said tightly, “I suggested her marriage to Janus. We need Cyprus to secure our trade routes. In fact, our future wealth depends on it. You seem over-friendly with the sultan’s ambassador. Should I be asking you the same?” “Believe me, that’s changing.” Stamping to the balcony, Alonzo glared through fretted shutters at a crowd on the Molo, the palace’s water terrace. Beyond them, to his left, the Riva degli Schiavoni was equally thronged.


pages: 388 words: 99,023

The Emperor's New Road: How China's New Silk Road Is Remaking the World by Jonathan Hillman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, British Empire, cable laying ship, capital controls, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, drone strike, energy security, facts on the ground, high-speed rail, intermodal, joint-stock company, Just-in-time delivery, land reform, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Malacca Straits, megaproject, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, rent-seeking, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, special economic zone, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, trade route, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, union organizing, Washington Consensus

But on China’s border, things were moving slowly, if at all. As minutes stretched into hours, the idea for this book was born. In Washington, DC, and other Western capitals, policy makers heard about the forum in Beijing. They read about dozens of foreign leaders showing up, over sixty countries signing onto China’s effort, ancient trade routes being revived, and other grand claims, often the same ones that Chinese state media tout. They saw maps of new economic corridors running outward from China. All these details add to an image of China as cunning, strategic, and marching in lockstep toward midcentury. They missed the lunch breaks and border delays.

With first-time arrivals celebrated in France, Latvia, and Finland, among other countries in recent years, it is tempting to believe that trains are replacing camels on the old Silk Road. Even countries that have been reluctant to endorse the BRI have embraced China-Europe railways. When a train from Yiwu, China, arrived in London in January 2017, the Telegraph called it “a new chapter in the history of the centuries-old trading route,” and the Guardian said it “heralds the dawn of a new commercial era.”29 In reality, the route was an adjustment from a similarly hyped journey taken between China and Spain in 2014, and the difference between the two routes exists entirely within the EU. On arriving in Duisburg, Germany, the train continued to London instead of Madrid.

When the conversation turned to China’s trade with the Middle East, Pakistan’s minister for commerce, who was also the defense adviser, pointed out that the nearest outlet for Chinese trade with the Middle East was Karachi, not the port of Shanghai. The key to increasing China’s trade, he claimed, was to reopen “an ancient trade route . . . lost to modern times, not only for trade but for strategic purposes as well.” Zhou sent for a map, and after a glimpse of the route, he allegedly asked, “When can our engineers meet?”43 What is clear is that from the beginning, the highway’s commercial importance was secondary to strategic concerns.


Guns, germs, and steel: the fates of human societies by Jared M. Diamond

affirmative action, Atahualpa, British Empire, California gold rush, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, discovery of the americas, Easter island, European colonialism, founder crops, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, invention of movable type, invention of the wheel, invention of writing, James Watt: steam engine, Maui Hawaii, QWERTY keyboard, the scientific method, trade route

Evidently, those crops reached southern Nige- ria only after languages began to break up into subgroups, so each sub- group coined or received different names for the new plants, which the modern languages of only that particular subgroup inherited. Last come crop names that aren't consistent within language groups at all, but instead follow trade routes. These prove to be New World crops like corn and peanuts, which we know were introduced into Africa after the beginnings of transatlantic ship traffic (A.D. 1492) and diffused since then along trade routes, often bearing their Portuguese or other foreign names. Thus, even if we possessed no botanical or archaeological evidence whatsoever, we would still be able to deduce from the linguistic evidence alone that native West African crops were domesticated first, that Indone- sian crops arrived next, and that finally the European introductions came in.

When the Portuguese navi- gator Vasco da Gama became the first European to sail around the south- ern cape of Africa and reached the Kenya coast in 1498, he encountered Swahili trading settlements and picked up a pilot who guided him on that direct route to India. But there was an equally vigorous sea trade from India eastward, between India and Indonesia. Perhaps the Austronesian colonists of Mada- gascar reached India from Indonesia by that eastern trade route and then fell in with the westward trade route to East Africa, where they joined with Africans and discovered Madagascar. That union of Austronesians and East Africans lives on today in Madagascar's basically Austronesian language, which contains loan words from coastal Kenyan Bantu lan- guages. But there are no corresponding Austronesian loan words in Kenyan languages, and other traces of Austronesians are very thin on the ground in East Africa: mainly just Africa's possible legacy of Indonesian musical instruments (xylophones and zithers) and, of course, the Aus- tronesian crops that became so important in African agriculture.

Like ragweed's, sumpweed's pollen can cause hayfever where the plant occurs in abundant stands. If that doesn't kill your enthusiasm for becoming a sumpweed farmer, be aware that it has a strong odor objectionable to some people and that handling it can cause skin irritation. Mexican crops finally began to reach the eastern United States by trade routes after A.D. 1. Corn arrived around A.D. 200, but its role remained very minor for many centuries. Finally, around A.D. 900 a new variety of corn adapted to North America's short summers appeared, and the arrival of beans around A.D. 1100 completed Mexico's crop trinity of corn, beans, and squash.


pages: 133 words: 31,263

The Lessons of History by Will Durant, Ariel Durant

long peace, mobile money, plutocrats, profit motive, Thales of Miletus, Thomas Malthus, trade route

Will it continue across the Pacific, exporting European and American industrial and commercial techniques to China, as formerly to Japan? Will Oriental fertility, working with the latest Occidental technology, bring the decline of the West? The development of the airplane will again alter the map of civilization. Trade routes will follow less and less the rivers and seas; men and goods will be flown more and more directly to their goal. Countries like England and France will lose the commercial advantage of abundant coast lines conveniently indented; countries like Russia, China, and Brazil, which were hampered by the excess of their land mass over their coasts, will cancel part of that handicap by taking to the air.

Unquestionably the economic interpretation illuminates much history. The money of the Delian Confederacy built the Parthenon; the treasury of Cleopatra’s Egypt revitalized the exhausted Italy of Augustus, gave Virgil an annuity and Horace a farm. The Crusades, like the wars of Rome with Persia, were attempts of the West to capture trade routes to the East; the discovery of America was a result of the failure of the Crusades. The banking house of the Medici financed the Florentine Renaissance; the trade and industry of Nuremberg made Dürer possible. The French Revolution came not because Voltaire wrote brilliant satires and Rousseau sentimental romances, but because the middle classes had risen to economic leadership, needed legislative freedom for their enterprise and trade, and itched for social acceptance and political power.

.), 61 Taine, Hippolyte Adolphe (1828–93), 72* Talleyrand-Périgord, Charles-Maurice de (1754–1838), 90 Taranto, Greek colony at, 29 Tatars, 83 taxation, 56, 59–63, 66, 92 Ten Commandments, 40, 44 Teutons, 26, 30 Thales of Miletus (fl. 600 B.C.), 29 Thirty Years’ War, 28, 45 Thrasymachus (fl. 5th century B.C.), 39, 93 Thucydides (471?–?400 B.C.), 73, 100 Tiberius, Emperor of Rome (r. 14–37), 84 Tours, battle of (732), 24, 83 Toynbee, Arnold J. (1889– ), 69* trade routes, 15, 16, 53, 92 Trajan, Emperor of Rome (r. 98–117), 69 Treitschke, Heinrich von (1834–96), 26 Trichinopoly, 29 Trotsky, Leon (1877–1940), 66 Umbrians, 27 United States of America, 20, 21, 26, 30, 31, 42, 71, 100 industrial development, 16, 39, 40 agriculture and food supply, 22 morals and religion, 39, 40, 48, 50, 51, 96 concentration of wealth in, 55, 57 democracy in, 68, 76, 79, 91, 94, 96, 99 and Western civilization, 83, 84, 85, 91, 94, 97 Vandals, 27 Varangians, 28 Venice, 16, 92 Vico, Giovanni Battista (1668–1744), 88 Vinci, Leonardo da, see LEONARDO DA VINCI Virgil (70–19 B.C.), 53, 87 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet; 1694–1778), 23, 40, 49, 53, 77, 92, 100, 101 Wagner, Richard (1813–83), 26 Wang An-shih (premier 1068–85), 62–63 Wang Mang, Emperor of China (r. 923), 62 war, 18–22 passim, 55, 60, 61, 66, 70, 76, 77, 79, 81–86, 93 air power in, 16 and morals and religion, 23, 24, 39, 40, 42, 44, 47, 49 causes of, 53, 81, 82 and science, 82, 95 Watt, James (1736–1819), 41 wealth, concentration of, 55–58, 70, 72, 77, 92 West, the, 53, 67, 96, 100 decline of, 16 Western Europe, 29, 40, 45, 84 civilization of 28–30, 49, 83, 94, 97 U.


pages: 97 words: 31,550

Money: Vintage Minis by Yuval Noah Harari

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anne Wojcicki, autonomous vehicles, British Empire, call centre, credit crunch, DeepMind, European colonialism, Flash crash, Ford Model T, greed is good, job automation, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, lifelogging, low interest rates, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, peak-end rule, Ponzi scheme, self-driving car, Suez canal 1869, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

The idea of progress is built on the notion that if we admit our ignorance and invest resources in research, things can improve. This idea was soon translated into economic terms. Whoever believes in progress believes that geographical discoveries, technological inventions and organisational developments can increase the sum total of human production, trade and wealth. New trade routes in the Atlantic could flourish without ruining old routes in the Indian Ocean. New goods could be produced without reducing the production of old ones. For instance, one could open a new bakery specialising in chocolate cakes and croissants without causing bakeries specialising in bread to go bust.

The empires built by bankers and merchants in frock coats and top hats defeated the empires built by kings and noblemen in gold clothes and shining armour. The mercantile empires were simply much shrewder in financing their conquests. Nobody wants to pay taxes, but everyone is happy to invest. In 1484 Christopher Columbus approached the king of Portugal with the proposal that he finance a fleet that would sail westward to find a new trade route to East Asia. Such explorations were a very risky and costly business. A lot of money was needed in order to build ships, buy supplies, and pay sailors and soldiers – and there was no guarantee that the investment would yield a return. The king of Portugal declined. Like a present-day start-up entrepreneur, Columbus did not give up.

Mercenary armies and cannon-brandishing fleets cost a fortune, but the Dutch were able to finance their military expeditions more easily than the mighty Spanish Empire because they secured the trust of the burgeoning European financial system at a time when the Spanish king was carelessly eroding its trust in him. Financiers extended the Dutch enough credit to set up armies and fleets, and these armies and fleets gave the Dutch control of world trade routes, which in turn yielded handsome profits. The profits allowed the Dutch to repay the loans, which strengthened the trust of the financiers. Amsterdam was fast becoming not only one of the most important ports of Europe, but also the continent’s financial Mecca. HOW EXACTLY DID the Dutch win the trust of the financial system?


pages: 306 words: 79,537

Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World (Politics of Place) by Tim Marshall

9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, California gold rush, Charlie Hebdo massacre, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Hans Island, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, market fragmentation, megacity, Mercator projection distort size, especially Greenland and Africa, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, oil shale / tar sands, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transcontinental railway, Transnistria, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, zero-sum game

Crucially, the invasion of Afghanistan also gave hope to the great Russian dream of its army being able to “wash their boots in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean,” in the words of the ultra-nationalistic Russian politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and thus achieve what it never had: a warm-water port where the water does not freeze in winter, with free access to the world’s major trading routes. The ports on the Arctic, such as Murmansk, freeze for several months each year: Vladivostok, the largest Russian port on the Pacific Ocean, is ice-locked for about four months and is enclosed by the Sea of Japan, which is dominated by the Japanese. This does not just halt the flow of trade; it prevents the Russian fleet from operating as a global power.

However, gun, bomb, and knife attacks in the region against state and/or Han targets over the past few years do look as if they will continue and could escalate into a full-blown uprising. China will not cede this territory and, as in Tibet, the window for independence is closing. Both are buffer zones, one is a major land trade route, and—crucially—both offer markets (albeit with a limited income) for an economy that must keep producing and selling goods if China is to continue to grow and to prevent mass unemployment. Failure to do so would likely lead to widespread civil disorder, threatening the control of the Communist Party and the unity of China.

In all, the Danube basin affects eighteen countries and forms natural borders along the way, including those of Slovakia and Hungary, Croatia and Serbia, Serbia and Romania, and Romania and Bulgaria. More than two thousand years ago it was one of the borders of the Roman Empire, which in turn helped it to become one of the great trading routes of medieval times and gave rise to the present capital cities of Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest, and Belgrade. It also formed the natural border of two subsequent empires, the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman. As each shrank, the nations emerged again, eventually becoming nation states. However, the geography of the Danube region, especially at its southern end, helps explain why there are so many small nations there in comparison to the bigger countries in and around the North European Plain.


Super Continent: The Logic of Eurasian Integration by Kent E. Calder

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, air freight, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, energy transition, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, geopolitical risk, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial cluster, industrial robot, interest rate swap, intermodal, Internet of things, invention of movable type, inventory management, John Markoff, liberal world order, Malacca Straits, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart grid, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, trade route, transcontinental railway, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population, zero-sum game

In response to China’s BRI, Japan’s Silk Road diplomacy has been growing more active, and more collaborative with Indian and US efforts, although Abe also proved conciliatory to BRI in his late 2018 dialogue with China, demonstrating once again the oscillating character of Japan’s Silk Road diplomacy. Turkey’s Middle Corridor Initiative Central geographical positioning, including control over important trade routes, has long been a concern of the Turks and their ancestors, although specific priorities and strategies have changed over the years. The Ottomans, for example, placed high priority during their early days on achieving exclusive control over land trade routes from Europe across Asia. The current Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoǧan has regarded transcontinental trade routes as a geo-economic tool also. Domestic politics have also driven Turkish continental policies over the centuries.

The role of spices in Chinese cuisine, introduced from Persia during the Tang dynasty, was one concrete and enduring result of such confluence, as was the role of paper and gunpowder introduced from China into the West. Chinese pottery also graced both the Islamic world and the West. Religious concepts likewise flowed along the trade routes—Buddhism, Manichaeism, and Nestorian Christianity all traveled together with the silk. All this was largely achieved, however, through the power of markets, random military action, and interpersonal trading networks. There was only a limited role for political ­authority—and none at all for strategic decisions by the nation-state.14 For well over a thousand years the classic Silk Road was the principal conduit between East and West, linking the central poles of world civilization across Eurasia, the largest landmass on earth and a potential Super Continent.

The Caravanserai Project, initiated by Turkey, is working to coordinate customs clearance among the nations of this Middle Corridor, and numerous related infrastructure projects are also underway.63 Erdoǧan summarizes Turkey’s intentions this way: “This initiative, realized in a vast geography, means establishing a brand-new system interconnected in economic, political, social, and cultural areas.”64 In its efforts to reconnect Eurasia, Turkey’s approach is analogous, albeit in a smaller way, to China’s BRI—and also in tension with Russian aspirations to dominate transit routes across the Eurasian continent. China’s Belt and Road Initiative Few Chinese traversed the classic overland Silk Road beyond China’s frontiers, as we have noted. And China never— except under the Mongols— exerted powerful geopolitical sway over the transcontinental trade routes. China’s BRI, however, could be the vehicle for a variety of forms of influence over Eurasia—through “distributive globalism”—that China has never exerted before. No country is more centrally located within the populated core of Eurasia than China, encircled as it is by fourteen neighbors and the major economic centers of the region.


A Pipeline Runs Through It by Keith Fisher

accounting loophole / creative accounting, barriers to entry, British Empire, colonial rule, Dmitri Mendeleev, energy security, European colonialism, Ford Model T, full employment, Hernando de Soto, Ida Tarbell, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Blériot, Malacca Straits, Monroe Doctrine, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, vertical integration

The contract is another factor compelling even in peace times the reinforcement of our naval squadrons in that sea and the strengthening by every available means of our position and influence both in the Near East and the Middle East.’330 However, Churchill expressed confidence that the Royal Navy would reign supreme and that even if the Suez route were to become inaccessible the longer Cape route would be sufficient: Any difficulties we may experience on our trade routes will occur at the very beginning of a war, particularly if it began by surprise. Every day the war continues we shall become stronger on every trade route, and our opponents will become weaker … Along the Cape route we find it would be exceptionally easy to protect trade because of the disposition of our squadrons and bases, and the enemy’s vessels would find it exceptionally difficult to maintain themselves on that route for the purpose of attacking our trade.331 In a subsequent debate the Earl of Ronaldshay agreed that, ‘So long as South Africa remains British, the route round the Cape … would be available’, while another MP added, regarding the Cape route, ‘If we are not in a position to keep that part of the sea open, it is no use talking about oil or the Empire or anything else, because the game is up.’332 Several MPs argued that, overall, the eventual military cost to Britain of defending Anglo-Persian’s operations would quite likely outweigh any savings on the price of fuel oil.

However, by the end of the twelfth century the Byzantine navy was no longer being equipped with flame-throwers, perhaps because the Romans had by then lost easy access to these sources of petroleum.23 Fragments of pitch found in the excavation of an early medieval ship burial, located in a seventh-century cemetery at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, England, were initially thought to have been ‘Stockholm tar’ rather than native pitch or bitumen. On later analysis the fragments turned out, indeed, to be bitumen, but most likely from the Dead Sea region, evidencing the extent of overseas trade routes in Anglo-Saxon times, particularly for rare and valuable items that would be symbols of high status.24 When, in about 760, the Persian Abbasids displaced the Syrian Umayyad Caliphate, the Persians gained control over the oil springs at Baku, a trading port on the western shore of the Caspian Sea in the southern Caucasus, in present-day Azerbaijan.

However, it seems that these accounts of the fire may have been greatly embellished and its causes misreported.42 The early thirteenth-century Persian writer Ibn al-Balkhi reported the use of high-quality lamp oil in the coastal town of Bandar Deylam near the head of the Persian Gulf, the petroleum most likely being sourced from the surrounding region.43 There was also a naphtha spring that yielded a significant revenue at this time at Khanikin (Khanaqin), on the trade route between Baghdad and Tehran, so the inhabitants of these latter cities may have sourced oil from there.44 Oil continued to be drawn from wells around Baku and traded in significant quantities, as Marco Polo described towards the end of the thirteenth century in his account of his travels: On the confines towards Georgiana there is a fountain from which oil springs in great abundance, insomuch that a hundred shiploads might be taken from it at one time.


pages: 604 words: 161,455

The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life by Robert Wright

agricultural Revolution, Andrei Shleifer, Apollo 13, Asian financial crisis, British Empire, centre right, cognitive dissonance, cotton gin, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Easter island, fault tolerance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the telegraph, invention of writing, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Marshall McLuhan, Multics, Norbert Wiener, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, social web, Steven Pinker, talking drums, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, your tax dollars at work, zero-sum game

But the good guys won in the end, and in the meantime the displays of inchoate capitalism’s might were impressive. Merchants in various German cities formed the Hanseatic League to subdue pirates, build lighthouses, and otherwise lubricate their livelihood. The league wound up defeating the king of Denmark in war and controlling maritime trade routes. In Italy, cities that had fast become city-states—complete with fighting among themselves—felt their freedoms threatened by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I. (One early clue: Frederick took an advocate of urban independence, burned him to death, and scattered his ashes in the Tiber River.) The cities put aside their differences, formed the Lombard League, and fought Frederick until he gave in: they would pay lip service to his supremacy but be free to govern themselves.

The Mongols had pushed their western frontier all the way to the Caspian Sea by the time of Genghis Khan’s death in 1227, and they later extended it into Turkey and eastern Europe. In the process they knocked off the Abbasid caliphate, the second of the great Islamic dynasties. The expansion was epically bloody. But, like the Muslims before them, the Mongols realized that, once the pillaging is over and you’ve got an empire to run, peace is a wonderful thing. They kept trade routes safe, and in return for thus lowering the communication and trust barriers, they exacted what has been compared to the modern value-added tax, at around 5 percent. This was a bargain. Compared to the series of power brokers through which Jewish and Muslim caravans previously passed, the Mongol thoroughfare offered “less risk and lower protective rent,” according to the social scientist Janet Abu-Lughod.

Compared to the series of power brokers through which Jewish and Muslim caravans previously passed, the Mongol thoroughfare offered “less risk and lower protective rent,” according to the social scientist Janet Abu-Lughod. By the end of the thirteenth century, with the Mongols having brought China into direct contact with Europe, there existed a “world system that . . . had made prosperity pandemic.” The Mongol Empire’s transcontinental highway, paired with seagoing trade routes to the south, thus carried Eurasia’s invisible brain, and its invisible hand, to new evolutionary heights. They were still primitive organs by modern standards; goods and ideas traveled between east and west without east and west having a clear idea of each other. A global village it wasn’t. Still, mutual awareness was now higher than in ancient times, when the Chinese thought cotton coming from the west was fleece from “water sheep,” and Romans thought their imported silk grew on silk trees.


pages: 437 words: 113,173

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance by Ian Goldin, Chris Kutarna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Dava Sobel, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Doha Development Round, double helix, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental economics, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, full employment, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahbub ul Haq, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Max Levchin, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, open economy, Panamax, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, post-Panamax, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, rent-seeking, reshoring, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, Snapchat, special economic zone, spice trade, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, uber lyft, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, zero day

Ten years later, his compatriot Vasco da Gama navigated around it, then up Africa’s east coast and across the Indian Ocean to the port of Calicut (or Kozhikode), the “City of Spices.” His voyage proved Ptolemy wrong: the Indian Ocean was not landlocked after all. That news, in turn, threatened the viability of communities all along the Silk Roads between Asia and Europe—vastly lucrative overland trade routes that had been built atop the belief that no sea route existed. Of less significance to contemporaries, but of more importance to world history, in 1492, Christopher Columbus—himself in search of a new sea route to Asia—hit upon the island of Hispaniola (today’s Haiti and Dominican Republic). He had found the New World.** Their successes fueled ever-bolder truth- and treasure-seeking.

Fully 60 percent of the global exchange in goods was made up of rich countries exporting to one other. Developing countries trading among themselves made up just 6 percent. But now those respective shares are approaching equality. Trade everywhere has grown, but it has grown twice as fast along the new trade routes that have opened between emerging markets. Rankings of the world’s container ports reflect this rebalancing. In 1990, all the world’s top 10 ports by annual volume were in developed economies. By 2014, 14 of the top 25 were in the developing world, and China by itself boasted 7 of the top 10.

In 1996, however, one of the biggest shipping companies in the world, Maersk of Denmark, decided to challenge that orthodoxy. It took delivery of the 6,400-TEU “post-Panamax” ship Regina. The economic center of gravity, Maersk reasoned, was shifting. The Panama Canal was irrelevant to the fastest-growing trade routes: the Pacific routes connecting the Far East (China, Korea, Japan), the Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan) and the west coasts of North and South America; the Atlantic routes connecting Europe to South America; and the Indian Ocean routes connecting Europe to the Middle East and Asia (via the Suez Canal).


Egypt by Matthew Firestone

call centre, clean water, credit crunch, friendly fire, haute cuisine, Khartoum Gordon, Right to Buy, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, sustainable-tourism, Thales and the olive presses, trade route, urban sprawl, young professional

* * * Return to beginning of chapter FOREIGN INVADERS The story of ancient Egypt is the story of Egypt’s relationships with its neighbours, for its wealth attracted some and its strategic location on the Mediterranean and Red Seas, and on the trade routes between Africa and Asia, attracted others. When it was strong, it controlled the gold of Nubia and the trade route across the Levant – not for nothing was the image of Ramses II crushing the Hittites at Kadesh splashed across so many temple walls. When it was weak, it caught the attention of the power of the moment. In 663 BC, the Assyrian leader Ashurbanipal sacked Thebes.

Building stone was hewn by teams of labourers supplemented by prisoners, with granite obtained from Aswan, sandstone from Gebel Silsila, alabaster from Hatnub near Amarna and limestone from Tura near modern Cairo. Gold came from mines in the Eastern Desert and Nubia, and both copper and turquoise were mined in the Sinai. With such precious commodities being transported large distances, trade routes and border areas were patrolled by guards, police (known as medjay) and the army, when not out on campaign. Men also plied their trade as potters, carpenters, builders, metalworkers, jewellers, weavers, fishermen and butchers, with many of these professions handed down from father to son. (This is especially well portrayed in the tomb scenes of Rekhmire, Click here.)

They ensured peaceful rule in Upper Egypt by erecting temples in honour of the local gods, building in grand Pharaonic style to appease the priesthood and earn the trust of the people. The riverside temples at Esna, Edfu, Kom Ombo and Philae are as notable for their strategic locations, on ancient trade routes or key commercial centres, as for their artistic or architectural merit. Aswan’s history was always going to be different. However much the rulers in the north, whether Theban or Macedonian, may have wanted to ignore the south, they dared not neglect their southern border. Settlement on Elephantine Island, located in the middle of the Nile at Aswan, dates back to at least 3000 BC.


pages: 354 words: 92,470

Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History by Stephen D. King

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, moral hazard, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, paradox of thrift, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Skype, South China Sea, special drawing rights, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

In 1880, the UK had the largest national income among the European Great Powers, enjoyed by far the highest per capita income among those powers, had by some margin the biggest share of world manufacturing output (eclipsing not only the UK’s European rivals, but also the US) and by far the most impressive collection of warships: 650,000 tons, compared with 271,000 for France, 200,000 for Russia, 169,000 for the US, 100,000 for Italy and a measly 88,000 for Germany.15 It was on the verge of creating the biggest empire – in terms of both land mass and population – the world had ever seen. Nor was its empire all ‘hard power’: it created legal systems, opened trading routes, established giant bureaucracies (notably in India), constructed rail networks and brought cricket to the masses. None of this, however, was enough to ensure the British Empire’s survival. As it crumbled, the world succumbed to a prolonged economic and social spasm. We may be on the verge of something similar today. 4 PRIDE AND THE FALL ON THE MARCH When the Berlin Wall came down, it was easy enough to believe that countries previously shackled to Soviet communism would choose the American way.

THE CHINESE VERSION At the other end of the Eurasian land mass, China’s first serious attempts at globalization came 1,500 years before Columbus discovered the Americas. Faced with constant demands for tribute from Xiongnu warriors to their west, the Han Chinese eventually decided to fight back, in the process discovering an agricultural bounty, a path through the Gansu corridor and, via the Pamir Mountains, the beginnings of a trade route that later became known as the Silk Road. The ebb and flow of both trade and power thereafter meant that the magnetic appeal of the Silk Road – and, later, its maritime equivalents – became a dominant part of the pre-New World global economy. In the thirteenth century, China capitulated to the Mongol hordes, who promptly set up camp in what became known as Beijing.

THE OTTOMAN VERSION The Roman and Persian Empires were too busy sparring with each other over the relative merits of Christianity and Zoroastrianism to notice the arrival of a new religious, political and military movement in the seventh century. Yet, thanks largely to the rapid unification of often nomadic Arab tribes, and helped along by their deep knowledge of existing trade routes, Islam spread extraordinarily rapidly: under the Umayyad Caliphate, established only three decades after the Prophet Mohammad’s death, Islam reached through North Africa to the Iberian Peninsula and marched through the Middle East into India. For Arabs in particular, the Quran had both spiritual and practical attractions.


pages: 234 words: 63,149

Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World by Ian Bremmer

airport security, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, capital controls, clean water, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, global rebalancing, global supply chain, Global Witness, income inequality, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, Parag Khanna, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, trade route, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

The American security presence in Europe and Asia has bolstered confidence in both regions that disputes and tensions need not provoke war. Europe can afford to invest in economic and political union rather than military hardware. The presence of U.S. troops in East Asia reassures the Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese that Japan does not need an army. The U.S. Navy safeguards important trade routes. Washington can’t single-handedly halt the proliferation of the world’s deadliest weapons; the past two decades have made that clear. But the United States has done more than any other country to ensure that nuclear development in states like North Korea and Iran comes at the highest possible cost and risk to discourage other would-be nuclear weapons states from following their example.

To create those jobs, the economy must grow, and to achieve that growth China needs access to oil, gas, metals, minerals, and advanced technology from outside the country. A blue-water navy can help safeguard that access and might one day partner with American vessels to do this. Beyond this mission, though, why should China take on the risks and burdens that come with heavier responsibilities abroad? The U.S. Navy patrols major trade routes and has helped in the past to limit the risk of conflict in every region of the world. China has benefited from that commitment. Beijing, of course, could dedicate huge amounts of money toward sharing this responsibility, but what incentive does it have to do so? The problem for China, and for everyone else, is that the United States has increasingly limited means to carry this weight—and Americans are likely to retreat from some of their overseas commitments faster than the Chinese, or anyone else, can afford to fill the vacuum.

A generation ago, China’s state-owned enterprises and political bureaucrats had little experience with potentially volatile emerging states in Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, not to mention moving tankers through troubled waters. America’s willingness to play the global policeman has given China time to open and maintain trade routes and sea lanes, and develop trade and investment relations abroad. The willingness of successive U.S. presidents to pull punches on Beijing’s human rights record in favor of better trade relations created the makings of, if not a beautiful friendship, at least a profitable partnership. Despite the delay imposed by events in Tiananmen Square, the death of European and Soviet communism helped the aging Deng Xiaoping persuade China’s elite that only a rising standard of living would save the country’s one-party system and that a more ambitious experimentation with market-driven capitalism was the only way to get there.


Lonely Planet Panama (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Carolyn McCarthy

California gold rush, carbon footprint, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, land tenure, low cost airline, megaproject, off-the-grid, Panamax, post-Panamax, Ronald Reagan, Suez canal 1869, sustainable-tourism, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, women in the workforce

Although the Spanish settlement quickly became an important center of government and church authority, the city was ransacked and destroyed in 1671 by the English pirate Captian Henry Morgan, leaving only the stone ruins of Panamá Viejo. Three years later, the city was reestablished about 8km to the southwest in the area now known as Casco Viejo. Although the peninsular location was well defended, the Spanish overland trade route faded upon the destruction of the Caribbean port at Portobelo in 1746. Panama gained independence in 1821 and became part of Gran Colombia; a decade later the regional confederation dissolved and Panama belonged to Colombia. Panama City subsequently declined in importance, though it would return to prominence in the 1850s when the Panama Railroad was completed, and gold seekers on their way to California flooded across the isthmus by train.

The rails fell into disrepair during the Noriega regime, but in 1998 the Panama government partnered with Kansas City Southern, an American-based railway holding company, to create the Panama Canal Railway Company (PCRC). The joint venture sought to re-establish the Atlantic–Pacific rail link and create a profitable alternative to the Panama Canal trade route. In 2001 PCRC also introduced a passenger service with a fully operational vintage train. If you’re looking to relive the golden age of railway travel, the vintage train features exotic wood paneling and blinds, carpeted interiors, glass-domed cars and open-air viewing decks. The hour-long ride parallels the canal, sometimes traversing thick rainforest.

The secondary forests of the protected area are rich in bird life and there’s no shortage of mountainous trails and waterfall-fed ponds to discover. History Following the destruction of Nombre de Dios by Sir Francis Drake in 1573, the Spanish moved to fortify the Caribbean coast. Of principal concern was the Río Chagres, which flowed inland to the town of Venta de Cruces (near the modern town of Gamboa), and then linked up with the trade route leading to the city of Panamá. In 1595, by order of Phillip II of Spain, Fuerte San Lorenzo was built into the side of a steep cliff near the river mouth. Fuerte San Lorenzo, Portobelo and Panamá, the ‘three keys’ of the Americas, became known as the strategic hearts of the Spanish trade empire.


pages: 490 words: 146,259

New World, Inc. by John Butman

Admiral Zheng, Atahualpa, Bartolomé de las Casas, Blue Ocean Strategy, British Empire, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, currency manipulation / currency intervention, diversified portfolio, Etonian, Francisco Pizarro, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, market design, Skype, spice trade, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, wikimedia commons

It remained the richest country on earth, however, with an extraordinary gravitational pull on the global economy. By 1500, China accounted for 25 percent of the world’s output of goods and services. England, by contrast, accounted for just 1.1 percent.10 Through the fifteenth century, a tangled web of trade routes connected Cathay to Europe, stretching five thousand miles across oceans, mountains, steppes, and deserts. Along these routes—which the German explorer Baron von Richtofen labeled the “Silk Road” in the 1870s—all manner of luxury goods were carried by ship, camel, and horse.11 By the time they reached Europe, their price could have risen by as much as 1000 percent, having been handled by many middlemen—factors, traders, government officials—who charged fees, exacted their portion, skimmed a percentage, imposed taxes and duties, and demanded bribes.12 For centuries, it was the Venetians who were the primary importers of Chinese, Indian, and other Asian goods into Europe, collecting them from Arab merchants who had overseen their transportation to the key markets of the eastern Mediterranean—Alexandria in Egypt and Aleppo in what is now Syria.

Along these routes—which the German explorer Baron von Richtofen labeled the “Silk Road” in the 1870s—all manner of luxury goods were carried by ship, camel, and horse.11 By the time they reached Europe, their price could have risen by as much as 1000 percent, having been handled by many middlemen—factors, traders, government officials—who charged fees, exacted their portion, skimmed a percentage, imposed taxes and duties, and demanded bribes.12 For centuries, it was the Venetians who were the primary importers of Chinese, Indian, and other Asian goods into Europe, collecting them from Arab merchants who had overseen their transportation to the key markets of the eastern Mediterranean—Alexandria in Egypt and Aleppo in what is now Syria. It was a highly profitable business, not least because the Venetians held an effective monopoly. And it was partly to break this Venetian stranglehold on the spice trade that the Portuguese launched a succession of voyages in search of a faster, cheaper trade route to the East. In 1498, after nearly a century of exploration, the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama rounded the southern tip of Africa—the Cape of Good Hope—sailed into the Indian Ocean, and reached Calicut, on India’s Malabar coast. This port was the great trading center of the East, a fabulous emporium, every bit the equal of Venice and Antwerp, where Indian, Arab, and Chinese merchants came to trade.

Not since the days of King Harold II—who was vanquished by William, Duke of Normandy, at the Battle of Hastings in 1066—had there been official contact between England and Russia. Back then, Harold’s daughter had been married off to the Grand Prince of Kiev.23 But Chancellor had arrived in Muscovy at an opportune moment of change. The Russians were expanding their empire by opening the trade route along the Volga River—which flowed from Moscow to the Caspian Sea—and tapping into the riches of Persia and the Silk Road to China. It had been thirty years since an ambassador from western Europe, representing the Habsburgs, had been seen at the Russian court. Now Ivan was looking for new trading partners.


Superpower Interrupted: The Chinese History of the World by Michael Schuman

Admiral Zheng, British Empire, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, European colonialism, Great Leap Forward, land bank, moveable type in China, Pearl River Delta, place-making, Rubik’s Cube, Shenzhen special economic zone , South China Sea, special economic zone, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

There was already demand for Chinese products outside of China, and the Chinese didn’t even know it. When Zhang returned to the Han capital, he convinced the court of Emperor Wu to send him off on another mission, this one to locate that mysterious trade route to India. He never found it. Blocked by tangled jungle and hostile tribes in the wilds of what is today Yunnan province, Zhang and his party were forced to turn back. But his exploits did help create an even more important trade route: the Silk Road. When Emperor Wu sent his armies west in the wake of Zhang’s discoveries, he kicked down the remaining barriers to trade between China and Central Asia. And from there, to the Roman Empire.

A luminary of the Chinese Communist Party, he led the economic reform movement in the 1980s that rebuilt Chinese global power, but he also ordered the infamous crackdown on pro-democracy protesters on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989. Faxian, Buddhist Monk. His travels between China and India around the turn of the fifth century AD left us an early account of pan-Asian trading routes. Gaozong, Emperor of the Song Dynasty. He rallied Song Dynasty loyalists after its defeat by the Jurchens and became the first emperor of the Southern Song in 1127 AD. Guangxu, Emperor of the Qing Dynasty. Briefly allied with radical reformers in the late nineteenth century to resurrect the sagging fortunes of the Qing in its conflicts with the West.

Since steppe tribesmen and their descendants controlled the reins of power in north China for almost three hundred years, it was logical for the Chinese to start learning their tongues and customs to curry favor and appointments with the new rulers. The most important of all foreign influences in China during this period was Buddhism. The teachings of the Buddha had traveled over the Central Asian trade routes from its Indian homeland into China probably in the later years of the Han Dynasty, and spread rapidly during the Period of Disunion. The import would become so influential in China that at times in the mid-first millennium it challenged homegrown Confucianism for primacy within royal courts. To some Chinese, the appeal of a foreign religion cast doubt on the assumed superiority of their own civilization.


pages: 518 words: 128,324

Destined for War: America, China, and Thucydides's Trap by Graham Allison

9 dash line, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, escalation ladder, facts on the ground, false flag, Flash crash, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, game design, George Santayana, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, industrial robot, Internet of things, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal world order, long peace, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, one-China policy, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, special economic zone, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the rule of 72, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade route, UNCLOS, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Through the “Silk Road Economic Belt” and “21st-Century Maritime Silk Road”—collectively known as One Belt, One Road (OBOR)—China is constructing a network of highways, fast railroads, airports, ports, pipelines, power transmission lines, and fiber-optic cables across Eurasia. These modern physical links along what were once ancient Chinese trade routes will foster new diplomatic, trade, and financial ties. At this point, OBOR includes 900 projects at a cost exceeding $1.4 trillion. Even after adjusting for inflation, this amounts to 12 Marshall Plans, according to the investor and former IMF economist Stephen Jen.74 Largesse, economic imperialism—call it what you will.

In a crisis involving its historical rival Beijing, any steps Tokyo takes would certainly be shaped by these memories, and by the Japanese government’s shifting attitude toward military force. A likely flashpoint is the Senkaku Islands (known in China as the Diaoyu Islands), located near valuable fishing grounds, trade routes, and potential oil reserves in the East China Sea. The United States temporarily controlled the islands after World War II, but in the early 1970s returned them to Japan, which had claimed them since the nineteenth century. But in the 1970s, China also claimed sovereignty over the islands. Chinese ships regularly pass through these waters, raising tensions between Beijing and Tokyo and risking a collision that could set off a chain reaction.

The two most instructive cases of these good-news stories come from the twentieth century: the first when the United States deposed the United Kingdom as the leading global power; the second when an ascending Soviet Union threatened America’s position as the unipolar power. Together, they offer a rich set of clues for leaders seeking to make the rise of China a fifth case of no war. SPAIN VS. PORTUGAL Late fifteenth century For most of the fifteenth century, Portugal’s fleet ruled ocean trade routes, overshadowing its Iberian rival and neighbor, the Spanish kingdom of Castile. Portugal’s success reflected its historical development. In 1249, its people became the first Europeans to escape Muslim rule, creating a nation largely along Portugal’s modern-day borders. Then, in 1348, the Black Death killed one-third of the country’s population, leaving too few able-bodied workers to farm the rocky soil.1 Enterprising Portuguese turned to the Atlantic and in time became Europe’s most skilled and successful fishermen.


pages: 322 words: 84,752

Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up by Philip N. Howard

Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, Brian Krebs, British Empire, butter production in bangladesh, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital map, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Google Earth, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information security, Internet of things, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, packet switching, pension reform, prediction markets, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, spectrum auction, statistical model, Stuxnet, Tactical Technology Collective, technological determinism, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day

Military leaders have an easier time defending the empire, and political leaders have more information about public needs. The Romans had such an empire, because they built the roads and aqueducts that provided their empire structure and stability. The British also had such an empire, because they had a network of fortifications and a superior navy to manage their global trade routes. In this chapter I map out the expanding infrastructure of networked devices. I explore this domain with some hard data—a kind of census—on the size of the empire of connected things. Then I discuss some of the ways these networks of connected devices get used in political ways. When governments fail to protect us, and are unable to even warn the public of danger, we use digital media to build new systems of early warning.

Still, in exposing these dark secrets, Amanda revealed a lot about what our internet is becoming. What’s in a Pax? The Pax Britannica was a period of history, between Napoleon’s defeat and World War I, during which the British Empire managed global affairs. London was the center of power, the British navy controlled the most important sea-trading routes, and relatively efficient bureaucracies put the world’s resources and people into the Empire’s service. Several aspects of the Pax Britannica may actually describe our future as much as that moment of our past. The British were strong because their network infrastructure gave them unparalleled levels of political, economic, and cultural control.

We need to map the new world order of the pax technica. 3 NEW MAPS FOR THE NEW WORLD Maps are expressions of political power, both perceived and claimed. When the Romans set out to organize their expanding empire, they mapped the great lengths of roads and aqueducts that structured their social world. British cartographers provided merchants with maps of the best trading routes and equipped military officers with maps that identified the best places for fortifications. In recent years, we’ve started producing new kinds of digital maps that reveal new kinds of power. What new maps do we need to understand the new world order? The usual map of the world reveals a patchwork of countries.


The Ages of Globalization by Jeffrey D. Sachs

Admiral Zheng, AlphaGo, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, circular economy, classic study, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, Commentariolus, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, DeepMind, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, domestication of the camel, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, European colonialism, general purpose technology, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income per capita, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, out of africa, packet switching, Pax Mongolica, precision agriculture, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rewilding, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, systems thinking, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, zoonotic diseases

The control of fire enabled early humans to move to colder biomes; the multisite invention of agriculture enabled dense human settlements in alluvial plains; the domesticated horse expanded the zones of agriculture; Columbus’s voyages of discovery ultimately led to massive European migrations to the Americas; the Suez and Panama canals deeply altered the costs and patterns of global trade and, with global warming, new trade routes in the Arctic Sea may do the same; the British mass production of quinine to control malaria enabled the European conquest of tropical Africa; the railroad opened up the interiors of continents for food production and trade. The economic importance of geography is therefore constantly reshaped by changing knowledge and technologies.

Most dryland agriculture other than in the river valleys is based on animal herding in the wetter part of the drylands, called steppes or grasslands. The Eurasian steppes were home to the wild horse and were the original sites of horse domestication. Before the Industrial Age, the steppes were for millennia the vast east-west “highway” for horse-based transport and communication, known today as the Silk Road (a name given to these ancient trade routes in the nineteenth century). The cold zones have growing seasons that are too short and too cold to support high-yield crop production, other than some wheat-growing areas in the more hospitable parts of the cold zones, such as in Canada and Russia. As with the dry climates, population densities tend to be low.

The cannon artillery enabled by gunpowder helped to account for the spectacular successes of the Ottoman, Mongol, and Timurid empires. When the Atlantic powers, including the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and English, successfully added cannon power to their ocean vessels, they were able to dominate the Indian Ocean trade routes. Britain’s early industrialization tremendously spurred its military power, through a steam-powered navy, mass-produced firearms and heavy artillery, machine guns, logistics and transport supported by rail and telegraph, and in the early twentieth century, armored personnel carriers and tanks.


Affluence Without Abundance: The Disappearing World of the Bushmen by James Suzman

access to a mobile phone, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, clean water, discovery of the americas, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, full employment, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, means of production, Occupy movement, open borders, out of africa, post-work, quantitative easing, rewilding, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, trickle-down economics, unemployed young men, We are the 99%

They accused the Harvard Kalahari Research Group and other anthropologists of having failed to properly examine the Bushmen’s historical relationships with other peoples over time—most notably the many pastoralist peoples that had colonized parts of southern Africa during the first and second millennia. They cited archaeological and historical evidence that pointed to the possible long-term presence of livestock herders in some parts of the Kalahari as well as the existence of nineteenth-century trade routes through areas that had been assumed to be completely isolated until the mid-twentieth century. These criticisms cooled enthusiasm for the romantic version of primitive affluence that blossomed in popular culture. But like the popularizers, the critics of primitive affluence radically overstated their case in what soon became referred to as the “Great Kalahari Debate.”

So while there is no record of Cão’s crew seeing any indigenous people, it is possible that Cão and his crew were seen by them. It was Cão’s friend and rival Bartolomeu Dias who would make the first documented contact between Europeans and southern Africa’s indigenous people. Charged by King João II of Portugal to follow in Cão’s wake, find a sea trade route to India, and establish the truth of the legend of Prester John, Dias embarked for the southern Atlantic in August 1487. He made good progress and after several months pushed farther south than Cão’s padrão at Cape Cross. Dias’s fleet rounded the Cape of Good Hope in January 1488. But he was too far out to sea to spot the natural harbor that lay under the majestic slopes of Table Mountain.

During this period of upheaval, Tswana-speaking herders from the east pushed deeper into the Kalahari, as did Herero and Mbanderu from the west. At around the same time, the first white hunters and explorers arrived in the Kalahari hoping to make their fortunes from ivory and ostrich feathers. They followed a series of narrow trade routes along which their booty flowed west from the Kalahari to the coast and European goods like muskets, ironware, and textiles flowed from the coast into the interior. But their activities were contained by the Ju/’hoansi. James Chapman, a white hunter and explorer whose legacy still looms large over the Kalahari, remarked in 1851 that “the inhabitants of these parts are a much finer race of Bushmen” than others his men had encountered.


pages: 1,072 words: 297,437

Africa: A Biography of the Continent by John Reader

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, clean water, colonial rule, discovery of the americas, illegal immigration, land reform, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, new economy, out of africa, Scramble for Africa, spice trade, surplus humans, the market place, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

Contact with the highlands of the central Sahara and across the desert survived the climatic perturbations through a string of settlements, where pastoralist Berbers exploited the resources of isolated natural wells and oases.21 These connections, along which goods already passed sporadically from group to group across the desert, were the ready-made foundation of trade routes that flourished when the Phoenicians arrived in Carthage. Herodotus writes of the Berbers' Saharan trade, and their routes across the desert are recorded in paintings of loaded mules and horse-drawn carts the camel was not introduced to the Sahara until the second century AD) discovered at rock-shelter sites along the way.22 One route passed via Ghat in the Fezzan region of the northern Sahara, through the Hoggar mountains and down to the Niger River near Gao; another took a westerly route, skirting south of the Atlas mountains, through Morocco and Mauritania and on to the Niger River again.

For more than 1,000 years the Egyptians had maintained a colonial presence in Nubia, at first as a means of exploiting the resources of the region itself – principally gold, ivory, timber, animal products, and slaves – and subsequently to facilitate the transit of these goods from points further south when Nubian sources of supply were exhausted. But increasingly, as the Egyptian lines of communication lengthened and their authority abroad was weakened by political difficulties at home, Nubians took over sections of the trade. Eventually they controlled the entire trade route from Aswan to Khartoum and the lands beyond. With only modest resources of their own, Nubians had become rich and powerful from handling the resources of others. Predisposed towards the Egyptian model of centralized authority and power, the local Nubian rulers had created a powerful independent state by 1000 BC, known to the Egyptians as Kush.

An authoritative review of the evidence concerning the ‘corridor through which men, things and ideas were said to have passed from the civilized world to Africa’, 14 concludes: ‘… any residual feeling that Egypt or Nubia must have been responsible for developments in sub-Saharan Africa will have to be abandoned and Bantu-speaking people accepted as innovators in their own right.’15 CHAPTER 21 The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea A mariners' handbook from the first century AD indicates that although trading vessels from Roman Egypt sailed to sub-Saharan Africa, the region offered meagre profits and attracted little interest. Two thousand years ago the patterns of civilization founded in Athens and Rome radiated across Europe to the Rhine and Britain in the north, and to the Atlantic coast of the Iberian peninsula in the west. Trade routes carried their influence across Asia to link up with patterns of civilization developing independently in China and India. The Mediterranean world was of course entirely under the sway of Rome – including North Africa and the resources of the Nile. At that time Rome had a population of close to 1 million people (no other city was as large until 1800, when a census recorded 959,310 people living in London) and the complexities of everyday life in Rome would not have been unfamiliar to residents of the modern urban world.


pages: 522 words: 150,592

Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms & a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories by Simon Winchester

Beryl Markham, British Empire, cable laying ship, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, financial engineering, friendly fire, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Isaac Newton, Louis Blériot, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Nelson Mandela, North Sea oil, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Piper Alpha, polynesian navigation, Suez canal 1869, supervolcano, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, undersea cable

The tiny craft promptly sank and everyone had to be rescued by a ship from the Royal Oman Navy. 5. SAILINGS The Phoenicians were the first to build proper ships and to brave the rough waters of the Atlantic. To be sure, the Minoans before them traded with great vigor and defended their Mediterranean trade routes with swift and vicious naval force. Their ships—built with tools of sharp-edged bronze—were elegant and strong: they were made of cypress trees, sawn in half and lapped together, with white-painted and sized linen stretched across the planks, and with a sail suspended from a mast of oak, and oars to supplement their speed.

All told, the Norsemen’s brief stay in America seems to have been motivated by curiosity, marked by maritime courage, and sustained with a degree of apparent civility. The much better-known voyage of Columbus, by contrast, was motivated by a combination of commercial ambition, a growing Spanish exasperation at the blockage of land trade routes to the east by the Ottoman Turks (and the thought that this East could be reached instead by heading west and sailing halfway around the world), and the evangelical yearnings of the Church. It turned out to be a voyage carried out in comparative nautical comfort, and it never actually reached the North American mainland, with Columbus to his death believing he had reached the East—the Indies—and in all probability, Japan.

Those who believe it was a need of more agricultural land to feed a growing population are countered by those who wonder why they didn’t just push backward into their northern forests and make agriculture there. Others suggest it was a decline in the trade to which the Vikings had long been accustomed—with the expansion of Islam in the Mediterranean having an unanticipated impact on the old trade routes and prompting the Vikings to try to open new ones. Some say climate may have also played a role: the period between 800 and 1300 A.D. coincided with a period of warming in the Northern Hemisphere, which increased sea temperatures by a degree or more and would have caused the ice in many of the fjords used by the Vikings to melt, furthering their ability to sail away more frequently.


pages: 537 words: 149,628

Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War by P. W. Singer, August Cole

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, air gap, augmented reality, British Empire, digital map, energy security, Firefox, glass ceiling, global reserve currency, Google Earth, Google Glasses, IFF: identification friend or foe, Just-in-time delivery, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, new economy, old-boy network, operational security, RAND corporation, reserve currency, RFID, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, stealth mode startup, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

Wang pulled an imaginary trigger with his right pointer finger, and the smart-ring on it transmitted a wireless signal that initiated the presentation visuals his aide had sent ahead. Behind him, a 3-D hologram map of the Pacific appeared. Glowing red lines moved across the map, marking the history of China’s trade routes and military reach through the millennia. The lines moved out and then back in. Toward the end, a blue arc appeared, showing the spread of U.S. trade routes and military bases over the past two centuries. Eventually the blue lines reached across the globe. Then, as the decades closed in on the present, the red lines pushed back out, crossing with the blue. Wang didn’t need to explain this graphic; everyone knew its import.

They took a regime mired in corruption and on the brink of civil war and forged a locked-down country marching in the same direction, the nation’s business leaders and the military joined at the hip. “But net assessment, as they teach you back in the schoolhouse, isn’t only about looking outward; it’s also about knowing yourself and your own place in history.” A visual of two maps of the globe appeared, the first of British trading routes and colonies circa 1914, the second a current disposition of U.S. forces and bases, some eight hundred dots spread across the world. “Some say we’re fighting, or rather not fighting, a cold war with the Directorate, just like we did with the Soviet Union more than half a century ago. But that may not be the right case to learn from.

She was likely researching a retort. He realized that he had to move the discussion beyond the level of trading quotations. Wang turned to the wider group. “Of course, we are all aware of the reasons given for why it will never be our time. Our population demographics are not optimal, they say. Our trade routes are too vulnerable, they say. Our need for outside energy is too great, they say. These statements are all true. And they will always be true if we turn our backs on our duty to make our destiny manifest. The worst thing we can do is fear our own potential.” His finger clicked one last time, and around them played the famous scene of the tank in People’s Square crushing the old Communist Party’s riot-control truck, the crowd of protesters’ initial looks of surprise and then their celebration as they realized that the military was on their side.


pages: 523 words: 195,307

Travels in West Africa by Mary Henrietta Kingsley

Fellow of the Royal Society, trade route

This nyeno he utilises in buying trade stuff from villages not on the trade route. Among the Fans the men who have got the goods stand by with these to trade for rubber with the general public and bachelors of the village, in a way I will presently explain. In tribes like Ajumbas, Adooma, etc., the men having the goods travel off, as traders, among their various bush tribes, similarly paying their nyeno, and so by the time the goods reach the final producing men, only a small portion of them is left, but their price has necessarily risen. Still it is quite absurd for a casual white traveller, who may have dropped in on the terminus of a trade route, to cry out regarding the small value the collector (who is often erroneously described as the producer) gets for his stuff, compared to the price it fetches in Europe.

The result of my investigations, and the answers I have received from the men themselves, show that there is a reason why the natives do not succumb every time to the temptation to kill the trader, and take his goods, and this is twofold: firstly, all trade in West Africa follows definite routes, even in the wildest parts of it; and so a village far away in the forest, but on the trade route, knows that as a general rule twice a year, a trader will appear to purchase its rubber and ivory. If he does not appear somewhere about the expected time, that village gets uneasy. The ladies are impatient for their new clothes; the gentlemen half wild for want of tobacco; and things coming to a crisis, they make inquiries for the trader down the road, one village to another, and then, if it is found that a village has killed the trader, and stolen all his goods, there is naturally a big palaver, and things are made extremely hot, even for equatorial Africa, for that village by the tobaccoless husbands of the clothesless wives.

In those districts on the southern banks of the Ogowe the main features of the trade, and the trader’s life are the same, but the details are more intricate, for the Igalwa trader from Lembarene, Fernan Vaz, or Njole, deals with another set of trading tribes, not first hand with the collectors. The Fan villages on the trade routes may, however, be regarded as trade depots, for to them filters the trade stuff of the more remote villages, so the difference is really merely technical, and in all villages alike the same sort of thing occurs. The Igalwa or M’pongwe trader arrives with the goods he has received from the white trader, and there are great rejoicing and much uproar as his chests and bundles and demijohns are brought up from the canoe.


pages: 603 words: 182,781

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

To the jaundiced American eye, New Songdo and its clones might appear to be fantasies left over from the Bubble. But dismissing them as the product of Asia’s infatuation with all things mega misses the carefully calibrated machinery underneath. It’s a machine the rest of us ignore at our peril as we enter the next phase of globalization—one marked by the shift from West to East and the trade routes up for grabs in between. It even has a name, which Stan Gale pronounced for me with a flourish: “It’s an aerotropolis.” It isn’t his word. The man who taught it to him is John Kasarda, a professor at the University of North Carolina who has made a name for himself with his radical (and some might say bone-chilling) vision of the future: rather than banish airports to the edge of town and then do our best to avoid them, we will build this century’s cities around them.

Taken on its face, it’s a reduction-ist worldview, but his underlying point is that our slightest whims, multiplied several billion times and duly noted by the marketplace, have already had the effect of conjuring aerotropoli where you’d least expect them, transforming everything and everyone they touch. It’s no wonder, then, that developing nations such as China and India have been the aerotropolis’s most eager adopters. They see it as an indispensable weapon for hijacking the world’s trade routes. China’s grand plans are perhaps more ambitious than anyone realizes—it intends to keep adding factories, corner the market on green energy technologies, double down on its export-driven growth strategy, and chart a New Silk Road to markets in Africa and the Middle East. The goal is to keep a lid on dissent by lifting another six hundred million citizens out of absolute poverty.

Frictionlessness is the product of a whole host of attributes, many of which are invisible: tariff-free trade zones, faster customs clearance, fewer and faster permits, and a right-to-work workforce that knows what it’s doing. “It’s the way you reduce time, the way you reduce costs, the way you reduce space,” Kasarda says. “The aerotropolis is where the elastic mile, the friction of space, community without propinquity, and trade routes all come together.” They combine to cut costs and red tape for corporations, often at the expense of their employees and the taxpayers, in exchange (theoretically) for greater gains for all down the road. Companies wanted governments that would respond to their needs unflinchingly, and so he would give them one that was.


pages: 7,371 words: 186,208

The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times by Giovanni Arrighi

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business logic, business process, classic study, colonial rule, commoditize, Corn Laws, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, double entry bookkeeping, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial independence, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, late capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, means of production, Meghnad Desai, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Peace of Westphalia, post-Fordism, profit maximization, Project for a New American Century, RAND corporation, reserve currency, scientific management, spice trade, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War

These networks encircled the world and could not easily be bypassed or superseded. In fact, the wealth and power of the Dutch capitalist oligarchy rested more on its control over world financial networks than on commercial networks. This meant that it was less vulnerable than the Venetian capitalist oligarchy to the establishment of competing trade routes or to increased competition on a given route. As competition in long-distance trade intensified, the Dutch oligarchs could recoup their losses and find a new field of profitable investment in financial speculation. The Dutch capitalist oligarchy therefore had the power to rise above the competition and turn it to its own advantage.

The most important of these systemic circumstances was no doubt the disintegration of the Eurasian trading system within which Genoa’s commercial fortunes of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries had been made. These fortunes were built primarily on the competitiveness of the Central Asian trade route to China and on the success with which Genoese enterprise managed to establish a quasi-monopolistic control over the Black Sea “terminal” of this route. As long as the Mongol empire ensured access to and security of the Central Asian route, and Genoa retained its military superiority in the Black Sea region, Genoese trade prospered and Genoese enterprises grew in scale, scope, and number.

The reason why we are speaking of a Genoese cycle, however, is not that at a critical juncture the Catalans were “embattled on so many fronts,” since the Genoese were embattled on even more fronts. In part, to paraphrase Abu-Lughod’s dictum concerning Venice, the reason is that the Genoese “gamble” on Castilian trade proved a fortunate one. Even more than in the case of the Venetian “gamble” on the southern Asian trade route, chance was none the less only a minor part of the Genoese story. The most important part was that the Genoese placed their “bets” very carefully and, more important, backed them up with a repertoire of monetary and organizational means that few, if any, of their actual or potential competitors could match.


The Map of Knowledge: How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found: A History in Seven Cities by Violet Moller

Book of Ingenious Devices, British Empire, classic study, double entry bookkeeping, Johannes Kepler, Murano, Venice glass, Republic of Letters, spice trade, the market place, trade route, wikimedia commons

As al-Mansur explained to his generals, ‘Here is the Tigris, with nothing between us and China, for all that is from the sea can come to us on the river, as can the provisions of the Jazira, Armenia and the surrounding areas. And there is the Euphrates, on which everything from Syria, Raqqa and the surrounding areas may come.’5 Baghdad was ideally situated, with direct access, via the al-Sarat and Nahr’Isa canals, to the major trade routes: north-west, up the Euphrates to Syria and beyond; north-east, on the Tigris, via Mosul; and south, to the Persian Gulf, gateway to India, China and the Far East. Baghdad also lay at the centre of a vast network of land routes. Travellers and merchants from the East would have descended along the Silk Roads with their winding caravans, down through the mountains of Iran, on their way to North Africa, Arabia, Syria, the Mediterranean coast and on to Europe.

Even though it was underground at first, Mu’tazilism helped to bring classical learning to al-Ándalus, coming into its own during the following century, under the enlightened rule of Rahman III and al- Hakam II – just as it had in al-Ma’mun’s Baghdad. Rahman II, who ruled from 822 to 852, opened up trade routes in the Mediterranean by making alliances with the Byzantines in Constantinople. This increased opportunities for the trade of Andalusian produce, minerals and textiles, created huge wealth and connected the peninsula with the wider world. Rahman was also a generous patron of scholarship and did all he could to stimulate intellectual activity in Córdoba.

In the ensuing tumult, there was neither the time nor the money to fund ambitious programmes of mathematical exploration, astronomical observation or medical research. The two great discoveries of the fifteenth century, the New World and the printing press, were disastrous for Islamic fortunes. European voyages of discovery opened up new trade routes by sea that bypassed the Middle East, depriving it of commercial opportunity. The ancient Silk Roads, which had conveyed such great riches over the centuries, grew quiet and desolate. As printing presses opened in towns across Germany, France, Italy and England, in the Muslim world people remained suspicious of this new technology and struggled to design moveable type for Arabic, with its whirling diacritics and myriad variations.


pages: 287 words: 95,152

The Dawn of Eurasia: On the Trail of the New World Order by Bruno Macaes

active measures, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, British Empire, computer vision, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, digital map, Donald Trump, energy security, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global value chain, illegal immigration, intermodal, iterative process, land reform, liberal world order, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, megacity, middle-income trap, open borders, Parag Khanna, savings glut, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, speech recognition, Suez canal 1869, The Brussels Effect, trade liberalization, trade route, Transnistria, young professional, zero-sum game, éminence grise

In 2011 Putin told participants at a conference in the White Sea port city of Arkhangelsk that Russia would be investing massively in the Arctic region in a bold bid to challenge traditional trade lanes. Perhaps different countries and cities will soon begin to compete to attract investment and people to the new trade route. Will there be a capital of the Arctic? In his Connectography, Parag Khanna suggests that Kirkenes in Norway may be the best candidate for the role, but Murmansk in Russia, just 200 kilometres to the south-east and founded in 1916, starts with considerable advantages. It is by far the largest settlement within the Arctic Circle and in 2016 its port handled more than 30 million tonnes of goods, a 50 per cent increase from 2015.

There are two old Portuguese forts, a reminder of the time when Portugal ruled the waves. The embroidered caps of the men bear influences from Zanzibar and Baluchistan. Chinese porcelain is ubiquitous and the bakers are Yemeni and Iranian. On the beach women dressed in burqas fly their kites just like in Afghanistan. As Kaplan puts it, ‘the ocean constituted a web of trade routes. It vaguely resembled what our world of today increasingly looks like with its commercial and cultural interlinkages.’11 The best image of this connected Indian Ocean world must have been that of one of its ports at the time of the Mongols, where dhows with lateen sails from the Red Sea, prahus from Malaysia and Indonesia and enormous Chinese junks would be tied next to each other.

Were we to head south, we would disembark on the modern beach towns on the Iranian shore and a short drive would take us to Tehran and on to Isfahan and the Indian Ocean. The Caspian is like a compass where the four cardinal points guide you to the four corners of the Old World. The ancient geographer and astronomer Ptolemy speaks in his discussion of the longitudinal dimension of the world of a middle point on the trade route between Europe and China which he calls the Stone Tower. He mentions that a certain Greek merchant, an adventurous soul, travelled all the way to the Stone Tower, where he either met merchants coming from China or sent his own agents to the Chinese capital, ‘the metropolis of the Seres’.5 From his account it is clear that no one would make the whole journey, but it was still possible to collate different distances and calculate something like the total extension of the known world from the Atlantic to China.


Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest by Wade Davis

British Empire, Columbine, Etonian, Fellow of the Royal Society, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, Mahatma Gandhi, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route

In 1890 Britain moved to annex Sikkim, and by the terms of the Anglo-Chinese Treaty, which fixed the boundaries, and the subsequent trade regulations, negotiated in 1893, it was granted the right to establish a trade mart and install a permanent agent at Yatung, in the Chumbi Valley, a verdant sliver of Tibetan territory that runs between Sikkim and Bhutan and had long been the traditional trade route between India and Tibet. Lhasa was party to neither agreement and actively intervened to impede commerce, imposing custom duties on the Chinese at Phari, at the head of the valley, and physically barricading the valley beyond Yatung to keep out the British. Curzon inherited the standoff when he became viceroy in 1899 and was not about to accept such an affront to British prestige.

In support were no fewer than 10,000 porters and 20,000 yaks, which each day would carry some 40,000 pounds of food, ammunition, and equipment over a tenuous supply line eventually reaching from Lhasa to Darjeeling. In weather so cold that white rainbows spread across the sky, the army headed not north to the Serpo La and Kampa Dzong, but east to the Jelep La, the 14,390-foot pass that led to the Chumbi Valley and the main trading route from Sikkim to Tibet. This was the direct approach to Gyantse, the immediate goal, and Lhasa, the ultimate quest. Younghusband himself went through the Jelep La on December 13, a Sunday. In terrible winds, with thermometers recording thirty degrees of frost, he surely must have reflected on the audacity of marching an army across the Himalaya in the heart of winter along narrow tracks that had never seen the passage of a European.

In four days they reached Lhatse, a fort and monastery perched on a rocky outcrop dominating a wide plain and guarding the approaches to the heart of central Tibet from the west. There the expedition divided. Bailey and another officer, Captain Wood of the Royal Engineers, taking all the heavy baggage and most of the transport animals, followed the traditional trade route, which ran overland, parallel to the river but well north of it for some 160 miles. Rawling and Ryder, lightly equipped, elected to continue west along the right bank of the Tsangpo, a perilous track perched at times 200 feet above the water on rock ledges too narrow to permit the movement of a loaded pony.


Arabs: A 3,000 Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, colonial rule, disinformation, domestication of the camel, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, invention of movable type, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, liberation theology, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, New Urbanism, out of africa, Pax Mongolica, plutocrats, post-truth, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route

All this busy trade is eloquent evidence of how an Arabian ‘nation far off’, as the Book of Joel calls the Sabaeans, were tied multiply into distant economies. Then it was perfumes and gums, now it is petroleum and gas. Another people connected by trade with wider economies were the Nabataeans, whose domain straddled the trade routes where they were funnelled out of the north-west of the peninsula. Unlike the Sabaeans and their South Arabian neighbours, the Nabataeans almost certainly spoke a form of Arabic; like the Sabaeans, however, they almost certainly did not consider themselves ’arab. Not only were they a settled people, but living as they did in the Levant, in the lap of the Mediterranean rather than out on some Arabian limb, their cultural contacts had made them true cosmopolites.

Although there is nothing obviously like poetry in all those thousands of Safaitic inscriptions on rocks in the wilderness, many of poetry’s later themes – love, lust, loss, raiding, longing – appear in them. And while the oldest complete odes that we have are by Kindah poets of the sixth century, it seems impossible that they could have hatched, ab ovo, not only fully fledged but flying high. Poetry must have been developing in those early centuries AD, going on its oral travels up and down the trade routes, picking up its material and forming its character along the way. Indeed, much of the oldest verse is about departures, journeys, mounts. ‘Go!’ urged al-Shanfara, early in the sixth century, You have all you need: the moon is out, The mounts are girthed to go, the saddles too. . . . Yes, by your life!

The late pre-Islamic poet al-A’sha was himself so celebrated for his descriptions of female beauty that he was in demand as a ‘marriage bureau’, producing airbrushed poetic advertisements for plainer girls. As the sixth century progressed, poets themselves gained in celebrity: when, towards the end of the century, Muhammad’s tribe of Quraysh founded the pan-Arabian fair of Ukaz on the main trade-route leading into Meccan territory from the south, poetic competitions were the biggest attraction. Contestants arrived on the most expensive mounts and, wearing their flashiest clothes, duelled in verse. Poets were the pop-stars of the time. And the importance of places like Ukaz was more than literary: they were places of truce, where warring tribes could meet without the ever-present pressure to pursue feuds and extract vengeance.


pages: 1,152 words: 266,246

Why the West Rules--For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris

addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Atahualpa, Berlin Wall, British Empire, classic study, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Doomsday Clock, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, falling living standards, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, global village, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, market bubble, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, out of africa, Peter Thiel, phenotype, pink-collar, place-making, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Sinatra Doctrine, South China Sea, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, upwardly mobile, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery

When agricultural villages began turning into cities (soon after 4000 BCE in the West and 2000 BCE in the East), for instance, access to the particular soils and climates that had favored the initial emergence of agriculture began to matter less than access to great rivers that could be tapped to irrigate fields or used as trade routes. And as states kept expanding, access to great rivers started mattering less than access to metals, or to longer trade routes, or to sources of manpower. As social development changes, the resources it demands change too, and regions that once counted for little may discover advantages in their backwardness. It is always hard to say in advance how the advantages of backwardness will play out: not all backwardness is equal.

Each built up Arab client kingdoms, Persia absorbed southern Arabia into its empire, and Byzantium’s Ethiopian allies invaded Yemen to balance this. Arabia was being drawn into the core, and Arabs were creating their own kingdoms in the desert, building oasis towns along trade routes, and converting to Christianity. The great Persian-Byzantine wars convulsed this Arab periphery, and when the empires fell apart, Arab strongmen battled over the ruins. In western Arabia, Mecca and Medina (Figure 7.6) fought through the 620s over trade routes, their war bands fanning out across the desert to find allies and ambush each other’s caravans. Old imperial frontiers meant little in this game, and by the time Medina’s leader took over Mecca in 630, his raiders were already fighting in Palestine.

In the East it migrated northward from the area between the Yellow and Yangzi rivers to the Yellow River basin itself, then westward to the Wei River and the region of Qin. A second consequence was that the West’s lead in social development fluctuated, partly because these vital resources—wild plants and animals, rivers, trade routes, manpower—were distributed in different ways across each core and partly because in both cores the processes of expansion and incorporation of new resources were violent and unstable, pushing the paradox of development into overdrive. The growth of Western states in the second millennium BCE, for example, made the Mediterranean Sea not only a highway for commerce but also a highway for forces of disruption.


Israel & the Palestinian Territories Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, airport security, Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, bike sharing, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, flag carrier, G4S, game design, gentrification, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, information security, Khartoum Gordon, Louis Pasteur, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban planning, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Megiddo remained a prosperous Egyptian stronghold for at least 100 years and later on held out against the Israelites (Judges 1:27), probably only falling to David. Under his son Solomon, Megiddo was transformed into one of the jewels of the Israelite kingdom and became known as the Chariot City – excavations have revealed traces of stables extensive enough to have held thousands of horses. For a while Megiddo was a strategic stronghold on the important trade route between Egypt and Assyria, but by the 4th century BCE the town had inexplicably become uninhabited. However, its strategic importance remained, and among the armies that fought here were the British in WWI. On being awarded his peerage, General Edmund Allenby took the title Lord Allenby of Megiddo.

During the late 15th and 16th centuries, Tsfat’s Jewish community increased in size and importance thanks to an influx of Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. Among the new arrivals were some of the Jewish world’s pre-eminent Kabbalists. During this period, Tsfat was an important stop on the trade route from Akko to Damascus and was known for its production of textiles. A Hebrew printing press – the first such device anywhere in the Middle East – was set up in Tsfat in 1577. In the late 1700s, Tsfat welcomed an influx of Hasidim from Russia. Tsfat was decimated by the plague in 1742, 1812 and 1847, and devastated by earthquakes in 1759 and 1837.

Hiring a local guide can help explain the situation in the city, but be aware that Palestinian guides probably won’t be allowed in settler areas. If you arrive independently, expect local kids to offer you a tour, but agree on the price before you set off. Despite its woes, Hebron continues to flourish as a business leader among Palestinian communities. Situated on a former trade route to the Arabian Peninsula, the city is celebrated for its grapes, its skilled traders and its artisans’ production of blown glass, leather and hand-painted pottery, just as it has been since antiquity. History According to the Hebrew Bible, Hebron was founded around 1730 BCE, its biblical name, Kiryat Arba (the Village of Four), perhaps referring to its position on four hills on which four Canaanite tribes settled.


The Phantom Atlas: The Greatest Myths, Lies and Blunders on Maps by Edward Brooke-Hitching

digital map, Easter island, Edmond Halley, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, John Harrison: Longitude, Livingstone, I presume, Thales of Miletus, trade route, UNCLOS

STRAIT OF ANIAN 48°29'N, 124°50'W Also known as Strete of Anian Willem Barentsz’s landmark 1598 map of the Arctic region, drawn from his observations made during his 1596 voyage. It is decorated with sea monsters, ships, whales and the mythical ‘Estrecho de Anian’ in the top right corner. One of the greatest obsessions in the history of European exploration was the search for the Northwest Passage. Uncovering a trade route through the crushing pack ice of the Arctic to reach Asia and her endless riches – as an alternative to the gruelling and dangerous route around South America – would bring incalculable wealth to the nation that found the way. For centuries such a way was purely theoretical, willed into mythical existence through sheer mercenary desire.

This offered a chance to pursue non-martial preoccupations. Reports were coming in from whalers that the ice packs to the east of Greenland were breaking up at an unprecedented rate, and so, under Sir John Barrow, Second Secretary to the Admiralty, efforts were renewed to hunt for a long-sought trade route through the Arctic to Asia. The command of the first expedition was handed to 41-year-old John Ross, a capable Scot who had joined the British Navy aged nine as an apprentice, and spent the following thirty-two years developing an illustrious naval career, including a captaincy in the Swedish Navy.

Hugely influential, this trusted information was employed by cartographers who explained the twenty-day voyage with the logical speculation of a large western inlet. Carte des Nouvelles Decouvertes, a map by Buache and de l’Isle from 1750, showing La Mer de l’Ouest, a vast inland sea in North America. As European settlement of North America expanded, the English and French grew more desperate for a thoroughfare trade route to compete with the Spaniards’ lucrative East Indies trafficking. Those who mounted expeditions through the American interior relied on information from native guides, and, as we have seen from Baron de Lahontan’s error-ridden journey tracing his Great River of the West (see relevant entry here), these explorers were not provided with the most reliable of intelligence.


pages: 540 words: 168,921

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism by Joyce Appleby

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Doha Development Round, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Firefox, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, General Magic , Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, land bank, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, PalmPilot, Parag Khanna, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

Just as the capitalist system has global reach today, so its beginnings, if not its causes, can be traced to the joining of the two halves of the globe. Europe, Africa, and Asia had been cut off from the Americas until the closing years of the fifteenth century. Even contact between Europe and Asia was confined to a few overland trade routes used to transport lightweight commodities like pepper and cinnamon. Then European curiosity about the rest of the world infected a few audacious souls, among them Prince Henry the Navigator. Prince Henry never left Portugal, but he funded a succession of trips down the west coast of Africa. Merchants, enticed by a trade in gold and slaves along the western Africa coast, increased the number of voyages.

Going by sea made it much easier to carry heavy cargo than overland. Since the time of the Roman Empire, Europeans had had some contact overland with the Orient, but famines and epidemics could wipe out commercial connections for decades. Arab traders were often successful in rupturing the European trade routes as well. It took experienced merchants like the Venetian family of Marco Polo to carry on this hazardous trade. The lateen-rigged ships and recently discovered sea routes gave Europeans a cheaper, safer way of establishing what turned out to be permanent contact by sea. Four years after Dias made his way to the Orient, Columbus’s pioneering route to the New World triggered another round of explorations.

The earth-spanning commercial networks that Europeans began laying down in the sixteenth century vastly increased the places where capitalists could send their goods. When capitalism acquired its momentum, investors didn’t stay put in Europe. They followed the trajectory of Europe’s trading empires. The significance of expanded trade routes and partners could not possibly be overstated, but the key point to make about trade in a history of capitalism is that it had existed for centuries before capitalism and would have continued to flourish without it. Because we can see the obvious connections between the sixteenth-century voyages to the Orient and the New World, we’re tempted to connect it seamlessly to the eighteenth-century invention of the steam engine and the emergence of full-blown capitalism as though the one followed the other inexorably, but there is no inevitability in life.


Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media by Peter Warren Singer, Emerson T. Brooking

4chan, active measures, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Comet Ping Pong, content marketing, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, global reserve currency, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jacob Silverman, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral panic, new economy, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, post-materialism, Potemkin village, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, RAND corporation, reserve currency, sentiment analysis, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social web, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, Upton Sinclair, Valery Gerasimov, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

Wang pulled an imaginary trigger with his right pointer finger, and the smart-ring on it transmitted a wireless signal that initiated the presentation visuals his aide had sent ahead. Behind him, a 3-D hologram map of the Pacific appeared. Glowing red lines moved across the map, marking the history of China’s trade routes and military reach through the millennia. The lines moved out and then back in. Toward the end, a blue arc appeared, showing the spread of U.S. trade routes and military bases over the past two centuries. Eventually the blue lines reached across the globe. Then, as the decades closed in on the present, the red lines pushed back out, crossing with the blue. Wang didn’t need to explain this graphic; everyone knew its import.

They took a regime mired in corruption and on the brink of civil war and forged a locked-down country marching in the same direction, the nation’s business leaders and the military joined at the hip. “But net assessment, as they teach you back in the schoolhouse, isn’t only about looking outward; it’s also about knowing yourself and your own place in history.” A visual of two maps of the globe appeared, the first of British trading routes and colonies circa 1914,27 the second a current disposition of U.S. forces and bases, some eight hundred dots spread across the world. “Some say we’re fighting,28 or rather not fighting, a cold war with the Directorate, just like we did with the Soviet Union more than half a century ago. But that may not be the right case to learn from.

She was likely researching a retort. He realized that he had to move the discussion beyond the level of trading quotations. Wang turned to the wider group. “Of course, we are all aware of the reasons given for why it will never be our time. Our population demographics are not optimal,48 they say. Our trade routes are too vulnerable,49 they say. Our need for outside energy is too great,50 they say. These statements are all true. And they will always be true if we turn our backs on our duty to make our destiny manifest. The worst thing we can do is fear our own potential.” His smart-ring finger clicked one last time, and around them played the famous scene of the tank in People’s Square crushing the old Communist Party’s riot-control truck, the crowd of protesters’ initial looks of surprise and then their celebration as they realized that the military was on their side.


pages: 218 words: 63,471

How We Got Here: A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets by Andy Kessler

Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, animal electricity, automated trading system, bank run, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Bretton Woods, British Empire, buttonwood tree, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Corn Laws, cotton gin, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Fairchild Semiconductor, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, GPS: selective availability, Grace Hopper, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Multics, packet switching, pneumatic tube, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, proprietary trading, railway mania, RAND corporation, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, systems thinking, three-martini lunch, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, UUNET, Wayback Machine, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

The bill passed and Boulton and Watt had the patent on Atmospheric Steam Engines (with cool condensers) until 1800, even though it still didn’t work that well. *** The Brits were at war on and off with the French for centuries, but never more so than in the 18th century over territories in the New CANNONS TO STEAM 25 World, especially in Canada over fur, in the West Indies over sugar, cotton and rum, and over trade routes to central Asia. Add to that those rebellious, thankless colonists from Massachusetts to Georgia. King George needed cannons for his troops in the American Colonies as well as for his warships to keep the French on their side of the English Channel. Back to John Wilkinson, the Iron Master of Shropshire, who had a precision cannon-boring tool, which was in essence a big monster lathe.

Turbines, driven by steam engines or flowing water, would be the perfect solution for generating cheap electricity in the 20th century. What a long way the steam engine had come. Watt improved the Newcomen design and improved its power from 3-5 horsepower to maybe 25 horsepower. By the end of the 19th Century, steam power had increased by a factor of 1000, on a warship to protect trade routes, trade enabled by those very same steam engines. *** I think the lesson here is not any specific piece part for computing, but instead the parallels of the industrial revolution and the digital revolution. Elasticity and scale, or the ability to constantly lower the price of goods and services, drove the industrial era.

On Dec 31, 1600, when everyone else was singing Auld Lang Syne, 218 knights and merchants in the City of London created the East Indies Company, and were given exclusive rights by the crown to all trade in the East Indies. At the time, this was no lay-up as the Dutch and those nasty Portuguese controlled the trade routes. But the EIC, with a trading business and its own private military to protect it, became the largest Non Government Organization. Think Exxon with weapons. The creation of the East Indies Company was the first of many government-anointed trading companies that formed the backbone of mercantilism.


Nuclear War and Environmental Catastrophe by Noam Chomsky, Laray Polk

Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, energy security, Higgs boson, Howard Zinn, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Kwajalein Atoll, language acquisition, Malacca Straits, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, nuclear ambiguity, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

Is this move related to the South China Sea? Yes, in particular that, but it’s more general. It has to do with the “classic security dilemma” that I mentioned before, referring to the strategic analysis literature. China’s efforts to gain some measure of control over nearby seas and its major trade routes are inconsistent with what the US calls “freedom of the seas”—a term that doesn’t extend to Chinese military maneuvers in the Caribbean or even most of the world’s oceans, but does include the US right to carry out military maneuvers and establish naval bases everywhere. For different reasons, China’s neighbors are none too happy about its actions, particularly Vietnam and the Philippines, which have competing claims to these waters, but others as well.61 The focus of US policy is slowly shifting from the Middle East—though that remains—to the Pacific, as openly announced.

There are underseas fossil-fuel resources, and a good deal of contention among regional states about rights to them. But it’s more than that. The new US base on Jeju Island in South Korea, bitterly protested by islanders, is not primarily concerned with energy resources. Other issues have to do with the Malacca Straits, China’s main trade route, which does involve oil and gas but also much else.63 In the background is the more general concern over parts of the world escaping from US control and influence, the contemporary variant of Grand Area policies. Much of this extends the practice of earlier hegemonic powers, though the scale of US post–World War II planning and implementation has been in a class by itself because of its unique wealth and power.


The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy by Bruce Katz, Jennifer Bradley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, benefit corporation, British Empire, business climate, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion pricing, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, Donald Shoup, double entry bookkeeping, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, global supply chain, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, transit-oriented development, urban planning, white flight, Yochai Benkler

The scale and speed of urban and metropolitan growth across the world is the defining and unifying thread of the twenty-first century. Rising metros are fueling the rise of nations. Throughout 144 07-2151-2 ch7.indd 144 5/20/13 6:55 PM A GLOBAL NETWORK OF TRADING CITIES 145 history, cities have been the heart of global commerce, forming trade routes, crossroads, switching points, and meeting places. Metropolitan areas are now the origins of global trade, concentrating idea generators, innovation zones, and production hubs. They have become the focus of global investment, responding to the insatiable hunger for the transport, energy, and social infrastructure necessary to grow and develop.

Hamburg, located on the River Elbe, which flows into the North Sea, had close access to salt mines, the key ingredient in preserving fish.93 The marriage between these two river cities and their merchants (the Hansa) altered the economic geography and evolution of northern Europe. The proximity of the rivers (the Trave runs inland, ending thirty-two miles from the Elbe) allowed an alternative trade route between the Baltic and North Seas.94 Merchants were able to circumvent the dangerous passage around Denmark and provide more security for the shipment of goods. 07-2151-2 ch7.indd 166 5/20/13 6:55 PM A GLOBAL NETWORK OF TRADING CITIES 167 The growth of trade spurred demand for more infrastructure (for example, the opening of the Stecknitz canal between the Elbe and Trave rivers in 1398),95 other products (such as barrels for shipping the salted fish), and supportive services (taverns, shoes, clothing).

As trade grew and became more secure, a new type of ship, the Hanseatic cog, was invented, “which was larger, could better protect the cargo and was also more navigable than local vessels.”97 As Lübeck and Hamburg extended trade with other cities, the alliance’s membership and structure became larger and more formal. Cologne, with its close trading links to London, became a key member. In 1280 Lübeck allied with Visby to ensure safe passage of goods along trade routes to Gotland, Sweden, and Novgorod, Russia. Shortly thereafter Riga and Tallinn, two Baltic trading cities, joined as well. Thus was opened a gateway for Russian goods, crops, and materials needed for ship building.98 Scholars give different dates for the formalization of this network of trading cities into the Hanseatic League, but by the fourteenth century, a “powerful compact of cities” had emerged, “with far reaching trade agreements and almost total control of North European trade.”99 As Jennifer Mills recounts, “Since there were no navies to protect their cargoes, no international bodies to regulate tariffs and trade and few ports had regulatory authorities to manage their use, the merchants banded together to establish tariff agreements, provide for common defense and to make sure ports were safely maintained.”100 A semiformal governance structure, the Hanseatic Diet, was established, which met every twenty-five to thirty years to discuss league policy.101 With economic power came political influence.


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The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations by Jacob Soll

accounting loophole / creative accounting, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, delayed gratification, demand response, discounted cash flows, double entry bookkeeping, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, High speed trading, Honoré de Balzac, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, Scientific racism, South Sea Bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route

He dealt in art and was painted numerous times in his red robes, most notably as one of the “honorable men” in Fra Filippo Lippi’s masterpiece, the Madonna del Ceppo, which is still housed in Prato’s Civic Museum. When he died in 1410, he left a fortune of about 100,000 florins, a king’s ransom.2 In 1383, as today, it took particular skills to get rich. Less than forty years after the Black Death that carried off half the population of Europe (and both of Datini’s parents), and with trade routes plagued by brigands and pirates, there was nonetheless an economic boom, much of it centered in Northern Italy. By the 1340s, the Italians had invented double-entry bookkeeping, the bill of exchange, and marine insurance, and they had perfected payments by book transfer, note, and oral agreement.

The odors of styrax flowers, spicewood, frankincense, and myrrh wafted across what was, to visiting foreigners, an overwhelming display of commercial marvels.7 Along with products, other things flowed in from around the world, including reports, accounts, logbooks, and works of science and natural history, assessing political climates, trading routes, and fluctuations in commodities prices. Dutch consuls sent reports from Dutch whale oil factories in the Arctic, plantations in the West Indies, and trading posts in Europe, Brazil, Surinam, Manhattan, and Aden. Dutch trading posts could be found anywhere in the streets of the world, even in their own backyard, in cities of their hated neighbors the French, such as Nantes and La Rochelle.8 Accounting became a central element of Dutch education.

After the death of the Stadtholder William II of Orange in 1650, Johan de Witt had led the Netherlands for more than twenty years. Yet as Holland’s wealth grew, so did the envy of its powerful neighbors, France and England. In the 1650s and 1660s, the English and Dutch fought numerous battles over the English Channel, trade routes, and even colonies. The English captured the Dutch colony of New Netherland and its capital Manhattan in 1664. In 1672, Louis XIV’s troops raided and plundered Holland. De la Court and de Witt could calculate, account, and call for republican government, but even with all their wealth, 1 million Dutchmen could not resist 23 million Frenchmen with a hostile, absolute Sun King and his giant army bent on bringing the arrogant, lowborn merchants to their knees to beg for mercy from Catholic France.


The Life and Death of Ancient Cities: A Natural History by Greg Woolf

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, capital controls, classic study, Columbian Exchange, demographic transition, Dunbar number, Easter island, endogenous growth, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, global village, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, joint-stock company, mass immigration, megacity, New Urbanism, out of africa, Scramble for Africa, social intelligence, social web, the strength of weak ties, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

Its boulevards were lined with thousands of buildings, and ceremonial routes connected great plazas to its enormous temples. Those temples bore great monumental sculptures and reliefs of marble and granite decorated with gold and jade and bright painted murals. At the height of its power Teotichuacan probably had over 100,000 inhabitants. Trade routes and imperialism connected it to every part of Central America. After its fall in the middle of the sixth century c.e. it was mythologized, imitated, and even excavated for treasure by later pre-Columbian civilizations. Among them were the Aztecs whose own capital city, Tenochtitlán, the city built over a lake that lies under modern Mexico City, was already nearly two hundred years old when it was sacked by the Spanish in 1521 (see Figure 3).

The most famous novel of the Italian writer Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, imagines Marco Polo describing his travels to the Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan by evoking more and more fabulous cities he has seen (or never seen). Early modern travellers like Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta were not hacking their way through dense jungles looking for lost civilizations like the heroes of Victorian romances. They travelled along well-established trade routes that had connected the urban centres of the Old World, routes that went back to the Middle Ages and sometimes even earlier. Alexandrine merchants had traded with southern India in the time of Christ, riding the monsoon from the mouth of the Red Sea to Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu. What we now call the Silk Road was really a complex of these routes, stretching some north, others south of the Himalayas linking the urban civilizations of China and her neighbours to central Asia, Iran, India, and ultimately the Mediterranean world.

What we now call the Silk Road was really a complex of these routes, stretching some north, others south of the Himalayas linking the urban civilizations of China and her neighbours to central Asia, Iran, India, and ultimately the Mediterranean world. The Indian Ocean was connected by maritime trade routes first in the Roman period and then intensively in the Islamic Middle Ages.6 This reconnection was not a product of the European Age of Discovery. Vikings encountered indigenous peoples in Newfoundland and Greenland. The peoples of northern Australia were never completely cut off from South Asia: one set of connections is attested by the arrival of the dingo in probably two waves, both within the last 10,000 years.


pages: 2,313 words: 330,238

Lonely Planet Turkey (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, James Bainbridge, Brett Atkinson, Steve Fallon, Jessica Lee, Virginia Maxwell, Hugh McNaughtan, John Noble

British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, country house hotel, Exxon Valdez, Kickstarter, megacity, Mustafa Suleyman, place-making, restrictive zoning, sensible shoes, sustainable-tourism, Thales and the olive presses, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, yield management, young professional

Generally, agencies will not undertake the journey for less than about ₺200 total; between May and October, there are normally enough travellers to guarantee departures. Most operators leave around 9.30am and return by 4pm, giving you 2½ hours on-site. WORTH A TRIP LAODICEA Laodicea was once a prosperous commercial city straddling two major trade routes, famed for its black wool, banking and medicines. Cicero lived here for a time before Mark Antony had him liquidated, and large Jewish and Orthodox Christian populations coexisted here. Today, the columns standing in the long grass have good views of the travertines at Pamukkale. Laodicea is 8km from Pamukkale.

Tetrapylon (monumental gateway), Afrodisias | CAROL POLICH PHOTO WORKSHOPS / GETTY IMAGES © Sagalassos The Roman ruins of Sagalassos, which was also a major Pisidian city, are scattered in an unbeatably poetic location at an altitude of 1500m in the Taurus Mountains. Antonine Nymphaeum, Sagalassos | IZZET KERIBAR / GETTY IMAGES © Laodicea Entered along a colonnaded street, Laodicea was a prosperous city on two trade routes and home to one of the Seven Churches of Asia (mentioned in the Book of Revelation). Laodicea | AYHAN ALTUN / GETTY IMAGES © İznik İznik’s Roman walls and Byzantine churches recall its heyday when the first Ecumenical Council, which shaped Christianity, met here. Antalya & the Turquoise Coast Dalyan Dalaman Göcek Fethiye Kayaköy Ölüdeniz Butterfly Valley & Faralya Kabak Tlos Saklıkent Gorge Pınara Xanthos Letoön Patara Kalkan İslamlar Bezirgan Kaş Üçağız & Kekova Kaleköy Demre Olympos & Çıralı Antalya Around Antalya Selge & Köprülü Kanyon Side Antalya & the Turquoise Coast Why Go?

And while the vibrant street life is enough of a reason to visit, Ankara also boasts two extraordinary monuments central to the Turkish story – the beautifully conceived Museum of Anatolian Civilisations and the Anıt Kabir, a colossal tribute to Atatürk, modern Turkey's founder. History Although Hittite remains dating back to before 1200 BC have been found in Ankara, the town really prospered as a Phrygian settlement on the north–south and east–west trade routes. Later it was taken by Alexander the Great, claimed by the Seleucids and finally occupied by the Galatians around 250 BC. Augustus Caesar annexed it to Rome as Ankyra. The Byzantines held the town for centuries, with intermittent raids by the Persians and Arabs. When the Seljuk Turks came to Anatolia, they grabbed the city, but held it with difficulty.


Frommer's Israel by Robert Ullian

airport security, British Empire, car-free, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, East Village, Easter island, gentrification, haute cuisine, Khartoum Gordon, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Mount Scopus, place-making, planned obsolescence, Silicon Valley, Skype, Suez crisis 1956, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, Yom Kippur War

C A P E R N A U M ( K E FA R N A H U M ) This site marks the site of Kfar Nahum (the village of Nahum), a lakeside town where Jesus preached and his disciples, Peter and Andrew, made their homes. During the lifetime of Jesus, in the 1st century A.D., Kfar Nahum was a prosperous fishing community, port, and way station on the main trade route from Israel’s Mediterranean coast to Damascus. It even had its own Customs House and was probably the most cosmopolitan of the lakeside towns until the building of the Roman resort of Tiberias, in the mid–1st century. The town was abandoned around A.D. 700 and never reconstituted. Today, you’ll find a modern Franciscan monastery, which was built on the abandoned site in 1894, as well as ancient excavations spanning 6 centuries.

When Israel’s War of Independence ended, the fragile scrolls were unraveled, in some cases using surgical instruments. Only then was it learned that the only scrolls of the Bible to survive from the time when The Temple stood in Jerusalem had been restored both to the Jewish people and to the world. than the communal settlement of a religious sect. Qumran lies at a strategic point in an ancient trade route: Goods from Arabia and Africa were shipped up the Red Sea to Eilat, and then overland through the Arava Valley to the southern tip of The Dead Sea, where they were floated across to Qumran. At Qumran, cargo was unloaded and sent along the ancient Salt Road to Jerusalem. According to this theory, the otherworldly Essenes would not have settled at the crux of a major commercial route, but in a more remote location such as the caves in the mountains “above Ein Gedi.”

.), when Byzantine wealth and caravan trade were at their height. In addition to commercial wealth, Shivta’s ingenious citizens built an elaborate irrigation and water-collection system that allowed them to farm the barren soil. Israelis are studying Nabatean irrigation techniques to this day. Eventually trade routes slowly changed, and though Shivta survived as an Arab outpost for many centuries, by the 1100s it was a ghost town. The ruins of Shivta remained in fairly good condition throughout the centuries because they were too far away from newer building sites to make pillage economical. As a result, the city, which dates from the 500s, is still somewhat intact.


pages: 537 words: 158,544

Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order by Parag Khanna

Abraham Maslow, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Glaeser, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Islamic Golden Age, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, Londongrad, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, open borders, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, Pearl River Delta, pirate software, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Potemkin village, price stability, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Though it depends on European investment to develop non-oil sectors such as wine, citrus, and cotton, thousands of European energy-sector employees—from oil-platform riggers to executives—also depend on high-paying jobs in Baku, from which pipelines extend around the Caspian Sea’s southern rim, superimposed on ancient trade routes. The Caucasus may be the most distant and troublesome corner of the West’s East, but it is also the corner on which Europe’s future as a self-sufficient superpower most depends. CONCLUSION: STRETCHING EUROPE THE “COMMON EUROPEAN House” is growing far larger than historian A.J.P. Taylor ever could have expected, turning into a multitiered commonwealth of members, partners, and associates with varying degrees of privileges, commitments, and subsidies.

Its “new security concept” then sought to bind countries close to China by initiating confidence-building measures among the original “Shanghai Five” (China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan) to confront their common “three evils”: separatism, terrorism, and extremism.4 Like NATO in the Caucasus, the SCO sets the common rules and procedures for customs and border checkpoints, upgrades highways along ancient trade routes, and coordinates joint counternarcotics activities. What began as a forum for anti-American rhetoric is now considered by some to be either the “NATO of the East” or an energy club of oil-rich despots. “The SCO isn’t waiting for NATO to get things done,” warned an Uzbek official intimately involved with the SCO process.

Barbarians retreating across the steppe once watched their larger enemies weaken with distance from their core, but today China’s growing reach along its infrastructural axes is steadily and confidently compressing the Central Asian space. CHAPTER 10 KAZAKHSTAN: “HAPPINESS IS MULTIPLE PIPELINES” NO ONE COMES to Kazakhstan for the weather. But much like dominating trade routes ensured geopolitical advantage centuries ago, today controlling the flow of oil and gas pipelines brings profits and political ties. The combined oil reserves of the Caspian Sea are estimated at over two hundred billion barrels (as compared with the Persian Gulf’s proven reserves of over six hundred billion barrels), making the region indispensable as an alternative source of oil for both the West and the East.


pages: 497 words: 144,283

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day

Beyond the tedious border crossing into Bangladesh lie the final five hundred kilometers of swerving traffic and broken-down trucks to the port of Chittagong. Over the years that I’ve driven the Grand Trunk Road’s various national segments from the Hindu Kush Mountains to the Bay of Bengal, I’ve been on the lookout for archaeological and architectural reminders that this trade route predates the nations it crosses by more than two thousand years. From the ancient Mauryan Empire to the colonial British, the Grand Trunk Road has been upgraded and renamed every few centuries. Whatever name it goes by, across all of South Asia everyone knows it simply as the GT Road. Kipling had a more elegant term for this great artery: “a river of life.”

Unlike the caliphate eras, however, the future Pax Arabia should have multiple capitals such as Cairo, Dubai, and Baghdad—a borderless archipelago of connected urban nodes. If one rule of counterinsurgency is to find, protect, and build stable enclaves, that is also the right bottom-up approach to replacing Arab colonial cartography with a more legitimate order of urban hubs and their trade routes. The Ottoman era Hejaz Railway, which stretched from Istanbul to Mecca, with branches to Cairo and even Haifa in present-day Israel, is precisely the intercity model that should guide our thinking. Arabs reject a restoration of Turkish or Persian hegemony, but if they ever want to recover the vast geographic strength they enjoyed a millennium ago, it will have to be through connective cartography.

CHAPTER 8 INFRASTRUCTURE ALLIANCES GETTING GRAND STRATEGY RIGHT Geopolitics has for centuries been synonymous with the conquest of territory, the domination of one’s neighbors and rivals. Today the principle could simply be called competitive connectivity: The most connected power wins. States must protect their borders, but what matters are which lines they control: trade routes and cross-border infrastructures. All great strategists know the importance of the saying “Amateurs talk strategy; professionals talk logistics.” Empires have always focused on infrastructure as a tool of extending influence. The Romans and the Ottomans built sturdy roads stretching far from their capitals and placed these on maps used by armies and traders.


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The Origins of the British by Stephen Oppenheimer

active measures, agricultural Revolution, British Empire, Eratosthenes, gravity well, Gregor Mendel, it's over 9,000, mass immigration, Neolithic agricultural revolution, out of africa, phenotype, Recombinant DNA, the scientific method, trade route

Cunliffe neatly resolves some of the reasons for Strabo’s disbelief at Pytheas’ travel times by using his own text to suggest that Pytheas, as a Greek pioneer, actually took this trade route across Keltiké. By his discoveries further north, Pytheas could have opened up an opportunity for the rest of the Mediterranean to bypass the Punic/Phoenician Atlantic coastal monopoly in their search for tin (Figure 1.2).36 However, if Cunliffe is correct, then Pytheas, with such satisfactory travel arrangements, is unlikely to have been travelling alone, without a courier, or as a novice tourist. In other words, he would have been taking advantage of a pre-existing river– land–river–sea trade route worked out by the established local inhabitants of Keltiké.

The tip of the Breton Peninsula is nearer to that of Cornwall (Land’s End) than it is to any other part of France outside Brittany. The lack of any reference by Avenius to the English Channel highlights this key geographical feature, which through the ages determined and directed the Atlantic coastal trade route from Spain and southern France and then along the western fringes of the British Isles (Figure 1.2).30 Cornwall would make sense as one of the Oestrimnides, because Avenius goes on to say that it is two days’ sailing from there to the Sacred Isle (Ireland), inhabited by the race of Hiberni, with the island of the Albions (Britain) nearby.

Ptolemy mentions in his Geography three tribal locations with this name, one in northern England, another in south-east Ireland and Brigantinus Portus of the northern Gallaeci tribe. Also known as Brigantium Hispaniae, this was the ancient seaport of La Coruña in northwest Spain and the western terminus of a major trade route in tin, gold, lead and silver.25 There was also a clutch of similar place/tribal names connected with Lake Constance on today’s Swiss/Austrian border. The people of Central Raetia were called the Brigantii. Their tribal capital was Brigantium Raetiae (now Bregenz), and Lake Constance itself was then called Brigantinus Lacus.26 John Collis has an interesting map on which he shows the relevance of such Brigant-name links between the Continent and various parts of the British Isles.


An Island to Oneself: The Story of Six Years on a Desert Island by Tom Neale, Noel Barber

Ford Model T, trade route

Within twenty minutes he was climbing aboard with the agility of a boy of twenty. "Not bad for fifty-eight," he grinned; and this was my introduction to a man who had done what millions of us dream of doing, but never seem to do. For Tom Neale, a New Zealander, had left the world behind for life alone on a coral island so remote from the trade routes that he was fortunate if one ship a year called by chance to disturb his solitude. What had made him do it? Was he intelligent — or was he slightly mad? He didn't look a crank, as he sat there on the deck, the Manua Tele rolling gently in the swell. Tall and spare, his skin was stained dark brown; he wore tennis shoes, a pair of ragged shorts, ("Usually I wear a strip of pareu, but I thought there might be women aboard!")

We liked each other on sight, which surprised me, for I do not make friends easily; and it was after lunch — washed down with a bottle of Andy's excellent rum — that Frisbie first mentioned Suvarov. Of course, I had heard of this great lagoon, with its coral reef stretching nearly fifty miles in circumference, but I had never been there, for it was off the trade routes, and shipping rarely passed that way. Because its reef is submerged at high tide — leaving only a line of writhing white foam to warn the navigator of its perils — Suvarov, however, is clearly marked on all maps. Yet Suvarov is not the name of an island, but of an atoll, and the small islets inside the lagoon each have their own names.

Looking back, although I had to be very careful about moving around and was always conscious of my back, these were the happiest weeks of my life. 12. Farewell to the Island LONG BEFORE I could set eyes on her, I knew it must be the Manihiki schooner. That smudge dusting the horizon where the sea met the sky could only mark her arrival, for no other schooner would be so far off the trade routes. And though I had been anxiously scanning the horizon for days, worried about my back, a sudden thought now hit me like a blow between the eyes, a truth I had stubbornly refused to admit until now. Within a few hours I was going to be aboard that schooner. And once there I might never see Suvarov again.


pages: 248 words: 73,689

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

When the first Han emperor established his capital at Chang’an around 200 bce, it rapidly grew into the principal city in China, its focal point of power and learning, with a large population of scholar gentry managing the imperial bureaucracy, and an even larger underclass supporting them. As China opened up trade with civilizations to its west, across what would later come to be known as the Silk Roads, the Han capital took on even greater economic importance as a major destination along the trade route, with an extraordinary range of goods flowing in and out of its marketplaces. With the collapse of the Han dynasty, Chang’an went into a phase of decline, but it would return to prominence as the capital of the Tang dynasty in the eighth century, at which point it would become the largest city in the world, with a population similar to Rome’s at its zenith.31 Specialization In 2015, YouTube star Andy George set out to make a sandwich entirely from scratch.

The domestication of the horse and the invention of the wheel made it possible to travel large distances over land, while advances in shipbuilding opened up the possibilities for trade along the Mediterranean. As a result, a long-distance network of trade emerged, connecting cities from the Indus Valley westward to Egypt and up into Greece.35 Since then, cities have formed the backbone of a number of other important historical trade routes. The Silk Roads, which stretched from China in the East through India and Persia all the way to the Roman Empire, were linked by an extensive chain of cities. China sold its silk, tea and porcelain; India offered its spices and textiles; Persia contributed gold, silver, copper and iron; and Rome traded with glass, wine and jewels.36 By the first century ce, Chinese silk was so widespread in Rome that the philosopher Seneca was complaining that the thin, figure-hugging material had become a threat to marital relations.37 As trade between civilizations along the Silk Roads grew, so did the importance of the cities that facilitated them.

Index abortion here abstract mathematics here Achaemenid Empire here Adani, Gautam here agglomeration effects here agriculture here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and carbon emissions here and disease here, here productivity here, here vertical farming here Ahmedabad here air-conditioning here, here airports here, here, here, here Albuquerque here Alexandria here Allen, Paul here Allen, Thomas here Altrincham here Amazon here, here, here Amazon rainforest here Amsterdam here Anatolia here Anderson, Benedict here Anheuser-Busch here antibiotics here, here, here Antonine Plague here Anyang here apartment conversions here, here Apple here, here, here Aristotle here Arizona State University here Arlington here Assyrian merchants here Athens, Ancient here, here, here, here, here, here Atlanta here, here Austin here, here, here automation here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here axial precession here Baghdad, House of Wisdom here Baltimore here, here Bangalore here, here Bangkok here Bangladesh here, here, here, here Barlow, John Perry here Bauhaus here Beijing here, here Belmar redevelopment here Berkes, Enrico here Berlin here, here, here Berlin Wall, fall of here Bezos, Jeff here biological weapons here ‘biophilia’ here biospheres here bird flu here Birmingham here, here Black Death here, here, here Blake, William here Bloom, Nick here BMW here ‘bobo’ (bourgeois bohemian) here, here, here Boccaccio, Giovanni here Boeing here, here, here Bogota here Bologna here Bonfire of the Vanities here Borneo here Boston here, here, here Boston University here, here Brand, Stewart here Brazil here, here Brexit here, here, here Bristol here Britain broadcasting here deindustrialization here education here enclosure movement here foreign aid here high-speed rail here, here house prices here immigration here industrialization here, here infant mortality here ‘levelling up’ here life expectancy here mayoralties here per capita emissions here per capita incomes here remote working here social housing here Brixton riots here broadcasting here Bronze Age here, here, here, here bronze, and shift to iron here Brooks, David here Brynjolfsson, Eric here Burgess, Ernest here bushmeat here, here Byzantine Empire, fall of here Cairncross, Frances here Cairo here calendar, invention of here Cambridge, Massachusetts here Cambridge University here canals here, here, here ‘cancel culture’ here Cape Town here Catholic Church here C40 Cities partnership here Chadwick, Edwin here Chang’an (Xi’an) here, here, here, here Charles, Prince of Wales here charter cities here Chengdu here Chiba here Chicago here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here childbirth, average age at here childcare here, here, here, here, here China here ancient here, here, here, here call-centre workers here cereal production here civil strife here and Covid-19 pandemic here Cultural Revolution here definition of cities here economic liberalization here entry into WTO here Household Responsibility System here hukou system here One Child Policy here Open Coastal Cities here per capita emissions here rapid ageing here Special Economic Zones here technology here urbanization here China Towns here Chinese Communist Party here cholera here, here, here, here Chongqing here cities, definition of here Citigroup here city networks here civil wars here Cleveland here, here, here, here climate change here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here coastal cities here, here, here, here commuting here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Concentric Zone Model here Confucius here conspiracy theories here Constantinople here, here containerization here, here Copenhagen here, here Corinth here Cornwall here corruption here Coventry here, here covid-19 see pandemics crime rates here ‘cyberbalkanization’ here cycling here, here, here, here Damascus here Dark Ages here, here data science here de Soto, Hernando here deforestation here, here, here, here Delhi here Dell here Delphic oracle here democracy here, here, here Democratic Republic of Congo here, here, here, here, here, here Deng Xiaoping here dengue fever here Denmark here, here Detroit here, here, here, here, here, here, here Dhaka here, here, here, here, here Dharavi here Diana, Princess of Wales here diasporas here, here Dickens, Charles here district heating systems here Dresden here drought here, here, here, here, here, here, here Drucker, Peter here dual-income households here, here Dubai here, here, here Dunbar, Kevin here Düsseldorf here East Antarctic ice sheet here East China Sea here, here Easterly, William here Eastern Mediterranean here, here, here Ebola here Edinburgh here education here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here higher education here, here, here, here; see also universities Japanese school system here Egypt here, here Ancient here, here, here, here Ehrenhalt, Alan here electric vehicles (EVs) here Engels, Friedrich here Enlightenment here Epic of Gilgamesh here Erfurt here Ethiopia here, here Euripides here European Enlightenment here exchange rates here Facebook here, here, here fake news here famine here, here fertility rates here, here, here ‘15-minute city’ principle here Fischer, Claude here Fleming, Alexander here flooding here, here, here, here, here, here, here Florida, Richard here, here food shortages here Ford, Henry here, here foreign aid here fossil fuels here, here France here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Frankfurt here Franklin, Benjamin here Friedman, Thomas here, here Fryer, Roland here Fukuoka here, here Gaetani, Ruben here Galileo Galilei here Ganges River here Garden Cities here Garden of Eden here Gates, Bill here, here gay community here General Electric here General Motors here genetic engineering here gentrification here, here, here, here, here George, Andy here Germany here, here, here, here, here, here Gingrich, Newt here glaciers here Glasgow here Glass, Ruth here global financial crisis here, here, here global population, size of here globalization here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Goldstein, Amy here Google here, here, here Goos, Maarten here Grant, Adam here Great Depression here, here Greece, Ancient here, here, here, here, here Griffith Observatory here Gropius, Walter here Gruen, Victor here Gulf Stream here Haiti here Hamburg here Hanseatic League here, here Harappa here, here Harry, Prince here Harvard University here hate speech here Haussmann, Baron here, here Hawaii here Hazlitt, William here healthcare here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here heatwaves here, here Hebei here Heckscher, Eli here Herodotus here Himalayas here Hippocrates here Hippodamus here Hittite Empire here HIV here, here Ho Chi Minh City here Holocene here, here, here homophily here Hong Kong here house prices here, here, here, here, here, here, here Houston here, here, here Howard, Ebenezer here Hudson River here Hugo, Victor here Hume, David here Hurricane Katrina here hybrid working, see remote and hybrid working ice melting here, here import substitution industrialization here InBev here India here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here fertility rates here Indonesia here, here Indus River here Indus Valley here, here, here inequality here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here infant and child mortality here, here, here, here influenza here, here, here ‘information cocoons’ here Instagram here internet here, here, here, here, here, here invention here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here irrigation here, here, here, here Italy here Jacobs, Jane here, here, here Jakarta here, here James, Sheila here Japan here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here post-war development here schooling system here Jenner, Edward here Jesus Christ here Jobs, Steve here jobs apprenticeships here ‘lousy’ and ‘lovely’ here tradeable and non-tradeable here Justinian Plague here Kashmir here Kenya here Kinshasa here, here Kish here knowledge workers here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Koch, Robert here Kolkata here Korean War here Krugman, Paul here Kushim Tablet here Lagash here Lagos here, here, here, here, here, here, here Lahore here land titling programmes here Las Vegas here Latin language here Lee Kuan Yew here, here Leeds here, here Leicester here Leipzig here, here, here, here Letchworth here life expectancy here, here, here, here, here, here Liverpool here, here Ljubljana here London here, here, here, here, here, here, here bike lanes here Canary Wharf here, here Chelsea here, here, here China Town here cholera outbreaks here City of London here, here coffeehouses here and Covid-19 pandemic here financial services here gentrification here, here, here Great Stink here, here heatwaves here, here house prices here, here hybrid working here, here immigration here, here incomes here, here mayoralty here migration into inner London here population growth here, here, here poverty here, here public transport here, here, here slum housing here social housing here suburbanization here Los Angeles here, here, here, here Louisville here Luoyang here Luther, Martin here Luton Airport here Luxembourg here, here Lyon here McDonald’s here McDonnell Douglas here McLuhan, Marshall here Madagascar here malaria here, here, here, here Malaysia here Mali here malls, reinvention of here Manchester here, here, here, here, here, here, here Manila here Manning, Alan here Markle, Meghan here marriage here Marshall, Alfred here Marshall, Tim here Marx, Karl here Maya here, here measles here, here, here Meetup here mega regions here Mekong River here Memphis, Egypt here, here Mesoamerica here, here Mesopotamia here, here, here metallurgy here metaverse here methane here, here Mexico here Miami here, here, here microbiology here Microsoft here, here, here middle class, rise of here migration policy here millennial generation here Milwaukee here, here Minoan civilization here Mistry, Rohinton here MIT here MMR vaccine here ‘modernization’ theory here Mohenjo-Daro here, here Moretti, Enrico here, here mortality rates here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here motor car, invention of here Moynihan, Daniel here Mumbai here, here Mumford, Lewis here, here, here, here Munich here, here Mycenaean civilization here Nagoya here, here Nairobi here Nashville here National Landing, Arlington here Natural History Museum here natural resource exports here Nestlé here Netherlands here network effects here New Economics Foundation here New Orleans here, here New York here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here carbon emissions here and Covid-19 pandemic here gentrification here, here housing here, here, here incomes here, here Manhattan here, here, here, here, here population growth here, here and rising sea levels here slum housing here suburbanization here, here subway here waste and recycling here New York Central Railroad here New York World Fair here Newcastle here Nextdoor here Niger here Nigeria here, here, here, here Nilles, Jack here, here Nipah virus here Norway here, here Nottingham here Novgorod here ocean and air circulation here office rental and sales prices here Ohlin, Bertil here Oldenburg, Ray here online deliveries here OpenTable here Osaka here, here Oslo here Ottoman Empire here Oxford, population of here Oxford University here Pacific Belt Zone here Padua here Pakistan here, here, here pandemics here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and zoonotic diseases here paramyxovirus here Paris here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Paris Conference (2015) here Park Chung-hee, General here parks here Pasteur, Louis here Pearl River Delta here, here Peñalosa, Enrique here per capita income here Philadelphia here Philippines here, here Phoenix here, here Pixar here plague here, here, here, here Plato here plough, invention of here pollution here, here, here, here air pollution here, here, here, here population growth here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here PORTL here potter’s wheel, invention of here printing press here, here productivity here, here, here, here, here agricultural here, here Protestantism, rise of here public transport here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Putnam, Robert here, here quarantine here railways here, here, here, here, here high-speed rail here, here, here Ralston Purina here Reagan, Ronald here recycling here, here religion here remote and hybrid working here, here, here, here Renaissance Florence here, here, here renewable energy here, here Republic of Letters here République des Hyper Voisins here ‘resource curse’ here Rheingold, Howard here Ricardo, David here Rio de Janeiro here Riverside, San Francisco here robotics here Rockefeller, John D. here Roman Empire here, here, here Rome, Ancient here, here, here, here, here, here Romer, Paul here Rotterdam here Rousseau, Jean-Jacques here, here Sahel here, here sailboat, invention of here St Augustine here St Louis here, here, here Salesforce here San Diego here San Francisco here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here gentrification here, here hybrid working here, here San Francisco Bay Area here, here, here Santa Fe here São Paulo here Savonarola, Girolamo here Scientific American here Scott, Emmett J. here sea levels, rising here, here, here Seattle here, here, here, here, here, here Second Opium War here Seneca here Seoul here Shanghai here, here, here, here, here Shantou here Sheffield here, here, here Shen Nung here Shenzhen here, here Siemens here Silk Roads here, here Sinclair, Upton here Singapore here, here, here, here Slater, Samuel here smallpox here, here Smith, Adam here, here Snow, John here social capital here social housing here, here social media here, here, here, here, here Socrates here solar panels here South Africa here South Korea here, here, here, here, here, here Southdale Center here specialization here, here, here, here, here, here Spengler, Oswald here Starbucks here Stephenson, Neal here Stewart, General William here Stuttgart here Sub-Saharan Africa here subsidiarity principle here suburbanization here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Sunstein, Cass here Sweden here, here Sydney here, here, here, here, here, here Syrian refugees here, here Taiwan here Tanzania here telegraph here Tempest, Kae here Thailand here Thames River here, here Thatcher, Margaret here, here, here ‘third places’ here Tianjin here Tocqueville, Alexis de here Toffler, Alvin here Tokyo here, here, here, here trade liberalization here trade routes here Trump, Donald here, here tuberculosis here, here, here Twain, Mark here Twitter here, here typhoid here, here typhus here, here Uber here Uganda here Ukraine here, here Umayyad Caliphate here unemployment here, here United Nations here, here United States anti-global populism here anti-trust regulation and industrial consolidation here anxiety and depression here broadcasting here car registrations here cost of education here decline in trust here deindustrialization here Gilded Age here Great Migration here house prices here, here immigration here industrialization here inequality here labour mobility here ‘magnet schools’ here parking spaces here patent filings here per capita emissions here, here per capita incomes here remote working here, here, here return on equity here Rust Belt here schools funding here slavery here socioeconomic mobility here suburbanization here tax revenues here US Federal Housing Authority here US General Social Survey here US Trade Adjustment Assistance Program here universities here, here, here University College London here University of Texas here university-educated professionals here Ur here urban heat island effect here urbanism, subcultural theory of here Uruk here, here, here, here, here vaccines here, here Van Alstyne, Marshall here Vancouver here Venice here, here Vienna here, here Vietnam here voluntary associations here, here Wakefield, Andrew here walking here, here, here Wall Street here Warwick University here Washington University here WELL, The here Welwyn Garden City here wheel, invention of here wildfires here, here William the Conqueror here Wilson, Edward Osborne here, here Wilson, William here World Bank here, here World Health organization here World Trade Organization here World Wide Web here writing, invention of here Wuhan here, here Xiamen here Yangtze River here, here Yangtze River Delta here yellow fever here Yellow River here, here Yersinia pestis here Yokohama here YouTube here, here Yu the Great here Zhuhai here Zoom here Zoroastrianism here BLOOMSBURY CONTINUUM Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY CONTINUUM and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc This electronic edition first published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin 2023 Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work All rights reserved.


pages: 484 words: 120,507

The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel by Nicholas Ostler

barriers to entry, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Internet Archive, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, language acquisition, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, open economy, precautionary principle, Republic of Letters, Scramble for Africa, statistical model, trade route, upwardly mobile, Wayback Machine

But such large-scale languages were known in the West too: in London, in AD 1600, the foremost English intellectual of his age, Francis Bacon, was claiming that if his writings had any hope of a future, it lay in their translation into Latin, a language of southern Europe then over two millennia old. World languages are not just a modern phenomenon: they are at least as old as world empires, global trade routes, and proselytizing religions. Many, many more can be found in the world’s history. But they are strangely fleeting: Greek is now restricted to the small country of its origin; Arabic (outside the mosque) is not current north of Morocco or west of Iraq; and neither Sanskrit nor Latin are in active use outside small priestly enclaves.

Kyrgyzstan, southern Kazakhstan) all the way along the Silk Road through Khotan and Gansu to the Chinese capital Chang’an, with outlying colonies northward in the Ordos loop of the Yellow River (in Inner Mongolia), and near Lake Baikal in Siberia.17 Inscriptions in Sogdian, which often show a link to the Samarkand area, have been found near the newly built highway across the Himalayas between China and modern Pakistan, demonstrating that, in the fourth to sixth centuries AD, Sogdian speakers were, at the very least, responsible for most of the graffiti on this trade route to India and hence were quite likely present in major northern cities of that country.18 The Sogdian monk known as Kang Senghui, whose surname Kang shows that his family came from Samarkand, and who became a famous translator of Buddhist literature in the Chinese metropolis of Luoyang ca AD 250, had been born in Hanoi, of a family that had been resident (for trade) in India.

All human life seems to be here. Given the Sog-dians’ mercantile reputation, it is surprising not to see more words for more serious, gainful activities, but there is only alfagdan ‘earn’, from ax . Having fifteen hundred years of their own civilization to look back on when they supplanted the Sogdians on their principal trade routes, perhaps the Persians had little to learn in arts of expression from their northeastern neighbors.38 But de la Vaissière has noted among them a cluster of words for sensory indulgence (r ‘desire’ and also ru de ‘greedy’ are identical in the two languages; rab xe ‘lust’ is from Sogdian arp x; bal d ‘depraved’ from pa t ; fude ‘frivolous’ from ‘adulterous’).


pages: 260 words: 84,847

P53: The Gene That Cracked the Cancer Code by Sue Armstrong

Asilomar, discovery of DNA, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Kickstarter, mouse model, Recombinant DNA, seminal paper, stem cell, trade route

It was an idea that begged to be explored because, like a stone thrown into a pond, the ripples from a founder mutation can spread far and wide. How far had 337 mutant p53 spread in Brazil? It has turned out to be remarkably widespread. When Prolla and Hainaut did some research in Porto Alegre – also on the trade route of the tropeiros and their mules – to investigate the prevalence of the mutation in the general population, they came up with startling results. Prolla’s particular interest is breast cancer, and she was involved in a study of prevention strategies that recruited several thousand healthy volunteers from poor suburbs of Porto Alegre to test mammography.

He has another hypothesis about the origins of the founder mutation that he feels is equally plausible and as a result has spent nearly two years investigating alternative possibilities, often accompanied by Achatz, as time permitted. The mutation is known to be concentrated in southern regions of Brazil, and the trail has taken the two to towns and settlements along the old trading routes between São Paulo city and Porto Alegre, 860km (530 miles) away in the state of Rio Grande do Sul. Codon 337 is a vulnerable site on the gene for mutations, explained Hainaut, and to investigate possible carcinogens he and Achatz travelled to a grim industrial town where the population is exposed to pollution from heavy metals, sulphur and other chemicals seeping from dirty mine dumps.

These very particular historical and demographic circumstances could explain how the mutation got so firmly established despite having a negative effect.’ By the middle of the 18th century the road stretched in a continuous track from Sorocaba, inland from São Paolo, to Porto Alegre, and soon became a busy trading route. Trade consisted largely of cattle being taken to market in Sorocaba from the south, and goods of all sorts being brought down by mule on the return journey. It was a round trip of some six months for the tropeiros, who would have had many stops, and likely liaisons, along the way – perfect conditions for spreading a genetic mutation.


pages: 278 words: 88,711

The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century by George Friedman

American ideology, banking crisis, British Empire, business cycle, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, gentleman farmer, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, low earth orbit, low interest rates, mass immigration, megastructure, Monroe Doctrine, pink-collar, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, working poor

-JIHADIST WAR CHAPTER 3 POPULATION, COMPUTERS, AND CULTURE WARS CHAPTER 4 THE NEW FAULT LINES CHAPTER 5 CHINA 2020: PAPER TIGER CHAPTER 6 RUSSIA 2020: REMATCH CHAPTER 7 AMERICAN POWER AND THE CRISIS OF 2030 CHAPTER 8 A NEW WORLD EMERGES CHAPTER 9 THE 2040S: PRELUDE TO WAR CHAPTER 10 PREPARING FOR WAR CHAPTER 11 WORLD WAR: A SCENARIO CHAPTER 12 THE 2060S: A GOLDEN DECADE CHAPTER 13 2080: THE UNITED STATES, MEXICO, AND THE STRUGGLE FOR THE GLOBAL HEARTLAND EPILOGUE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ——————————— Atlantic Europe The Soviet Empire Yugoslavia and the Balkans Earthquake Zone Islamic World—Modern U.S. River System South America: Impassable Terrain Pacific Trade Routes Successor States to the Soviet Union Ukraine's Strategic Significance Four Europes Turkey in 2008 Ottoman Empire Mexico Prior to Texas Rebellion China: Impassable Terrain China's Population Density Silk Road The Caucasus Central Asia Poacher's Paradise Japan Middle East Sea Lanes Poland 1660 The Skagerrak Straits Turkish Sphere of Influence 2050 U.S.

With the advent of globalization in the fifteenth century, this truth became as near to absolute as one can get in geopolitics. U.S. control of the sea meant that the United States was able not only to engage in but to define global maritime trade. It could make the rules, or at least block anyone else's rules, by denying other nations entry to the world's trade routes. In general, the United States shaped the international trading system more subtly, by using access to the vast American market as a lever to shape the behavior of other nations. It was not surprising, then, that in addition to its natural endowments, the United States became enormously prosperous from its sea power and that the Soviet Union couldn't possibly compete, being landlocked.

China has also emerged as a major industrial power in the last generation, with growth surpassing that of any other major economy in the world, although its economy is still far smaller than that of Japan or the United States. Nevertheless, China is now a key player in the Pacific Basin. Previously, it was much more self-sufficient than Japan in terms of primary commodities. But as China has grown, it has outstripped its own resources and become a net importer of raw materials. Pacific Trade Routes The Pacific now has two major Asian powers that are heavily dependent on imports to fuel their economy and on exports to grow their economy. Japan and China, along with South Korea and Taiwan, all depend on access to the Pacific in order to transport their goods and commodities. Since the U.S.


Fodor's Venice and Northern Italy by Fodor's

car-free, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, Murano, Venice glass, trade route, urban planning, young professional

Venice reached its height of power in the 15th and 16th centuries, during which time its domain included all of the Veneto region and part of Lombardy. But beginning in the 16th century, the tide turned. The Ottoman Empire blocked Venice’s Mediterranean trade routes, and newly emerging sea powers such as Britain and the Netherlands ended Venice’s monopoly by opening oceanic trading routes. The Republic underwent a slow decline. When Napoléon arrived in 1797, he took the city without a fight, eventually delivering it to the Austrians, who ruled until 1848. In that tumultuous year throughout Europe, the Venetians rebelled, an act that would ultimately lead to their joining the Italian Republic in 1866.

The competition to design a stone bridge across the Grand Canal (replacing earlier wooden versions) attracted the late-16th-century’s best architects, including Michelangelo, Palladio, and Sansovino, but the job went to the less famous but appropriately named Antonio da Ponte (1512–95). His pragmatic design featured shop space and was high enough for galleys to pass beneath; it kept decoration and cost to a minimum at a time when the Republic’s coffers were low due to continual wars against the Turks and the opening of oceanic trade routes. Along the railing you’ll enjoy one of the city’s most famous views: the Grand Canal vibrant with boat traffic. | Rialto. Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari. This immense Gothic church of russet-color brick, completed in the 1400s after more than a century of work, is deliberately austere, befitting the Franciscan brothers’ insistence on spirituality and poverty.

Train service to Asti, on the other hand, is frequent and fast. Visitor Information Asti tourism office (Corso Alfieri 357 | 14100 | 0141/530357 | www.astiturismo.it). Exploring Asti Asti is best known outside Italy for its wines—excellent reds as well as the famous sparkling white spumante—but its strategic position on trade routes at Turin, Milan, and Genoa has given it a broad economic base. In the 12th century Asti began to develop as a republic, at a time when other Italian cities were also flexing their economic and military muscles. It flourished in the following century, when the inhabitants began erecting lofty towers (West end of Corso Vittorio Alfieri) for its defense, giving rise to the medieval nickname “city of 100 towers.”


pages: 740 words: 161,563

The Discovery of France by Graham Robb

Brownian motion, deindustrialization, Honoré de Balzac, Louis Pasteur, New Economic Geography, Peace of Westphalia, price stability, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban sprawl

A bicycle unrolls a 360-degree panorama of the land, allows the rider to register its gradual changes in gear ratios and muscle tension, and makes it hard to miss a single inch of it, from the tyre-lacerating suburbs of Paris to the Mistral-blasted plains of Provence. The itinerary of a cyclist recreates, as if by chance, much older journeys: transhumance trails, Gallo-Roman trade routes, pilgrim paths, river confluences that have disappeared in industrial wasteland, valleys and ridge roads that used to be busy with pedlars and migrants. Cycling also makes conversation easy and inevitable – with children, nomads, people who are lost, local amateur historians and, of course, dogs, whose behaviour collectively characterizes the outlook of certain regions as clearly as human behaviour once did.

Until permanent migration became the norm in the late nineteenth century, Paris was not the all-consuming gravitational centre of France. The capital was well served by the major rivers of north-eastern France – Yonne, Seine, Marne, Aisne and Oise – but not by the rivers that rise in the Massif Central. The best roads out of the Auvergne all led south. A trade route to Bordeaux, Toulouse, Montpellier or Marseille, busy with mule trains and pilgrims, was preferable to an obscure track that led north into lands where people spoke a different language. Even in the early twentieth century, many villages in the southern Auvergne and Périgord had closer ties with Spain than with the northern half of France.

As the Marquis de Mirabeau observed in 1756, Roman roads had been ‘built for eternity’, while a typical French road could be wrecked within a year by ‘a moderate-sized colony of moles’. The very large number of places called ‘Le Grand Chemin’ or ‘La Chaussée’ shows that the Roman contribution to the development of modern France was not confined to the trade routes through Provence and the Rhône valley. There were long stretches of Roman surface or base layer on the roads from Arles to Aix, Clermont-Ferrand to Limoges, Arcachon to Bordeaux, the old salt route from Saintes to Poitiers, the left bank of the Lot between Aiguillon and Lafitte, and the road that wound up from the Alsace plain to Mont Sainte-Odile with an impressive top layer of nicely squared stones.


pages: 735 words: 165,375

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation by Edward Glaeser, David Cutler

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of penicillin, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, future of work, Future Shock, gentrification, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global village, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial cluster, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, job automation, jobless men, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge worker, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Richard Florida, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Socratic dialogue, spinning jenny, superstar cities, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech baron, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, union organizing, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

America’s own Ellis Island was used to quarantine immigrants until 1954. The fictional Vito Corleone spends a lonely forty days on the island after immigration officials diagnose him with smallpox in The Godfather Part II. Quarantine provided a middle way between complete openness and shutting down trade routes entirely. Before 1377, Ragusa had turned travelers away, but that meant an end to all commerce. Quarantine permitted some trade, while still reducing the flow of disease. Inbound ships and their trading partners will always want to speed things up. The collective interest lies in isolation—the individual advantage comes from connection.

Thucydides credits the Athenian plague to Ethiopia. Yersinia pestis likely came from central Asia, though some suggest an ancient European origin. That perspective reflects the biased focus of European historians on events in Europe. If sixth-century Europeans spread plague to central Africa through some long-forgotten trade route, Europeans never wrote about it. But thanks to a Franciscan missionary, we have a written record of how the Spanish unleashed a terrible pandemic upon the Aztecs: “when the smallpox began to attack the Indians it became so great a pestilence among them throughout the land that in most provinces more than half the population died.”

The story of yellow fever in Philadelphia cautions us against too much reliance on travel bans, and reminds us that other investments, like the city’s public water system, can help populations survive when a disease makes it through the cordon sanitaire. As sailing ships connected continents, more diseases wandered the globe. The Europeans who crossed the Atlantic brought American diseases back to Europe. Syphilis seems to have been a prime example. Since Africa became part of the triangular trading routes, African diseases, like yellow fever, got thrown into the mix. Yellow fever is an arbovirus, transmitted by infected mosquitoes, not by airborne droplets. Both the virus and the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that carry it are thought to originate in Africa, where the disease still kills tens of thousands of people annually, despite the existence of a functional vaccine since 1937.


pages: 956 words: 288,981

Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2011 by Steve Coll

airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Boycotts of Israel, centre right, colonial rule, computer age, disinformation, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, illegal immigration, index card, Islamic Golden Age, Khyber Pass, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, women in the workforce

Bhutto wanted, as she said later, to “market Pakistan internationally as . . . the crossroads to the old silk roads of trade between Europe and Asia.” Like every young student on the subcontinent, she had grown up with history texts that chronicled invasions across the Khyber Pass. These ancient conquests had been inspired by lucrative trade routes that ran from Central Asia to Delhi. “So I thought, ‘Okay, control of the trade routes is a way to get my country power and prestige.’ ” She imagined Pakistani exporters trucking televisions and washing machines to the newly independent Muslim republics of former Soviet Central Asia. She imagined cotton and oil flowing to Pakistan from Central Asia and Iran.23 But when she and her advisers looked at the map in 1994, they saw Afghanistan in the way, an impassable cauldron of warlords, a country engulfed by a civil war fueled by Pakistan’s own intelligence service.

It was only the Arab volunteers—from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Algeria, and other countries, who had been raised in an entirely different culture, spoke their own language, and preached their own interpretations of Islam while fighting far from their homes and families—who later advocated suicide attacks. Afghan jihadists, tightly woven into family, clan, and regional social networks, never embraced suicide tactics in significant numbers.18 Afghan fighters also often refused to attack bridges or trade routes if they were important to civilian traders or farmers. The Afghan tolerance of civilian commerce in the midst of dire conflict frustrated visiting Americans. A congressman on tour would fly over Afghanistan, see a bridge standing unmolested, and complain loudly on his return to Washington that it ought to be blown up.

They seized tanks and armored personnel carriers.29 They announced that all highway roadblocks would be dismantled, all non-Taliban militia disarmed, and all criminals subject to swift Islamic punishments. They lynched a few resisters to make their point. Benazir Bhutto was suddenly the matron of a new Afghan faction. The Taliban might provide a battering ram to open trade routes to Central Asia, as she hoped, yet they also presented complications. Pakistani intelligence already had one Pashtun client, Hekmatyar. The ISI Afghan bureau was in turmoil. The Rawalpindi army command had recently appointed a secular-minded, British-influenced general, Javed Ashraf Qazi, to take charge of ISI.


pages: 489 words: 132,734

A History of Future Cities by Daniel Brook

Berlin Wall, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, company town, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, indoor plumbing, joint-stock company, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pearl River Delta, Potemkin village, profit motive, rent control, Shenzhen special economic zone , SimCity, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, starchitect, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, working poor

Befitting its status as a trading port, but hardly a boomtown, Dubai was of minor interest to Great Britain in its age of empire. Seeing the centrality of the Gulf for its lucrative trade routes to India, the British East India Company sought to safeguard the region from anti-Western, Islamic fundamentalist pirates in the early nineteenth century. With the help of their intimidating royal navy, the British struck a series of agreements with the local sheikhs beginning in 1820 to keep the region peaceful and the trade routes open. When the Maktoum, a branch of the ruling family of Abu Dhabi, a small trading port seventy-five miles down the coast, took over Dubai in 1833, they duly kept the peace on behalf of the British.

He resolved to slam it shut. 2 SHANGHAI RACE CLUB Shanghai, 1842–1911 The Bund, mid-1860s A thirteenth-century Mongol emperor is credited with naming the city of Shanghai, which means “above the sea” in Chinese. The emperor was describing the city physically—it sits on bluffs above the Huangpu River, a tributary of the Yangtze, just a few miles from where it empties into the ocean—but the name also embodies a deeper, albeit less literal, truth. Presiding over the innumerable trade routes of the world’s largest ocean, the city of Shanghai reigns over the Pacific. If geography is destiny, the city where the Yangtze meets the Pacific—the gateway to the world for one-tenth of humanity—is, by rights, the leading city on the planet. When Hugh Lindsay of the British East India Company first laid eyes on Shanghai, he understood its importance immediately.

In the International Settlement, the British shipped in Sikhs from India—whom they prized for their martial traditions, not to mention their regal height, turbans, and mustaches—to serve as policemen. Among other duties, they patrolled the public garden to keep out the Chinese. A small Parsi community, a diaspora group of Persian Zoroastrians who had settled in India in the Middle Ages, also made their way to Shanghai following British trade routes. As “foreigners” in Shanghai, Parsis had full use of the public garden and other spaces from which the Chinese were banned. Still, given the city’s racial hierarchies, passing not just for foreign but for white was of great importance. Shanghai’s Jewish community, with roots in Baghdad, was careful to identify themselves as Sephardim, a Hebrew term literally meaning “Spaniards,” denoting the descendants of Jews expelled from Spain in 1492.


pages: 565 words: 134,138

The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources by Javier Blas, Jack Farchy

accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, algorithmic trading, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, book value, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commodity super cycle, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, electricity market, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, financial innovation, Ford Model T, foreign exchange controls, Great Grain Robbery, invisible hand, John Deuss, junk bonds, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Oscar Wyatt, price anchoring, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stakhanovite, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, éminence grise

Where living conditions in the mid-1940s had been marked by price controls and rationing, by the 1960s a growing number of households in the US, Europe and Japan could afford televisions, refrigerators and cars. Between 1950 and 1955, more than half of the households in America bought a television. 4 Everywhere new trade routes were opening, as nationalism and protectionism gave way to free trade and global markets. The world economy was growing at the fastest rate on record, driving ever greater consumption of natural resources. The period became known as the Golden Age of Capitalism. 5 Weisser had understood that this new world held unprecedented opportunities for a company whose entire business was international trading – never before had a commodity trader been able to paint on such a global canvas.

Port workers went on strike and refused to load ships taking grain to the Soviet Union, and unions urged their members to boycott Cargill and the other commodity traders. Some lawmakers even tried to block the sales, without success. The furore was one of the first demonstrations of the political nature of the commodity trade, and the power that the traders were accumulating as pioneers of international commerce. In the course of establishing new trade routes between east and west, Cargill and the other pioneers were driving a commercial rapprochement between the US and the Soviet Union that politicians weren’t prepared for. Within a few years, however, the deals with Moscow in 1963–64 would seem like a practice run for a much larger – and much more politically explosive – series of deals.

To kick-start his new project, he bought a dormant company called Marquard & Bahls for 70,000 Reichsmark (the equivalent of about $100,000 in today’s money), largely for its import–export licence, a thing of value in a country that was still formally under foreign occupation. By the 1950s, when Weisser travelled to Moscow, the company was already well known throughout the primitive market for refined products by its telegraphic address: Mabanaft, a contraction of its trading name, Marquard & Bahls Naftaproducts. But Weisser did more than just pioneer a new trade route – he helped to create a new industry where previously there had been none. When Weisser set off for Moscow in 1954, there was no real international oil trade – just a handful of huge companies with near-unlimited market power. Oil trading had briefly flourished in the nineteenth century after the first discovery of oil in America at Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859.


pages: 592 words: 133,460

Worn: A People's History of Clothing by Sofi Thanhauser

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, big-box store, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Caribbean Basin Initiative, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, COVID-19, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, export processing zone, facts on the ground, flying shuttle, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, Honoré de Balzac, indoor plumbing, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, microplastics / micro fibres, moral panic, North Ronaldsay sheep, off-the-grid, operation paperclip, out of africa, QR code, Rana Plaza, Ronald Reagan, sheep dike, smart cities, special economic zone, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce

Humans carefully clothe their hierarchies, and political power is not just advertised by forms of clothing; it is sometimes achieved through skillful use and manipulation of both personal dress and the national textile trade. This section interrogates clothing’s deep interpenetration with power and hierarchy, from ancient China to Louis XIV, to the modern mega brand. Fourth is the story of synthetics. From the ancient silk route, we move to more contemporary trade routes and regimes, by tracing the rise of synthetic fabric in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Between 2000 and 2008, petroleum-based fabrics supplanted cotton as the most commonly worn fabric on the planet. In the previous century, clothing manufacture briefly moved out of the sweatshop, and then back into it while governments aided and abetted this backslide in basic workers’ rights.

Just as had occurred in Europe, the development of a money economy, which initially drew women into the cottage-based textile industry, in the longer term promoted the marginalization of their labor and reduced their place in production. * * * — During the Ming, the center of the luxury trade was Suzhou, a 2,500-year-old city in the Yangtze Delta that first gained wealth when the Grand Canal was completed during the Sui Dynasty (581–618). The canal connected Beijing with Hangzhou and placed Suzhou on a major trade route. Suzhou was studded with the exquisite garden residences of the wealthy, some now UNESCO heritage sites, the warehouses of major merchants, and the workshops of craftsmen in the luxury trade. Canal bridges served as pickup spots for specialized day laborers. Spinners hoping to be hired for a day’s work once gathered before dawn at the bridge by Guanghua monastery.

This clothing was produced in only one size, to be modified by a sailor heading out to sea as best he could. Mass-manufactured garments for enslaved peoples developed as an industry in 1840–60. By buying cheap, mass-produced clothes, planters discovered, they could avoid using valuable slave labor in stitching. Trade routes between New York and other eastern cities and the port of New Orleans were established to ship ready-made clothing of cheap, coarse fabric to large plantations. The New Orleans dealer Folger and Blake Company claimed in one advertisement that planters would “find it greatly to their advantage to purchase their clothing ready-made” for slaves, while numerous New York firms specialized in what was known as “Negro clothing.”


pages: 393 words: 127,847

Imagine a City: A Pilot's Journey Across the Urban World by Mark Vanhoenacker

Airbus A320, Boeing 747, British Empire, car-free, colonial rule, COVID-19, East Village, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, high-speed rail, Jane Jacobs, Johannes Kepler, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, megacity, Nelson Mandela, Pearl River Delta, period drama, Richard Florida, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban planning

It’s a story that foretokens the description of the Janus-like city of Despina, in Calvino’s Invisible Cities, as reachable by only these two means of transport; it also illustrates how inexorably, in the age before oil brought Kuwait unimaginable wealth, this entrepôt would arise at the junction of desert and maritime trading routes, and grow to become for a time the Gulf’s largest port town. Its souk, or market, was known across northern Arabia, while “the lustre of its pearls,” Villiers records, “is famous in Paris and New York; its merchants are respected from Syria to Singapore, from Cairo to Calicut.” For me, Kuwait’s air, and all that it has shaped and carried, is the most arresting characteristic of the city.

And I love the museum’s guest book, in which some visitors have felt moved enough to not only sign their names but to make little drawings of boats. “Good & surprised to watch many ships!!” writes Peter, a traveler from South Korea. “You don’t make a great future without a great past,” adds a visitor named Aya. Kuwaitis—beyond the trading routes their country sat astride, and the pearls beneath its sea—had a better reason than most to set sail. There are no rivers or natural streams here. No lakes. From vessels out on the Gulf, the city’s famed pearl divers might swim down to fill leather skins from undersea freshwater springs that issued directly into the saline depths, but nowhere in the city itself did a spring reach the earth’s surface.

Makhubu also draws my attention to the blue mountains and skies of the world beyond this room, and to how—in contrast with the open perspectives and often unpeopled landscapes in the European-style tradition of painting in South Africa—their beauty can only be glimpsed through the small window and the door the police have left open. Here in Cape Town’s castle I wander away from the halls of paintings and come to an exhibit that focuses on the ceramics that arrived on the same trade routes that the city was founded to further and to guard. Much of what’s on display follows the traditional blue-on-white arrangement that we associate with earthenware from the Dutch city of Delft (which shares its name with a township that lies directly east of Cape Town’s airport). Most bewildering, perhaps, to a pilot already confounded by place lag, are the Chinese export works from the first half of the eighteenth century.


pages: 2,020 words: 267,411

Lonely Planet Morocco (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Paul Clammer, Paula Hardy

air freight, Airbnb, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, Day of the Dead, Dr. Strangelove, illegal immigration, low cost airline, Multics, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, place-making, Skype, spice trade, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

Almohad Yacoub el-Mansour remodelled Marrakesh with a fortified kasbah, glorious gardens, qissariat (covered markets), a rebuilt Koutoubia and a triumphal gate (Bab Agnaou). But the Almohads soon lost their showpiece to the Merenids, who turned royal attention to Meknès and Fez. Life improved again in the 16th century, when the Saadians made Marrakesh the crux of lucrative sugar-trade routes, established a trading centre for Christians and a protected mellah (Jewish quarter) in 1558. Ahmed al-Mansour ed-Dahbi (the Victorious and Golden) paved the Badi Palace with gold and took opulence to the grave in the gilded Saadian Tombs. Alawite leader Moulay Ismail preferred Meknès to Marrakesh, and moved his headquarters there – though not before looting the Badi Palace.

In the early 15th century, the port became a safe haven for pirates and racketeers. Anfa pirates became such a serious threat later in the century that the Portuguese sent 50 ships and 10,000 men to subdue them. They left Anfa in a state of ruins. The local tribes, however, continued to terrorise the trade routes, provoking a second attack by the Portuguese in 1515. Sixty years later the Portuguese arrived to stay, erecting fortifications and renaming the port Casa Branca (White House). The Portuguese abandoned the colony in 1755 after a devastating earthquake destroyed Lisbon and severely damaged the walls of Casa Branca.

The focus is on the history of the area from prehistoric times to the 19th century. Placards are in French and Arabic. Some highlights are pre-Roman tools; a sculpture with scenes of a bacchanalian feast; some 16th-century jewellery; an extraordinary floor mosaic from Volubilis; and a fascinating wall map of trade routes past and present. Before you leave, don’t miss the exotic Sultan’s Garden off the main courtyard, opposite the entrance. The museum is outside the medina – follow the perimeter all the way to the western end, to the highest part of the city, enter the Porte de la Kasbah, and follow the road to the museum.


pages: 389 words: 87,758

No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends by Richard Dobbs, James Manyika

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, demographic dividend, deskilling, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, job automation, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, pension time bomb, private sector deleveraging, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Great Moderation, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Zipcar

It has broadened and branched out, like a river moving through its delta. In 1990, more than half of all goods flows were between developed countries. The typical transaction might have been a Toyota Celica shipped from Japan to the United States. But in 2012, such transactions accounted for only 28 percent of all goods flows.10 Since 1990, trade routes have evolved from hubs in the United States and Western Europe into a global web of trade, with Asia as the largest trading region. Emerging economies now account for 40 percent of all goods flows, and 60 percent of those go to other emerging economies—known as south-south trade. In 1990, this trade accounted for 6 percent of global goods flows; it rose to nearly 24 percent by 2012.11 It might, for example, involve a barrel of oil going from Congo to China, or soybeans farmed deep in Brazil shipped to Malaysia, or an Indian pharmaceutical shipped to Algeria.

Between 1980 and 2007, annual cross-border capital flows increased from $0.5 trillion to a peak of $12 trillion, a twenty-three-fold increase that was in large measure driven by Europe’s monetary and trade integration.15 Such flows fell sharply in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and then bounced back. In 2012, estimated financial flows stood at $4.6 trillion, nearly five times the level in 1990.16 Trade routes have expanded and trade patterns have become increasingly more complex 1 Includes only merchandise. 2 This value does not include the trade flows between countries in a region. If intraregional trade flows are included, the total trade for 2009 is $18.3 trillion. Overall value estimate for 2013, breakdowns calculated on data until August 2010.

Some do so for philanthropic purposes. Coca-Cola used its market distribution expertise in sub-Saharan Africa to manage the storage and delivery of AIDS drugs in countries such as Tanzania. “We’re not lending our trucks or our fleet, or our motorcycles,” as Coca-Cola CEO Muhtar Kent put it. “We’re lending our expertise.”48 Trade routes have expanded and trade patterns have become increasingly more complex 1 Migrants data from 2010 used for people flows; 2013 cross-border Internet traffic used for data and communication flows. For data on complete country set, download the full report, Global flows in a digital age: How trade, finance, people, and data connect the world economy. 2 Calculations exclude data and communication flows, for which data are not available for 1995.


pages: 297 words: 89,176

Cheese and Culture: A History of Cheese and Its Place in Western Civilization by Paul Kindstedt

agricultural Revolution, classic study, cotton gin, Kickstarter, mass immigration, New Urbanism, trade route

The development of rennet technology and storable cheeses, in turn, was probably directly responsible for the growing maritime trade in cheese that began around this time, as evidenced from commercial records recovered from the Hittite vassal city of Ugarit on the Syrian coast. Ugarit was a strategic trading center at the crossroads of major land-based trade routes that extended south to the southern Levant, east to Mesopotamia, and north to Anatolia. It was also a strategic maritime trade center with extensive connections to the southern Levant and Egypt, the Aegean islands and Greece, and Anatolia (Sherratt and Sherratt 1991). During the period when the Hittites controlled Ugarit toward the end of the second millennium BC Hittite administrators maintained extensive cuneiform records of land-based and maritime trade passing through the city.

The complex social arrangements, cultural attitudes, and sophisticated cheese-making practices and equipment that underpinned communal transhumance and alpine cheese making likely took centuries to evolve, stretching back to pre-Roman times. Although Saint Gall was founded on the fringes of rugged wilderness, the town of Arbon on the shores of Lake Constance was only 8 miles (13 km) away. Arbon was an ancient Celtic Helvetic settlement that the Romans had transformed into a wealthy regional center, situated on a major Roman trade route. Celtic agriculture had been well established in this region for many centuries, and pastoral transhumance and mountain cheese making had almost certainly been practiced in the region since before the Roman occupation. Thus, the monks at Saint Gall probably acquired their cheese-making knowledge from the wealth of experience residing in the peasant tenant farmers, or serfs, who populated the monastic manors under their control.

First Civilizations: Ancient Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt. 2nd ed. Equinox Publishing, London. Chaniotis, A. 1999. Milking in the Mountains: Economic Activities on the Cretan Uplands in the Classical and Hellenistic Periods. In From Minoan Farmers to Roman Traders, A. Chaniotis, ed. Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart. Charlesworth, M. P. 1970. Trade-Routes and Commerce of the Roman Empire. 2nd ed. Cooper Square Publishers, New York. Chavalas, M. 2005. The Age of Empires, 3100–900 bce. In A Companion to the Ancient Near East, D. C. Snell, ed. Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, UK. pp. 34–47. Cheke, V. 1959. The Story of Cheese-Making in Britain.


pages: 340 words: 90,674

The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey Into China's Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future by Geoffrey Cain

airport security, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, anti-communist, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Snowden, European colonialism, fake news, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Kickstarter, land reform, lockdown, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, phenotype, pirate software, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, speech recognition, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, WikiLeaks

It’s a region littered with crisscrossing ethnic and religious loyalties that both precede and supersede modern governments. Most violent conflicts in the world today are happening in Eurasia. It’s also rich in oil, rare earths, and mineral wealth—and rife with dictatorships, inequality, and religious fundamentalism. I became fascinated with the history of the Silk Road, the thread of trading routes winding from Europe to Asia, over which gold and precious metals flowed east to China and silk flowed west to Europe. It was first made famous to us in the West by the travels of Marco Polo in the thirteenth century. I read the accounts of European explorers who traveled through the harsh and unforgiving Taklamakan Desert, one of the world’s largest, just beyond Kashgar, the city that is the heartland of the Uyghurs.

[ ] In the years after 9/11, I watched as China, whose culture had long fascinated me, began to reach westward through the region called Xinjiang. Since 2013, China had been building a $1 trillion network of roads, ports, oil pipelines, and railroads. It’s called the “One Belt, One Road” initiative.9 China wants to move away from its overexploited coast, trying to establish global trading routes that could become an alternative to crossing the Pacific Ocean. It wants to convince companies—like Foxconn, the manufacturer of Apple’s iPhone that makes devices on the southeast coast in Shenzhen, near Hong Kong—to move their manufacturing inland. The companies would then use land routes, which are becoming cheaper, to reach export markets in the European Union and Middle East.

The United States had done something similar with its destruction of Native American lands and rights in its relentless march to the Pacific Coast; and with its double-dealing to achieve the construction of the Panama Canal, which allowed it to move ships quickly between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, giving it enormous geopolitical power. The British did the same with the Suez Canal in the Middle East, speeding the trade route between London and its most valuable colony, India.31 “Eurasia is by far the world’s largest and most central supercontinent, with well over a third of the Earth’s entire land area,” noted the political scientist Kent E. Alder. “Beneath its soil lies nearly two-thirds of the world’s oil and over 80 percent of conventional gas reserves… Eurasia’s constituent nations hold almost 85 percent of world foreign exchange reserves, while generating close to 70 percent of global GDP in PPP [purchasing power parity] terms, not to mention nearly half of the world’s manufactured goods.”32 A supercontinent connected through trade networks and roads was exactly what China needed and wanted.


pages: 335 words: 89,924

A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet by Raj Patel, Jason W. Moore

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Bartolomé de las Casas, biodiversity loss, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, company town, complexity theory, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, energy transition, European colonialism, feminist movement, financial engineering, Food sovereignty, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Haber-Bosch Process, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microcredit, Naomi Klein, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, peak oil, precariat, scientific management, Scientific racism, seminal paper, sexual politics, sharing economy, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, surplus humans, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, wages for housework, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War

Cotton workers, who demanded too many concessions, were systematically displaced on both sides of the Atlantic by technologies that reduced the need for their labor (some industrial cotton-worker militants were themselves displaced handloom weavers).55 Workers in one part of the world were pitted against those in another, with new trade routes opening up cheaper sources of cotton (saving time, money, and land for other more profitable uses).56 Resources were spent developing alternative fibers (just as cotton replaced wool, so new textiles have threatened the negotiating power of cotton workers). And union power was smashed directly, by strike-breaking private police and through legislation aimed at keeping restive workers in their place.

Cameron, and L.M. Cook. 1994. “Fossil Evidence of Recent Human Impact on the Land Snail Fauna of Madeira.” Journal of Biogeography 21, no. 3: 309–20. Gotzek, D., H.J. Axen, A.V. Suarez, S. Helms Cahan, and D. Shoemaker. 2015. “Global Invasion History of the Tropical Fire Ant: A Stowaway on the First Global Trade Routes.” Molecular Ecology 24, no. 2: 374–88. Gouge, William. 1622. Of Domesticall Duties, Eight Treatises, Etc. London: John Haviland, for William Bladen. Graetz, Heinrich. (1894) 1967. History of the Jews. Edited and in part translated by Bella Löwy. Vol. 3. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America.

Spinden, Herbert J. 1920. “Central American Calendars and the Gregorian Day.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 6, no. 2: 56–59. Spínola, H., A. Brehm, F. Williams, J. Jesus, and D. Middleton. 2002. “Distribution of HLA Alleles in Portugal and Cabo Verde: Relationships with the Slave Trade Route.” Annals of Human Genetics 66, no. 4: 285–96. Srnicek, Nick. 2017. Platform Capitalism. Malden, MA: Polity. Srnicek, Nick, and Alex Williams. 2015. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work. Brooklyn: Verso. Standing, Guy. 2016. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. Rev. ed.


pages: 1,014 words: 237,531

Escape From Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity by Walter Scheidel

agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, conceptual framework, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, disruptive innovation, Easter island, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flying shuttle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, means of production, Multics, Network effects, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer lending, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, secular stagnation, South China Sea, spinning jenny, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Nicola di Cosmo distinguishes between tribute empires that depended on payments from China and subordinates, from the Xiongnu at the end of the third century BCE to the Rouran up to the mid-sixth century CE; trade-tribute empires—exemplified by the Turks and Khazars during the following 350 years—that added control over long-distance trade routes to tribute-taking; dual-administration empires such as those of the Liao and Jurchen from the tenth through the mid-thirteenth centuries that increasingly relied on taxation; and the direct-taxation empires of the Mongols and Manchu that were made possible by the wholesale conquest of China.63 Throughout this period, as steppe powers shored up their capabilities, the interstitial phases between monopolistic (or duopolistic) empire in China itself kept contracting.

In the latter region, prebendal assets were never similarly well privatized or protected, and the advent of Turkic and Mamluk conquest regimes increased the odds of arbitrary confiscation.47 The impact of political fragmentation on trade varied. Even though one might reasonably suspect more intense polycentrism to have raised transaction costs, the opposite could also be the case. The presence of multiple autonomous polities along the same trade route did in fact harm exchange by prompting serial predation. At the same time, interroute fragmentation that enabled traders to choose among “multiple politically independent routes” lowered tariffs. In the end, whatever the costs of fragmentation in terms of lives and treasure, it reliably opened up room for choice and bargaining.48 Medieval Foundations of Modern Development By 1000, Latin Europe had, in Michael Mann’s words, turned into “a multiple acephalous federation” that lacked a dominant center and was composed of complex interaction networks.

Karayalcin 2008: 977–85 for a model, and 985–91 for supporting evidence; likewise Chu 2010, esp. 182. 46. E. Jones 2003: 233. 47. J. Hall 1985: 126–28; van Bavel, Buringh, and Dijkman 2018: 47. 48. Cox 2017: 726–29, who shows that tolls on fixed Ottoman caravan routes were much higher than on flexible English trade routes. 49. Mann 1986: 376–77 (quote: 376). 50. This last feature prompts Baechler 1975: 77 to observe that “the expansion of capitalism owes its origins and its raison d’être to political anarchy” (quote italicized in original). 51. Van Zanden 2009a: 48–49. My specifications in italics add much-needed precision to his own underlying trifecta (49).


The Rough Guide to Egypt (Rough Guide to...) by Dan Richardson, Daniel Jacobs

Bletchley Park, British Empire, call centre, colonial rule, disinformation, Easter island, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Livingstone, I presume, satellite internet, self-driving car, sexual politics, Skype, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, sustainable-tourism, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, Wall-E, Yom Kippur War

Asmant el-Khorab is now the field HQ of the Dakhla Oasis Project (DOP), a multi-disciplinary effort to understand the interaction of oasis cultures and their environment, from the Stone Age through until the twenty-first century. Half-a-dozen foreign missions are seeking the holy grail of Egyptology: evidence of links between the Old Kingdom and desert trade routes going back to Neolithic times, which may answer the question: did Ancient Egyptian civilization emerge from the Western Desert? * * * Qila ed-Dabba and Ain Asil 2–3km from Balat via a track 200m east of the village teahouse; also accessible on foot from Bashendi (2km) • Daily 8am–5pm • £E25 Although the oldest houses in Balat village date only from Mamluke times, this locality was a pharaonic seat of government as long ago as 2500 BC, when the oasis prospered through trade with Kush (ancient Nubia).

Submerged by the sea aeons ago, leaving fossils on the high plateau, the Kharga depression is hemmed in by 300-metre-high cliffs, with belts of dunes advancing across the oasis. It’s thought that there were no dunes here in Roman times; myth has it that they erected a brass cow on the escarpment, which swallowed up the sand. Many desert trade routes converged on the oasis, notably the Forty Days Road. Both Roman legionaries and Mamluke troops were stationed here, and deserted Roman forts and villages that claim descent from Mamluke soldiers attest to centuries of firm control by Egypt’s rulers, who have used Kharga as a place of exile since antiquity.

Protecting this vast area is another matter, especially since the revolutions in Egypt and Libya have weakened authority at every level. Please abide by park regulations (don’t disturb or remove anything), and report safari outfits engaged in trafficking artefacts to the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency ( eeaa.gov.eg). * * * THE FORTY DAYS ROAD Of all the trade routes between North Africa and the tropical south, the Forty Days Road (Darb al-Arba’in) was the one most involved in slavery – the only business profitable enough to justify the risks and rigours of the thousand-mile journey. The slaves, purchased at the Dongola slave market or kidnapped by the fierce desert tribes, were assembled at Kobbé, a town (no longer existing) 60km northwest of El-Fasher, the capital of Sudan’s Darfur Province, once an independent kingdom.


pages: 353 words: 98,267

The Price of Everything: And the Hidden Logic of Value by Eduardo Porter

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, British Empire, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Credit Default Swap, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, flying shuttle, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, new economy, New Urbanism, peer-to-peer, pension reform, Peter Singer: altruism, pets.com, placebo effect, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, ultimatum game, unpaid internship, urban planning, Veblen good, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

The very concept of a financial bubble is three hundred years old, added to the vernacular of finance in 1720 when French, Dutch, and British investors succumbed to euphoria over the potential of new trade routes across the Atlantic—pushing up stock prices before they ended in a precipitous crash. The British South Seas Company was established to buy the debt of the crown. To make money, it was given a royal charter to exploit trade routes between Africa, Europe, and Spain’s colonies in America. Spain and Britain being at war, the routes were of dubious value. But that didn’t stop investors from jumping on the vaunted opportunity.

Investment decisions, he thought, are the result of “animal spirits—of a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.” Robert Shiller, an economist at Yale, has proposed a model based on Keynes’s insight. In it, rationality takes a hike: a plausible new economic opportunity—say the Internet or new trade routes across the Atlantic—leads early investors to make a lot of money. This generates enthusiasm. The prices of the hot new asset—dot-com stocks, shares in shipping companies, whatever—are bid up as investors rush to partake of the profits. This leads to euphoria. Eventually the investments overrun the underlying logic.


pages: 363 words: 101,082

Earth Wars: The Battle for Global Resources by Geoff Hiscock

Admiral Zheng, Asian financial crisis, Bakken shale, Bernie Madoff, BRICs, butterfly effect, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, corporate governance, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global rebalancing, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, trade route, uranium enrichment, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

Contents Maps Introduction Chapter 1: The Four Essentials Clean Energy Technologies Lithium Triangle of the Andes Bolivia’s Ambitious Pitch Multitude of Factors New Products for Old Trading Routes The World in 2050 Chapter 2: Geographical Flashpoints Long Trading History The Opium Wars China’s Northern Borders Caspian’s Strategic Significance Arctic Ocean Disputes Chapter 3: The Key Players Commodity Trading Skills Russia’s Billionaire Oligarchs The AAR Connection Money in Metals World’s Most Valuable Companies Chinese Miners on the Prowl Rapid Emergence on the Global Stage Chapter 4: Food and Water Challenge for India, Pakistan Taming the Yangzi Aral Sea’s Damage Waters of the Nile High Food Prices Frozen Fresh Water Pressure on Prices Chapter 5: “Going Out” for Energy U.S.

According to the EIA, these “pre-salt” oil deposits, found in rocks beneath the salt layer at combined water, salt, and rock depths of up to 6,700 metres (22,000 feet), have the potential to transform Brazil into one of the largest oil producers in the world.13 Venezuela, a founder member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), has bigger reserves and is the world’s seventh largest oil producer, but since President Hugo Chavez’s nationalization of the oil industry in 2007, output has declined. Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, and Ecuador all produce oil and are the subject of interest from national and global oil companies. Colombia is growing its role as a coal exporter, too, with more supply earmarked for China and India. New Products for Old Trading Routes In a sense, this scramble for resources is simply a continuation of history—only the players and the products have changed. The Romans had been trading with India since before the first century, either via the overland caravan route through Persia, or by boat through the Red Sea. Indian trade extended east to China and Southeast Asia, as well as west to Africa and beyond.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, November 2011 National leaders may make soothing noises about peaceful cooperation, but given the level of mistrust between China and India, China and Japan, and China and the United States, it’s far from inconceivable to see future clashes in the East and South China Seas or the Indian Ocean trade routes as China seeks to safeguard the resources it believes belong to it, and to manage its sea lanes of communication. That rationale applies to scores of other hotspots around the globe—Cuba looking for oil 100 km (60 miles) off the coast of Florida irritates the United States, as does Venezuela’s own version of resources diplomacy.


pages: 366 words: 100,602

Sextant: A Young Man's Daring Sea Voyage and the Men Who ... by David Barrie

centre right, colonial exploitation, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, GPS: selective availability, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, lone genius, Maui Hawaii, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, polynesian navigation, South China Sea, three-masted sailing ship, trade route

Now they could determine their latitude at noon as the sun crossed their meridian, as well as after dark (from the height of Polaris), subject to the limitations of the instruments then at their disposal. Moreover, they could continue to find their latitude when south of the equator—when Polaris had disappeared below the northern horizon. This breakthrough helped the Portuguese to open up an enormously valuable trade route into the Indian Ocean around the Cape of Good Hope. Early in the sixteenth century the Portuguese also devised a rule for determining latitude by reference to the stars of the Southern Cross—which lie some distance from the south celestial pole.2 While latitude could be determined quite easily, the earth’s motions meant that the measurement of longitude was a much more difficult challenge.

Beyond doubt was the fact that the vast Pacific Ocean had only so far been explored in a haphazard, piecemeal fashion and that the available Pacific charts were full of gaps and baffling inconsistencies. It was therefore not unreasonable to suppose that the “southern continent,” if it existed, might lie hidden in its unexplored reaches, and that the Pacific coast of North America might reveal a new and commercially valuable trade route between Europe and the Far East. It was against this background that, in 1768, the British Admiralty decided to send an expedition to the South Seas, under the command of an obscure warrant officer in the Royal Navy who was soon to become a celebrity throughout Europe. Envisaged initially as a contribution to the international scientific effort to observe the second Transit of Venus of the eighteenth century (the first having taken place in 1761), the expedition had the additional task of exploring the southern Pacific in search of the fabled continent.

Michel, 3, 15n and natural navigation methods, 314n27 Pacific Northwest, 143, 147–48, 149, 151–53 and pack ice, 242 and position errors, 267–68, 275 and satellite navigation, 282 Straits of Magellan, 203, 206, 229 and Thetis wreck, 214 Torres Strait, 158 and voyage of the Beagle, 212 Tierra del Fuego and Anson’s explorations, 53 and Bougainville’s explorations, 115 and Cook’s explorations, 92 discovery of, 194–95 and voyage of the Beagle, 201, 203–8, 204–5 Timor, 39, 42–43, 175 tin clock, 228, 236 Tinian, 55 Titanic, 45 Tofoa (Tofua), 38, 41 Tom Thumb, 160 Tonga Islands, 37, 91, 133 Torres Strait and Bligh’s explorations, 41, 158 and Bougainville’s explorations, 120 and Cook’s explorations, 103 and Flinders’s explorations, 173–74, 175, 178, 182 and Slocum’s circumnavigation, 238 tourism, 95 trade routes, 139, 168 Trafalgar, Battle of, 147n transatlantic cruises, 7 Transit of Venus, 75, 88, 268 TRANSIT satellite system, 281 “Traverses” of St. Lawrence River, 10 treasure ships, 55–56 Treatise on Maritim Surveying (Mackenzie), 61 triangulation, 4–5, 61–62, 169, 239 trigonometry, 197 Trim (Flinders’s cat), 190–92 Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 191 Tropic of Capricorn, 23, 29 true north, 4, 27, 27n Tukopia, 134 Tupia, 264 Turrell, James, 283–84 Tuskar Rock lighthouse, 220 Tutuila, 129 Two-Handed Transatlantic Race, 271 typhus, 52 urbanization, 285 Urville, Jules Dumont d’, 136 U.S.


pages: 300 words: 99,410

Why the Dutch Are Different: A Journey Into the Hidden Heart of the Netherlands: From Amsterdam to Zwarte Piet, the Acclaimed Guide to Travel in Holland by Ben Coates

Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, British Empire, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, company town, drug harm reduction, Easter island, failed state, financial innovation, glass ceiling, invention of the printing press, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, megacity, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, short selling, spice trade, starchitect, trade route, urban sprawl, work culture

The Low Countries were the birthplace of the atlas, the globe and the principles of triangulation, and many Dutch nautical terms found their way into the English language – yacht, schooner, jib, skipper, bow, boom, sloop, cruise, deck, wreck, blunderbuss. Located between the powerhouse economies of Britain and Germany, with a long seaboard at the crossroads of major trade routes, Dutch merchants made handsome profits ferrying goods like wine north from the Mediterranean and grain south from the Baltic. Waterborne traffic went not only past the Netherlands but through it, Dutch rivers and canals providing a convenient means of avoiding the stormy North Sea. However, Dutch trading prowess was largely confined to Europe, and the country had effectively been a bystander of the great period of colonial expansion, preoccupied with the fight for its independence during the years when the Spanish, Portuguese and English laid claim to much of the world.

Eventually running to five bulky volumes, including beautiful illustrations, this was one of the world’s first great travel books. More importantly, the work was also a treasure trove of practical advice for those seeking to expand trade in Asia. It amounted to an encyclopaedia of Portuguese empire trade routes, including detailed nautical maps, information about the weather and tides, descriptions of the languages spoken by merchants in different ports, and the types of goods available for trade. The book identified quicker sailing routes from southern Africa to the East Indies, and explained the secret to breaking the Portuguese hold on the narrow straits between present-day Malaysia and Indonesia: by approaching from the south, Dutch ships could sneak through unnoticed by their rivals.

Neat colonial bungalows were held in the gentle embrace of wide curving rivers; a ruined cathedral crumbled amid exotic wildlife, including an armadillo, an anteater and a monkey dozing in the sunshine. These South American scenes demonstrated how, as trade in the East flourished, the Dutch turned their attention westward. Some traders had grown frustrated with the monopoly exercised by the VOC and now sought to circumvent it, by creating new trade routes offering access to Asia from the opposite direction. Other motivations also came into play: the Spanish empire had been busily getting fat on South American silver and gold, and the Dutch were keen to seize a piece of the action. A European fashion for furs and an increasing demand for salt to cure fish also offered lucrative opportunities for imports from North America.


pages: 695 words: 194,693

Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible by William N. Goetzmann

Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Cass Sunstein, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, compound rate of return, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, delayed gratification, Detroit bankruptcy, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, frictionless, frictionless market, full employment, high net worth, income inequality, index fund, invention of the steam engine, invention of writing, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, means of production, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, stochastic process, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, wage slave

FINANCE AND KNOWLEDGE Finance also played a role in another key aspect of civilization: the development of knowledge. One important way that humankind learned about the boundaries of the world was through merchant voyages requiring money and time—underwritten by investors hopeful of a future profit. In this way, finance has been a cofactor in civilization’s expansion and outreach. Trade routes linked societies from distant parts of the world. These distant connections were not only spatial, they were also temporal. From the outset, long-distance trade created long gaps of time: intervals between investment and return separated by the veil of uncertainty. Columbus had to wait patiently for the funding of his first transatlantic voyage, and then he had to promise the future unknown profits to his benefactors.

Assur merchants struck deals with local rulers and kingdoms along these caravan routes; paying duty on their goods, and exacting exclusive rights and shutting out other Assyrian competitors. They even pursued gray market exporters from their own city. When the traders returned—minus most of their donkeys—they brought silver, the economic lifeblood of Mesopotamia. A major stop along the Assure trade route was a city in the region of what is now northeastern Syria, in the valley of the Khabur River. Documents attest to it having a karum district.8 In the late third millennium, the city may have been the capital of the kingdom of Apum, although the attribution is not certain. As luck would have it, in my pre-professorial days, I joined an expedition to search for this ancient trade outpost.

This period also marked the beginning of large-scale urban Chinese civilization and the emergence of Chinese literature. One of the greatest of all China’s Warring States cities was Linzi [臨 淄] in the eastern Chinese state of Qi [齊]. Colonized by a Zhou general shortly after the fall of the Shang empire, the state of Qi occupied the Shandong [山東] peninsula and thus had access to shoreline trade routes as well as north–south inland commercial traffic. It was noted in Zhou times for its silks and other textiles, fish, and salt. According to the Grand Historian Sima Qian [司馬遷], who wrote the first account of the Zhou and Warring States era, the people of Qi were “generous, easy-going, of considerable intelligence, and fond of debate.… All five classes of people (scholars, farmers, traveling merchants, artisans, and resident traders) are to be found among them.”3 Note that two of the five classes were directly engaged in commerce.


pages: 801 words: 242,104

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond

biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, California energy crisis, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Donner party, Easter island, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, job satisfaction, low interest rates, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megaproject, new economy, North Sea oil, Piper Alpha, polynesian navigation, profit motive, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Stewart Brand, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, unemployed young men

The Khmer Empire, with its capital at Angkor, used to be Southeast Asia’s most powerful state, and Angkor’s population then was more than 20 times that of London’s at that time, around 1200. Tree-ring records now show that the region’s monsoon climate became more unstable, and that floods, droughts, deforestation, enemies, and shifting trade routes combined to bring down Angkor. For the first time in history, we face the risk of a global decline. But we also are the first to enjoy the opportunity of learning quickly from developments in societies anywhere else in the world today, and from what has unfolded in societies at any time in the past.

Ironically, raising sheep in Greenland doesn’t pay even in the short run: the government has to give each sheep-farming family about $14,000 each year to cover their losses, provide them with an income, and induce them to carry on with the sheep. The Inuit play a major role in the story of the demise of Viking Greenland. They constituted the biggest difference between the histories of the Greenland and Iceland Norse: while the Icelanders did enjoy the advantages of a less daunting climate and shorter trade routes to Norway compared to their Greenland brethren, the Icelanders’ clearest advantage lay in not being threatened by the Inuit. At minimum, the Inuit represent a missed opportunity: the Greenland Vikings would have had a better chance of surviving if they had learned from or traded with the Inuit, but they didn’t.

The U.S. is the world’s leading importer nation: we import many necessities (especially oil and some rare metals) and many consumer products (cars and consumer electronics), as well as being the world’s leading importer of investment capital. We are also the world’s leading exporter, particularly of food and of our own manufactured products. Our own society opted long ago to become interlocked with the rest of the world. That’s why political instability anywhere in the world now affects us, our trade routes, and our overseas markets and suppliers. We are so dependent on the rest of the world that if, 30 years ago, you had asked a politician to name the countries most geopolitically irrelevant to our interests because of their being so remote, poor, and weak, the list would surely have begun with Afghanistan and Somalia, yet they subsequently became recognized as important enough to warrant our dispatching U.S. troops.


pages: 215 words: 60,489

1947: Where Now Begins by Elisabeth Åsbrink

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, British Empire, disinformation, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, haute couture, illegal immigration, Mahatma Gandhi, Mount Scopus, trade route

Tired of the Zionists’ bombs and acts of terrorism; of keeping the Arabs happy; of the fact that £80 million has been squandered in Palestine over the last two years, and that 100,000 British men are obliged to be there, far from their homes and work. All “for the sake of a senseless, squalid war with the Jews in order to give Palestine to the Arabs, or God knows who,” as Winston Churchill puts it. Britain, which once occupied the region to secure trade routes and colonial power, no longer wants the future of Palestine to be seen as an internal British matter, but instead places the responsibility on the rest of the world. On February 18, five days after Christian Dior’s dream fireworks, the British announce that they are handing the issue of Palestine’s future over to the UN without making any recommendations whatsoever.

On Thursday, February 20, the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, announces that the British will be granting India independence. On Friday, February 21, the Americans are informed that Great Britain will no long be supporting Greece and Turkey as it did in the past. The Empire is collapsing. The country that once wielded world dominion is relinquishing it; the country that commanded the seas and the trade routes, held the balance of power, and disseminated its language, sport, arms, education system, currency, and soldiers across the globe is now cutting ties and turning in on itself. An incomprehensible week. Budapest The purge of anti-Communist elements starts on February 25 with the arrest of Béla Kovács, leader of the small farmers’ party, FKGP.


pages: 444 words: 103,367

The Outcast Blade by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

Murano, Venice glass, trade route

The look on the messenger’s face said he knew he was doomed either way. “Those are the Council’s orders, my lord.” “Damn the Council. I’m coming ashore.” “You’ll be arrested.” Even Lord Atilo looked shocked at that. “I’ve just sunk the Mamluk fleet. Saved Cyprus from capture and protected our trade routes. Do you really think anyone would dare?” “My lord. Your orders…” Atilo il Mauros wanted to say that no one gave him orders. Except that wasn’t true: Duchess Alexa did; her son would have done had he not been simple. And Prince Alonzo, the Regent of Venice, also had the right. “I’ve fought storms for three days.

Standing, Giulietta felt a hand on her shoulder and turned to find Marco wide-eyed and offering her a purple scarf. Having wiped her nose, she hesitated about handing it back. “K-k-keep it.” “You arranged my marriage to Janus. And don’t you dare say I had to marry someone. You arranged my marriage to a Black Crucifer because he ruled Cyprus, and Cyprus controlled the trade routes out of Egypt.” “He was Black only briefly.” “So everyone says. Black Crucifers torture people.” “For the remission of their sins.” “I don’t care.” Her voice cracked. “You arranged the marriage. And then…” She stopped and glanced sidelong at Marco, wondering how to word what came next. She’d been told to murder Janus, but slowly using the poisons her aunt provided.

She’d never had the fierce friendships other girls had because she’d never been allowed. Still, why would she stop her cousin? Giulietta spent much of her own nights talking to Tycho. He seemed willing to listen, eager to learn. He asked questions and she answered: about Sigismund’s empire, how the trade routes made Venice rich, what might happen to the Byzantine Empire after John V Palaiologos died. Like her, he found Venice easier to like at a distance. In fact, she was sure they could grow to love it provided they didn’t have to return there. Why would they want to? When they had Alta Mofacon. Her wheat was cut, threshed and stored, her hay was made and straw gathered.


pages: 370 words: 111,129

Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India by Shashi Tharoor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, barriers to entry, Boris Johnson, British Empire, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, corporate raider, deindustrialization, European colonialism, global village, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, night-watchman state, Parkinson's law, trade route

For centuries the handloom weavers of Bengal had produced some of the world’s most desirable fabrics, especially the fine muslins, light as ‘woven air’, that were coveted by European dressmakers. As late as the mid-eighteenth century, Bengal’s textiles were still being exported to Egypt, Turkey and Persia in the West, and to Java, China and Japan in the East, along well-established trade routes, as well as to Europe. The value of Bengal’s textile exports alone is estimated to have been around 16 million rupees annually in the 1750s, of which some 5 to 6 million rupees’ worth was exported by European traders in India. (At those days’ rates of exchange, this sum was equivalent to almost £2 million, a considerable sum in an era when to earn a pound a week was to be a rich man.)

The Bengal fleet in the early seventeenth century included 4,000 to 5,000 ships at 400 to 500 tonnes each, built in Bengal and employed there; these numbers increased till the mid-eighteenth century, given the huge popularity of the goods and products they carried. This thriving shipping and shipbuilding culture would be drastically curbed by the British. To reduce competition after 1757, the Company and the British ships that they contracted were given a monopoly on trade routes, including those formerly used by the Indian merchants. Duties were imposed on Indian merchant ships moving to and from Indian ports, not just foreign ones. This strangled the native shipping industry to the point of irrelevance in everything but some minor coastal shipping of low-value ‘native’ goods to local consumers.

(The war of 1803 destroyed 173,000 tons of British shipping, forcing the government in London to employ 112,890 tonnes of foreign vessels to conduct British commerce.) Expediently, Indian shipping was now deemed to be British and Indian sailors were reclassified as British sailors, allowing them access to British trade routes under the Navigation Acts. But as soon as the Napoleonic Wars ended, the Navigation Acts were again amended to exclude Indian shipping and the industry once again declined. The story was repeated in the early twentieth century, when V. O. Chidambaram Pillai in Madras was allowed to set up a shipping company in the run-up to World War I.


The Eternal City: A History of Rome by Ferdinand Addis

Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, classic study, clean water, Defenestration of Prague, friendly fire, gentleman farmer, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, land reform, moral panic, New Urbanism, Peace of Westphalia, Pier Paolo Pasolini, plutocrats, the market place, trade route, wikimedia commons

All over the great fertile plain to the south and east of Rome, around the ancient volcano of Mons Albanus, farmers and herders speaking an Italic language known as Latin were banding together to form the primitive communities that would grow to become the flourishing cities of Latium.* As these communities grew more organized, trade routes emerged to link the not-yet cities of the Latin plain, both to each other and to peoples further afield. Two of these routes crossed under Rome’s hills: the Tiber island marked the furthest point downstream at which the river could be forded, the easiest crossing point for anyone travelling up Italy’s west coast.

Most dangerous of all, from Rome’s point of view, was ongoing conflict with the Etruscan city of Veii, which lay less than a day’s march to the north, on the far side of the river. This was far too close for either Roman or Veientine comfort. Both cities were too powerful and too ambitious to let the other survive unmolested, and both were competing for control of the same vital trade route – the old salt road that led up the Tiber valley. As the Romans tried to cut off the Veientine route on the river’s right bank, so Veii kept pushing to cut off the Roman route on the river’s left. And at first, Veii had the best of it. At the Battle of the River Cremera, in 477 BC, the noble clan of the Fabii – a clan that would play a huge role in later Roman history – is supposed to have been almost wiped out.

Dionysius I, lord of the Greek city of Syracuse on the Sicilian coast, was, at that time, carving out a successful little empire for himself, with outposts all along the Italian peninsula. His new colony at Ancona on the Adriatic, right next to the territory of the Senones, was perfectly positioned to tap into the great north–south trade route over the Alps, especially if the Etruscans could be kept out of the picture. It is perfectly likely, though it cannot be proved, that the warband that sacked Rome was in Dionysius’s service. That would explain – better than the story of the negotiation at Clusium – why the Gauls came so far south: they were hired mercenaries on their way to Sicily.


pages: 547 words: 172,226

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, bread and circuses, BRICs, British Empire, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of the americas, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, invention of movable type, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land reform, low interest rates, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, Paul Samuelson, price stability, profit motive, Robert Solow, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, working poor

Political and economic institutions became more extractive, and Venice began to experience economic decline. By 1500 the population had shrunk to one hundred thousand. Between 1650 and 1800, when the population of Europe rapidly expanded, that of Venice contracted. Today the only economy Venice has, apart from a bit of fishing, is tourism. Instead of pioneering trade routes and economic institutions, Venetians make pizza and ice cream and blow colored glass for hordes of foreigners. The tourists come to see the pre-Serrata wonders of Venice, such as the Doge’s Palace and the lions of St. Mark’s Cathedral, which were looted from Byzantium when Venice ruled the Mediterranean.

Just as Rome declined, so did Aksum, and its historical decline followed a pattern close to that of the Western Roman Empire. The role played by the Huns and Vandals in the decline of Rome was taken by the Arabs, who, in the seventh century, expanded into the Red Sea and down the Arabian Peninsula. Aksum lost its colonies in Arabia and its trade routes. This precipitated economic decline: money stopped being coined, the urban population fell, and there was a refocusing of the state into the interior of the country and up into the highlands of modern Ethiopia. In Europe, feudal institutions emerged following the collapse of central state authority.

Inhabitants of these islands produced and exported these rare spices in exchange for food and manufactured goods coming from the island of Java, from the entrepôt of Melaka on the Malaysian Peninsula, and from India, China, and Arabia. The first contact the inhabitants had with Europeans was in the sixteenth century, with Portuguese mariners who came to buy spices. Before then spices had to be shipped through the Middle East, via trade routes controlled by the Ottoman Empire. Europeans searched for a passage around Africa or across the Atlantic to gain direct access to the Spice Islands and the spice trade. The Cape of Good Hope was rounded by the Portuguese mariner Bartolomeu Dias in 1488, and India was reached via the same route by Vasco da Gama in 1498.


Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain by John Darwin

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, Corn Laws, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, European colonialism, financial independence, friendly fire, full employment, imperial preference, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, Kowloon Walled City, land tenure, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, open economy, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Right to Buy, Scientific racism, South China Sea, special economic zone, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing

By the 1870s, every fifth ship at Calcutta was a British India steamship.73 Much of the rest of Mackinnon’s career was spent in the restless search for ways of extending this maritime empire, especially in East Africa, where, as a pious Scot, he was drawn by Livingstone’s grand project for promoting ‘Christianity, commerce and civilization’ to destroy paganism, slavery (and Muslim overrule). The sad end of this venture – the inglorious failure of his Imperial British East Africa Company – probably hastened his death. 9. Principal British trade routes and commodities, 1923 THE GOLDEN EMPORIUM Of course, the eastern economy was not just the handiwork of the India-based British. Around a vast arc of the southern oceans, from Natal to Fiji, Indian emigrant labour (some of it indentured and short-term) was vital to the growth of plantation economies.

Lugard now had the perfect credentials for a colonial proconsul. Another ex-soldier turned trader, George Goldie, had extracted a charter from London to defend Britain’s stake in the Niger valley against a commercial takeover by France. Goldie formed his Royal Niger Company in 1886. It used strong-arm methods to force open the trade routes into the Nigerian interior. By the mid 1890s, it was embroiled in all but a shooting war with French advance parties, moving south from the Sahel. Lugard’s task, as commander of Goldie’s private army, was to repel French influence and sign up local rulers to support the Company. When the armed struggle proved too much for the Company’s finances, its assets were nationalized (in 1898) and London took over.

As well as his and his family’s clothes, a medical chest and ‘civilized’ necessities such as coffee, sugar and tea, he would need some ‘equipment’ to make his presence effective: a stock of Bibles and books; the tools he would need for minimal self-sufficiency (spades, axes and saws) as well as those he would encourage his converts to use. The missionary could rarely operate very far from an established trade route or too far in advance of the trader’s frontier. Indeed it was sometimes convenient to become a trader himself. So determined was Samuel Marsden to rescue the Maori from the Prince of Darkness (his phrase) that he bought his own ship (he had become a rich man) and sailed the 1,200 miles from Sydney to the North Island of New Zealand to buy Maori flax in exchange for his trade goods.


pages: 3,292 words: 537,795

Lonely Planet China (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Shawn Low

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bike sharing, birth tourism , carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, country house hotel, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, G4S, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Japanese asset price bubble, Kickstarter, land reform, mass immigration, off-the-grid, Pearl River Delta, place-making, Rubik’s Cube, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, sustainable-tourism, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, young professional

History With its remote location, harsh terrain and diverse ethnic make-up, Yunnan was once considered a backward place populated by barbarians. The early Han emperors held tentative imperial power over the southwest and forged southern Silk Road trade routes to Myanmar (Burma). From the 7th to mid-13th centuries, though, two independent kingdoms, the Nanzhao and Dali, ruled and dominated the trade routes from China to India and Myanmar. It wasn’t until the Mongols swept through that the southwest was integrated into the Chinese empire as Yunnan. Even so, it remained an isolated frontier region, more closely aligned with Southeast Asia than China.

Best Classical Gardens AGarden of the Master of the Nets AHumble Administrator’s Garden APresidential Palace Best Museums ANanjing Museum ASuzhou Museum AMemorial Hall of the Nanjing Massacre Jiangsu Highlights 1 Get a grade A cultural fix at the splendid Nanjing Museum 2 Feast your eyes on the historical artefacts at Suzhou Museum 3 Indulge in the beauty of the gardens of Suzhou 4 Suzhou’s charms reach a crescendo along Pingjiang Lu 5 Enjoy tea-tasting and a traditional pingtan performance at the Pingtan Teahouse 6 Lose yourself in the alleys and canals of Tongli 7 Four words: Chinese Sex Culture Museum 8 Relax in the charming towns of Luzhi, Mudu or Zhouzhuang 9 Get some highbrow culture at a Kunqu opera performance a Scenic Ming Xiaoling Tomb is perfect for a stroll History Jiangsu was a relative backwater until the Song dynasty (960–1279), when it emerged as an important commercial centre as trading routes were opened up by the Grand Canal. In particular, the south of the province flourished: the towns of Suzhou and Yangzhou played an important role in silk production, overseen by a large mercantile class. Prosperity continued through the Ming and Qing dynasties, and with the incursion of Westerners into China in the 1840s, southern Jiangsu opened up to Western influence.

Frequent buses depart Quanzhou’s long-distance bus station (¥13, 1½ hours), taking you past arrays of stone statues (the area is famed for its stone-carving workshop) before ending up in Chongwu. Motorbikes (¥5) will take you from the bus drop-off to the stone city. Xunpu Village The fishing village of Xunpu, some 10km southeast of the city centre of Quanzhou, was on the old trade route of the maritime Silk Road and was perhaps the Arabs’ first port of call when they set foot in Quanzhou during the Song dynasty. The village, now under encroaching urbanisation, is still fascinating and you’ll find some old houses built with oyster shells behind the main road in the village. Meanwhile, the grannies still wear the flamboyant traditional head ornaments that they love to brag about.


pages: 467 words: 114,570

Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science by Jim Al-Khalili

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Book of Ingenious Devices, colonial rule, Commentariolus, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eratosthenes, Henri Poincaré, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, retrograde motion, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, time dilation, trade route, William of Occam

Its life force was the well of Zamzam, which provided the city’s water. For a century or so before Islam there had been a massive migration of population from southern to western Arabia (the region known as the Hijaz) and further north to Syria and Palestine. With its prime location along this trade route between Yemen in the south and the Mediterranean in the north, Mecca had grown rich and powerful, not only as a trade centre but as a financial one too. More importantly, its role as a holy centre for the many pagan religions of the Arabians dating back to antiquity made it a safe haven for those wishing to escape the widespread violence that regularly broke out among the tribes in the region.

Some historians have claimed that despite the Abbāsids’ admiration of all things Persian and, by association, their link to Indian science and culture in the East, the whole of the translation movement was built on what was originally Greek science.8 To some extent this is true. The expansion of Alexander the Great’s empire as far east as India, many centuries before Islam, carried the fruits of Greek science far beyond its home shores – although we should not forget the sea trade routes from Egypt as a separate avenue of transmission. This knowledge, one can argue, eventually made the circuitous journey from its Greek origins, via India, back to the palace courts of Abbāsid Baghdad. Much of Greek knowledge also reached the Arabic world through the great Christian cities of Antioch and Edessa where, to a lesser extent, a translation tradition from Greek to Syriac had flourished in the centuries before Islam’s arrival.

In this sense, what Maimonides took from the Islamic philosophers and applied to Jewish theology was no different from what Thomas Aquinas did for Christian theology. And so we finally come to the most important legacy of Andalusia. For it is through Spain that so much of Arabic science reached Europe. While there were other avenues of transmission and translation, such as through Sicily and along the trade routes with city-states like Venice, as well as through the efforts of Christian travellers in the East such as the Englishman Adelard of Bath (1080–1152), it was nevertheless first and foremost the recapture of Islamic Spain by the Christians that would give Europe access to the wealth of knowledge produced in the Islamic world.


pages: 474 words: 120,801

The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be by Moises Naim

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deskilling, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, intangible asset, intermodal, invisible hand, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megacity, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Monopolies, single-party systems, military dictatorships, societies that officially favor a particular race or religious faith, marketplaces swamped with advertising for a dominant product, cartels like OPEC, political systems like the American one in which two parties effectively control the electoral process and small ones cannot get a foothold—all of these are situations where the barriers to power are high, at least for now. But some citadels can be stormed—either because their defenses are not as strong as they seem, because they are unprepared for new types of attackers, or, for that matter, because the treasures they protected have lost value in the first place. In such instances the trade routes now bypass them, and they are no longer of interest to marauding armies. For example, the founders of Google did not set out to erode the dominance of the New York Times or other powerful media companies, but that is in fact what they accomplished. Insurgents who use improvised explosive devices in Afghanistan, or bands of Somali pirates who use rickety boats and AK-47s to hijack large ships in the Gulf of Aden, are circumventing the barriers that ensured the dominance of technologically sophisticated armies and navies.

The key is this: When people are more numerous and living fuller lives, they become more difficult to regiment and control. The exercise of power in any realm involves, fundamentally, the ability to impose and retain control over a country, a marketplace, a constituency, a population of adherents, a network of trade routes, and so on. When the people in that territory—whether potential soldiers, voters, customers, workers, competitors, or believers—are more numerous and in fuller possession of their means and functioning at ever-greater levels of ability, they become more difficult to coordinate and control. The former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, reflecting on the drastic changes in the world order since he entered public life, put it bluntly: “It is infinitely easier today to kill a million people than to control them.”8 For those in power, the More revolution produces thorny dilemmas: How to coerce effectively when the use of force gets more costly and risky?

For centuries, the job of tending the rivalry between nations and scrabbling for territory, resources, and influence has been the noble calling of generals and ambassadors. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the representatives of the so-called Great Powers wielded their respective country’s military might and economic clout to win wars, harness alliances, secure trade routes and territory, and set the rules for the rest of the world. After World War II even more impressive creatures, the superpowers, came to perch on top of this group. And the dawn of the twenty-first century, with the Soviet Union consigned to the history books, found just one player paramount: the sole superpower, the hegemon, the United States.


pages: 422 words: 113,830

Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism by Kevin Phillips

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency peg, diversification, Doha Development Round, energy security, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mobile money, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old-boy network, peak oil, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route

As early as 1670, despite the Dutch Republic’s “golden age” riches and its huge fleet and maritime outposts from Japan and South Africa to India and Brazil, some observers began to worry about how so many great merchants now lived on interest income and rents, rather than actively continuing earlier commercial and maritime activities.9 Then from 1688 to 1713, the Netherlands fought a series of wars—in retrospect, more beneficial to the future of their ally England, newly ruled by a king who was also a Dutch prince—that wound up costing the Hollanders, who were subordinate in war strategy, vital trade and trade routes while quintupling the Dutch debt. By the 1730s, it was reasonably clear that the Dutch Republic was starting to decline, and by the 1750s, as current-day historians like Simon Schama and Jonathan Israel have detailed with such thoroughness, there was malaise in the air, a sense of too much dependence on finance, a renewed fascination with the late-sixteenth-century Dutch revolt against Spain, and a yearning to somehow re-create the lost golden age.10 So was reform pursued?

By the end of that century, Amsterdam traders were complaining that whereas the town regents had previously been active merchants, now they “derived their income from houses, lands and money at interest.” The wars between 1688 and 1713 broke Holland as a naval power and forced interest rates up to 9 percent, the highest since its independence. During those same years, the Dutch national debt quintupled. By the 1720s and 1730s, the Dutch ceased to dominate some of their prime trading routes, and local financiers preferred to loan money abroad rather than at home. Midcentury brought obvious economic decline. This chronology was not very different. Spain, the previous leading world economic power, probably reached its heyday in the 1550s, started losing self-confidence after the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, and by the early 1600s was in the clutch of a malaiselike desengano.

The events and circumstances drawn together in this upheaval—unprecedented far-flung European maritime exploration; enough gold and silver from America to massively expand Europe’s money supplies; significant population growth; the rapid expansion of cities; the cultural dynamism of the Renaissance; European control of Asian trade routes, spices, and luxury goods; technological innovation in war, commerce, and navigation alike; huge new commercial fortunes; and much expanded consumer markets—signaled a new European centrality in the world. Asia, more populous and hitherto richer, fell behind. Prices did not always go up everywhere in Europe, but their general trajectory was upward.


The Frayed Atlantic Edge: A Historian’s Journey From Shetland to the Channel by David Gange

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, British Empire, garden city movement, global village, rewilding, Scientific racism, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, work culture

In the twentieth century, the papae were seen as holy men seeking a ‘desert place in the ocean’ and choosing these island sites because of their remoteness. But only a modern landlocked culture could misinterpret coastlines quite so drastically. Two things demolish that interpretation. One is the centrality of these islands to premodern trade routes. The ocean lanes now sometimes labelled ‘sea roads of the saints’ were general lines of travel for goods, ideas and people: these seas were society’s arteries. In later centuries Macleod lords set up home near two old Pabbays; historians long wrote of these lordly manors as sitting at ‘extreme outer limits of their territories’.

Sea travel was not, for them, as unwelcome a risk as it was in the minds of the first scholars to study them. Nor were they simple folk: their arrival on Scottish shores may have been caused by the expansion of large-scale maritime trading networks.2 As the archaeologist Hugh Carthy put it in 2011: ‘we appear seriously to have underestimated the extent and importance of coastal trade routes throughout the prehistory of western Europe, perhaps flippantly dismissing our ancestors as primitive hunter-gatherers’.3 This region, with its many shoreline niches for human exploitation, offers a vivid demonstration of the sea’s role as the cohesive element of the Mesolithic world. For every onshore structure dug up by Scotland’s archaeologists a hundred shipwrecks must lie at the bottom of such places: rowed, sailed and sunk during vast tracts of human history when boats and not buildings were humans’ primary tool against starvation and the elements.

Murray, 14; Orkney, 51–2, 57, 66, 86–7; in post-war Cornwall, 317–23, 324–5; Romantic poets, 131, 148; Shetland dialect poets, 25, 42, 54, 55; shieling songs and poems, 94–5; Simm’s otter poems, 175; Skye, 165, 175–8; Vagaland, 25–6, 40, 317; in Wales, 303–4, 306–10; of Western Isles, 93; wolves in, 136 poitín (home-made spirit), 220–1 Poldark (television series), 332 Pont, Timothy, 158 Pope, Alexander, 127 population density, 126–7 porphyry, 39 porpoises, 49, 167, 236, 272, 279, 333; as food, 276–7, 278–9 Porteous, William, 54, 55–6 Porter family of Enlli, 305 Portree (Skye), 181 potatoes, 111, 210, 214, 218, 228–9, 250 Praeger, Robert Loyd, 242–3 Presbyterians, Scottish, 219 primroses, 93 ptarmigan, 160, 180 puffins, 20, 32, 55, 55, 68, 87–8, 188, 227 Pwllheli (Wales), 292, 293, 294–5 Quandale, parish of (Rousay), 78–81 quartz, 33 quartzite, 126, 160 Quinag (A’ Chuinneag) (‘the Milk Churn’, mountain), 2, 3 Raasay, island of, 167 rabbits, 63, 65–6, 71, 228 racism, scientific, 190 Rackwick (‘Orkney riviera’), 83–5 railway boom (1830s), 5 Ramna Stacks, 32 Ramsbury, bishop of, 344 Rathlin lighthouse, 198 rats, 95 razorbills, 214, 271 Receivers of Wreck, 280 red fescue, 93 red ochre, 168 redstarts, 160 red-throated divers, 41 religion, 128, 219, 260–1, 304; mid-nineteenth century debates, 298–9; see also Catholicism; Celtic Christianity Renaissance, 189, 340 Rendall, Robert, Orkney Shore (1963), 67, 88 Rendall, Tommy, 68, 73 Ritchie, John, 11 Roan Inish, skerry of, 228 Robertson, Robin, ‘The Law of the Island’, 21–2 Robertson, Thomas, 34 Robinson, Mairead, 256–7, 259 Robinson, Tim, 256–7, 274–5, 310, 339, 340, 345; Connemara’s modern mapping, 240–1, 254, 256, 257, 258, 261; on Dún Aonghasa, 262; on imperial logic of mapping, 241–2; logic of attentive being, 265–7; noise of Atlantic coastlines, 85; as philosopher of place-lore, 256, 257, 258, 260, 263–4, 267–8; rejection of shore as boundary, 261; religion and secularism, 260–1 rock pipits, 277 Rodel (Harris coastal chapel), 172 Rognvald Kali Kolsson, Earl, 50–3, 60–1 Roman Britain, 209, 294 romanticism, 346–7; Celtic revival, 94–5; Cornish, 332; Romantic poets, 131, 148; and Shetland, 54; and Skye, 166, 182–3; of west of Scotland, 12 Rona, island of (Ronaidh an t’haf), 99, 167, 174 Ronas Voe (Shetland), 35 Ross, Mary, 282 Roundstone village (Connemara), 259 Rousay, island of, 59, 76–81, 86–7 Ruaidhrí, Patsaí Dan Mag (Thoraí island king), 225 Rullard’s Roost (tidal race), 59–60, 77 Rum, Isle of, 92, 180, 187, 190 Rumann mac Colmáin (poet), 273 Rusk Holm (Orkney skerry), 76–7 Ruvaal lighthouse, 198 rye, 220 Sabhal Mòr Ostaig (Skye), 165 Sakhalin Island, 248–9, 252 salmon, 236; farming of, 247 San Pellegrino of Ireland, 207 sand sedges, 93 sanderling, 254 Sandray (Sanndraigh), isle of, 116 sandstone, 33, 77, 82, 135 Sandwood Bay (near Cape Wrath), 310 Saro-Wiwa, Ken, 249–50, 251 Saunders, Gwenno, 316 Saurin, Amanda, 112–13 Saxa Vord (headland), 18 saxifrage, xi Scalloway (Shetland), 44 Scandinavia, xi, 168, 206; see also Norse world Scariff Island (County Kerry), 287 Schama, Simon, Landscape and Memory, 6 Schönberg, Arnold, 84 Scilly Isles, 333, 334, 335 Scoraig peninsula (Scotland), 153 Scotland: Act of Union (1707), 88, 128; ancient woodland, 157, 158, 159–60; Ardnamurchan coast, 187, 188; Argyll coastline, 198–204, 208; Balnakiel (near Cape Wrath), 123, 128–9, 172; Cape Wrath to Coigach, 123–4, 125, 132–4; clearances, 8, 127, 136, 188; conversion to strict Calvinism, 128; co-operative societies, 229, 230; deep sea lochs of west, 145; deforestation, 157–9; emptying of north-west, 152–3; first settlers, 167–70; geology/landscape in north-west, 123, 125–6, 130–3, 134, 135, 138–9, 145–9, 153–4; ‘Great Wilderness’, 153–6; ‘Highland problem’ as Enlightenment invention, 344; Highland sporting estates, 152–3, 154–5; historical sources for far north-west, 128, 130–2, 154; human traces/ruins, 123, 127, 136, 154, 155, 157–8; independence referendum (2014), 208; Industrial Revolution in, 157–9; land ownership today, 154; low treeline in mountain areas, 156–7; mountains of north-west, 2–3, 125–6, 134, 137, 145–6, 153, 155, 156, 157, 159–61; post-Culloden reign of terror, 129; steamers to Shetland, 26–7; stereotyping/mythologising of coastal communities, 11–12; urban Gaelic renaissance, 141–2; wildlife and flora of north-west, 125, 134–5, 139, 153, 156–7, 159–61; see also entries for islands and island groups; Sutherland Scotsman newspaper, 104 Scott, Walter, 182–3 Scottish Wildlife Trust, 135 sea clans, 171–4; stripped of power, 99–100, 173 sea conditions: death on the edge-zone, 236–7; as deceptive in changing weather, 28–9, 30, 40–1, 59–60; Dorus Mor tide, 193–4; at Foula, 55; late summer uncertainty, 59; noise of Atlantic coastlines, 83–7; Orkney tides, 19, 59–60, 75–7, 82–3; Outer Hebridean waves/rolling swell, 97–8; at Seven Stones, 335–6; shallow inshore in Hebrides, 97–8; Shetland tides, 19, 22–3, 27–30, 32, 36, 49, 50, 53, 75; tides of Hoy, 82–3; violence of waves, 18, 22; violent seas around Ireland, 228, 242–6, 266–8, 287; on Welsh coast, 293, 304 sea eagles, 7, 110, 135, 167 sea gooseberries, 110 Sea of Moyle, 229, 282 sea roads and trade routes: and early humans in Scotland, 168–9; historic sea links to China, xi, 206; in MacCaig’s verse, 137; Ness ships on, 101; of Norse world, 23, 50–1, 119–20, 172–3; plotted by ships of science, 240; revived during Donegal blockade, 230; role of in Mesolithic world, 168–70; in Shetland, 23, 26; South Atlantic sea route, 88; west coast of Ireland, 206, 211–13, 260 seabirds: breeding, 19; feathers as commodity, 117; as food, 11, 68, 70–1, 107; ground-nesting on Foula, 55; on Handa Island, 135, 137; in Ireland, 214, 215, 227, 228, 235, 236, 271, 283; ‘King Auk’, 62–3; on Orkney, 68, 70–1; on Shetland, 17, 20–2, 31–2, 38, 39, 42, 43, 46–8, 55–6; on Skye, 167, 168, 176, 178; Skye symbolism, 176; in Wales, 296; on Western Isles, 99, 107, 116, 117 Sealga, Loch na, 155, 156 seals, 81, 243, 246; killing of on Orkney, 68, 69–70; killing of on Papa Stour, 39 seaside resorts, 292–3, 310–11 seasons: autumn, 93–4, 116, 123–4; climbing in winter, 125–6, 145, 179–81; July as turn of British year, 17–18; late summer uncertainty, 59; spring, 188, 214, 227–8, 271; summer, 93–4, 315; winter, 18, 125–6, 155–6, 179–81, 187, 189, 293 Second World War, 317, 318, 321–2, 328, 332 secularism, 260–1, 297, 301 Sennen Cove (Cornwall), 333 Seven Stones (Cornish Atlantic), 334, 335–6 Severin, Tim, The Brendan Voyage (1978), 212 Sgoth Niseach (traditional Ness boat), 98, 108 Sgùrr Alasdair (Cuillin), 180–1 Sgùrr Mhic Choinnich (Cuillin), 181 Sgùrr na Banachdaich (Cuillin), 181 Sgùrr na Stri (Cuillin), 182 Sgùrr Thearlaich (Cuillin), 181 sharks, 17, 69, 139, 167, 254, 271–2 Sharp, William, 94 shearwaters, 236, 271 sheep, 40, 43–4, 46, 72, 76–7, 78, 96, 107, 117, 151, 156, 277 Shell (multinational company), 248–50, 251, 341 Shenavall bothy (Scotland), 153–6 Shetland Islands: arable land on Havera, 43, 47; boat design, 26–8, 29–31; coast of north mainland (Northmavine), 32–4; da roost (tide at Sumburgh Head), 27, 49, 50, 52; dialect tradition, 25, 31, 42, 53–4; drongs (sea stacks), 25, 48; Eshaness cliffs, 36–7; first newspapers, 53–4; Fitful Head, 49; geology/landscape, 18, 22, 25–6, 32–7, 38–40, 41–5, 48, 55–6, 75; Havera: The Story of an Island (2013), 41–2; history, 23, 24–31, 33–5, 39–40, 41–8, 52–3; human traces/ruins, 23, 24, 41, 43–7, 49, 50; intermixing of coast and culture, 24–6; Jarlshof Viking site, 50; and July’s double nature, 17–18; and Hugh MacDiarmid, 33–5; mountain heritage, 33, 75; Muckle Flugga, 18–22; Nort Atlantik term, 93; ocean floor, 33; Papa Stour caves, 38–9, 40; sea crossings, 75; sea fog (haa), 29, 40–1; sinking of coastline, 49; skerries, 5, 18–22, 23, 26; small boat tradition, 23, 24–31; St Magnus Bay, 36–7, 38–9, 40; steamers to Scottish mainland, 26–7; storms/shipwrecks in nineteenth-century, 27, 28–9, 30; Sumburgh Head, 27, 49, 50–2; tidal conditions, 19, 22–3, 27–30, 32, 36, 49, 50, 52, 75; tombolo beach, 49; violence of waves, 18, 22, 29–30; wildlife and flora, 17–18, 20–2, 31–2, 37–8, 41, 42, 43, 46–8, 50, 55–6; windmill on Havera, 43, 44–5, 47 Shiant Isles, 2, 99 Shieldaig (Scotland), 161 the shieling (Western Isles bothy), 94–5 Simm, Colin, 175 sixareens, 28, 29–31 Skea Skerries (Orkney), 76 Skellig Michael, skerry of, 283–7 the Skelligs, 277, 283–7 Skerryvore rock (Argyll), 198, 284 Skokholm (Pembrokeshire island), 291, 311 Skomer (Pembrokeshire island), 291, 311–12 skuas, 7, 17, 20, 38, 39, 47, 137 Skye, Ise of: Araidh na Suiridh, 94; ‘Battle of the Braes’, 177; bridge to mainland, 166; cattle-droving routes, 150–1; Cuillin, 176, 178, 179–82, 187; Dunnett and Adam reach, 193; Eyes on Skye community initiative, 166; fame as unique, 165; geology/landscape, 166–9, 174, 175–6, 177, 178, 179–82; ‘Glendale martyrs’, 177; history, 150–1, 165, 166; human traces/ruins, 167–71; in modern popular culture, 183; mountains, 3, 92, 176, 178, 179–82, 187; nineteenth-century land agitations, 165; poetry, 165, 175–8; politics, 176–8; ‘relict coastlines’, 167–9; Stallion Rock, 177, 178; and tourism, 165–6, 181–3; tradition of activism, 165, 166, 177; wildlife and flora, 167–9, 174–5, 176, 178, 180; as zoomorphic landscape, 176–8 slavery and British Empire, 88, 190 sleeping bag, 2, 35 Slieve league, sea cliffs of (County Donegal), 211 Sligo (Ireland), 237, 245 Slioch (‘the Spear’, mountain), 156, 157 Slyne Head lighthouse, 202 Smart, Borlase, 327 Smith, Brendan, 294 Smith, Brian, 53 Smith, Christine, 103 snipe, 198 snow buntings, 160 social inequality, 115, 177–8, 191–2; diet as marker of class, 127, 203; influence of new technologies, 343; shoreline sustenance associated with poverty, 127; and Trevelyan’s travels, 147–8, 152 social media, 9–10 socialism, 177–8 Society of Antiquaries, 44 Solnit, Rebecca, 7 Sound of Luing, 199 South Uist, 100, 109, 116–17 Spanish Armada, xi, 74–5 Spring, Dick, 248 Spring Rice, Thomas, 239 St Agnes (Cornwall), 324 St Boniface’s Kirk (Papay), 63–4 St Brendan, 118, 175, 212, 273, 284 St Columba (Colmcille), 118, 206, 214, 215, 225, 272–3, 284 St Cuthbert, 175 St David, 284 St Fionan, 272, 284 St George’s Channel, 291 St Gildas, 284 St Ives (Cornwall), 325–32, 333 St Kilda, 5, 8, 11, 99 St Ninian’s Isle, 48–9 St Patrick, 286 St Ronan, 98–9, 118 Stac Pollaidh (mountain), 2 Stac Clò Kearvaig, 134 Stafford, George Granville Leveson-Gower, marquis of, 127 Stags of Broadhaven, 243–6, 248 Stalin, Joseph, 178 Stenness Island, 36–7 Steven, Kenneth, 175 Stevenson family, 198 Stiùbhart, Domhnall Uilleam, 99 stone circles, 8 stonechats, 277 storm foul, 178 storm petrels, 1, 47 Stornoway, 97, 100, 105, 110, 132 Strathy Point lighthouse, 86 Stromeferry (Scotland), 152 Stromness (Orkney), 82, 83, 140–1 Stuart, house of, 100, 128–9 Styles, Harry, 183 Suilven (Sùilebheinn) (‘the Pillar’, mountain), 2, 3 Sula Sgeir, island of, 99, 107 Sula Stac, island of, 99 Summer Isles (Scotland), 1–3, 333 supernatural and the uncanny: Chamberlain’s Tide Races (1962), 302–3; mounds in landscape, 79–80 Sutherland: clearances, 127, 136; coastal mountains, 125–6; eighteenth-century communication lags, 129; and isolation, 188; and Jacobite cause, 128–9; low population density, 126–7; and Norman MacCaig, 121, 124, 137–40, 142; offshore skerries at Cape Wrath, 134; and urban Gaelic renaissance, 141–2; wildlife and flora, 134–5 Sutherland, Alex, 154 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 333 Taobh Tuath (Lewis), 109 Taransay (Harris), 118 ‘taskscape’, 79 Telford, Thomas, 141 Tennyson, Alfred, 333 terns, 32, 38, 43, 227 thalassophobia, 170, 205 Thomas, Antonia, 80–1 Thomas, Edward, 94 Thomas, Keith, 6 Thomas, R.S., 303–4, 308 Thompson, Sydney Mary, 282 Thomson, David, The People of the Sea, 246 Thomson, Willie, 66 timber trade, 157 Tobermory (Mull), 195, 196–7 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 218 Thoraí (Tory Island) (County Donegal), 214–23; island king, 215, 218, 223, 225, 226; lack of tourist infrastructure, 225–6; lighthouse, 198, 204; resistance to island’s emptying, 223–5; sean-nós (song style), 223; seasonal migration to Scotland, 229; as site of unfinished histories, 226; tradition of art, 223–5 Torridon range, 3, 161 tourism, 345; in Aran Islands, 262; in Cornwall, 312, 315–16, 325, 326; gulf between communities and visitors, 292; opening of Skye to visitors, 165–6, 181–3; in Wales, 292–3, 310–12 Traills (Orcadian laird family), 73–4, 88 transhumance customs, 94–5 transport: decline of boat travel, 6; mainland arteries, 5, 325–7 trees: ancient pinewoods, 157, 158, 159, 160; deforestation, 157–9, 175; low treeline in Scottish mountain areas, 156–7; on Skye, 167–8, 169 trefoils, 23, 94 Trevelyan, G.M., 6, 146–9, 152, 258 Trevose Head (Cornwall), 316 Tristan and Isolde myth, 333, 334 Tuatha Dé Danaan (mythological Irish race), 213 Turner, J.M.W., 182–3 A Turning Tide in the Life of Man (film, 2014), 264 Ùig (Skye), 100 Uist (Western Isles), 22–3, 100, 109, 111–12, 115, 116–17, 204 Ullapool (Scotland), 3–4, 124, 140–2 Ulster, province of, 118, 134; historical significance of coast, 205–9; see also Donegal, County (province of Ulster); Thoraí (Tory Island) (County Donegal) Underhoull (Shetland site), 23 Unst, island of, 22–3, 28–30, 32, 39–40 urban society, 141–2, 268, 339, 340, 341, 343, 344–6 Urquhart, Robert, 141–2 Vagaland (Thomas Alexander Robertson), 25–6, 40, 317 Valentia Island, 279–82 Vallay, island of, 111 Ve Skerries, 39 Viking heritage see Norse world voles, 95, 160 Wales: Anglo-Welsh ‘islomania’, 291, 295–6; and ‘Atlantic Arc’ idea, 295; Bae Ceredigion (Cardigan Bay), 291–2, 311; and Celtic Christianity, 296, 297–9, 301–4, 305; force of sea in winter, 293; geology/landscape, 295–6; Gorsedd festivals, 324; history, 292–3, 294–5, 296–302, 306–10, 311; human culture of coastlines, 293–5; human presence on coastlines, 292–3, 310–12; kingdom of Dyfed, 294; Llyn Peninsula, 291, 293, 295, 299–300; mixed essences of, 291, 293, 295–6; Pembrokeshire islets, 291, 311–12; St David’s Peninsula, 294; tourism in, 292–3, 310–12; Welsh language place names, 293–4, 296; wildlife and flora, 295–6, 307–8 walking: coastal walking routes, 9; in ‘Great Wilderness’, 153, 156; and Haldane, 149, 150; as research, 6, 7, 146–9, 257, 258–9; and Tim Robinson, 258–9; and Trevelyan, 146–9 Wallen, Errollyn, 86, 87 HMS Wasp, 215 Water Witch (sixareen), 30 Watt, Henry, North Sea (1939), 11 weather and climate, 336; and clothing decisions, 35; as deceptive in changing weather, 36; and deceptive seas conditions, 28–9, 30, 36, 40–1, 59–60; Europe’s ‘little ice age’, 49–50; July in Shetland, 17, 23–4, 28–9, 31; ocean as ecosystem, 343; prevailing sou’westerlies, 24; sea fog (haa) on Shetland, 29, 40–1; ‘Storm King’ on Shetland, 55–6; storms in nineteenth-century Shetland, 27, 28–9, 30 web resource, xii Wedgwood, Veronica, 148–9 Weisdale (Shetland), 44 Wellington, Duke of, 239 Welsh language, 4, 10, 293–4, 305–6; and oceanic geographies, 294–5; and slate industry, 246 West Africa, 169–70 West Burra, island of, 27 West Skerry, island of, 43 Western Isles, 1; active practice of history on, 104–14; broadcasting and publishing, 109; calcareous shell-sand, 93, 94, 95; clearances, 8, 95, 96, 100–1, 102; coffin roads and coffin ships, 96; competition for rich coastal land, 94; ‘Comuinn Eachdraidh’ (historical societies) in, 104–9, 112, 113, 115, 212; Cuan Siar term, 93; destigmatising of tradition, 107–8, 112–13; dramatic rejuvenation since 1970s, x, 91; early-medieval ‘thalassocracies’, 91; and Enlightenment ‘progress’, 95, 111–12, 258; farming on, 94–5, 96, 111–13, 116–17, 119–20; and Gaelic language, 72, 91, 93, 99, 100, 102, 104–5, 107–10; Gaelic language in, 72, 91, 93, 99, 100, 102, 104–5, 107–10; geology/landscape, 91–2, 93–4, 95–6, 98–9, 116; history, 94–5, 96, 98–100, 104–8; human traces/ruins, 96, 98, 99, 116–17, 119; illicit distilling on, 117; Industrial Revolution in, 100; infrastructure of Gaelic community, 109; lack of inscriptions, 92; linn nan creach (time of raids), 100; local government reform (1970), 105; machair (flowering grassland), 93, 96, 111, 112, 119, 227; mid-twentieth-century depression, 102; oral culture, 92, 99, 102, 106–7, 112; ‘papa’ sites, 117–20; poetry of, 93; potato blight of 1840s, 111; relationship of land with sea, 93–4; respect for unquiet ocean, 97–8; sea clans stripped of power, 99–100; small-scale crofting, 111–12, 115; sunsets and dawns, 96, 116; waves/rolling swell, 97–8; wildlife and flora, 93–4, 95–6, 110–11, 112–13, 116–17 Westray, island of, 60–1, 67–75 whales, 19, 49, 50, 167, 272–6, 280–1 Whalsay, island of, 26 wheatears, 42 Whitbread family, 153 White, Ben, 126 wild thyme, 112–13 wild-cats, 125 Wildlife Trust of South and West Wales, 311–12 Williamson, Gideon, 44 Williamson, Laurence, 54 Wilson, Brian, Blazing Paddles: A Scottish Odyssey, 197 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 172 wolves, 136 Woolf, Virginia, 316–17, 326, 330 Wordsworth, William, 130, 148 wrens, 153, 277 Yarner Wood (Dartmoor), 160 Yeats, W.B., 250–1 Yell, island of, 23, 29, 32 Youth Hostel Association, 148 Zennor (Cornwall), 320 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO know how to approach the acknowledgements required in a project like this, since the whole thing would never have got going, and would have fallen apart many times thereafter, were it not for the kindness of multitudes of friends and strangers.


pages: 265 words: 71,143

Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order by Jason Sharman

British Empire, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, death of newspapers, European colonialism, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, land tenure, offshore financial centre, passive investing, Peace of Westphalia, performance metric, profit maximization, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, spice trade, trade route, transaction costs

Particularly when they encountered Eastern empires far mightier than any European great power of the day, Europeans had little choice but to pay deference. Though they were quick to use violence whenever they thought they could get away with it, more important than military prowess in explaining expansion was the coincidence whereby Europeans’ goals were largely maritime—trade routes and port outposts—whereas local great powers were concerned with controlling land and territory, but largely indifferent to the seas. These complementary preferences allowed for a rough- and-ready coexistence. In addition, European ventures in the East and the Atlantic world were crucially reliant on the cultivation of local allies, patrons, and vassals.

Aside from military calculations, Europeans also depended on access to Asian markets much more than vice versa. The Mughals, Japanese, Chinese, and others could bring the Europeans to heel simply by refusing to trade with them. For their part, the polities of the region had little desire to contest Westerners’ efforts to establish control of key trade routes, resulting in a rough modus vivendi sometimes referred to as an “age of contained conflict.”139 CHAPTER TWO Company Sovereigns and the Empires of the East THE BEGINNING of the seventeenth century saw the arrival of a new type of European actor in Asia: the chartered company or “company sovereign,” epitomized by the Dutch and English East India Companies.


pages: 231 words: 72,656

A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage

Berlin Wall, British Empire, Colonization of Mars, Copley Medal, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, gentleman farmer, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Lao Tzu, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, out of africa, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

Coffeehouse discussions led to the establishment of scientific societies, the founding of newspapers, the establishment of financial institutions, and provided fertile ground for revolutionary thought, particularly in France. In some European nations, and particularly in Britain, coffee was challenged by tea imported from China. Its popularity in Europe helped to open lucrative trade routes with the East and underpinned imperialism and industrialization on an unprecedented scale, enabling Britain to become the first global superpower. Once tea had established itself as Britain's national drink, the desire to maintain the tea supply had far-reaching effects on British foreign policy, contributing to the independence of the United States, the undermining of China's ancient civilization, and the establishment of tea production in India on an industrial scale.

Its overall population tripled between 630 and 755 to exceed fifty million, and its capital, Changan (modern Xi'an), was the greatest metropolis on Earth, home to around two million people. The city was a cultural magnet at a time when China was particularly open to outside influences. Trade thrived along the trade routes of the Silk Road and by sea with India, Japan, and Korea. Clothing, hairstyles, and the sport of polo were imported from Turkey and Persia, new foodstuffs from India, and musical instruments and dances from central Asia, along with wine in goatskin bags. China exported silk, tea, paper, and ceramics in return.


pages: 274 words: 66,721

Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Shaped the Modern World - and How Their Invention Could Make or Break the Planet by Jane Gleeson-White

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, British Empire, business cycle, carbon footprint, corporate governance, credit crunch, double entry bookkeeping, full employment, Gordon Gekko, income inequality, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Islamic Golden Age, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Mahbub ul Haq, means of production, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Ponzi scheme, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, source of truth, spice trade, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile

Written from 1436 to 1439 entirely in the new Hindu–Arabic numerals, Badoer’s ledger is an invaluable record of Venetian mercantile life and of the hectic commercial activity of the Levant. Badoer was a nobleman who for over three years ran a commercial venture in Constantinople, the meeting place of the trade routes of Europe and Asia, trading for himself and as an agent for Venetian merchants. In the busy bazaars of Constantinople he bought spices, incense, leather, wool and slaves to ship back to Venice for his brother to sell on the Venetian market. The first two weeks of November and June were always Badoer’s busiest times, because it was then that his fleet prepared for its return trip to Italy, in compliance with the Venetian Senate, which required merchants to return to Venice at Christmas time and again in July to ensure a regular marketing of goods in the city.

But the merchant bankers of Venice thought otherwise. They soon realised the commercial potential of printed books and invested the large sums required to keep the printing presses running. To the merchants of Venice, the printed book was simply a commodity like any other and could be sold along the trade routes of Europe like pepper, silk, wax and other luxury goods. Venice became the centre of the new communications technology, the Silicon Valley of the Renaissance, and many of the first printed works on business and commerce were published in the city on the lagoon. By the time Pacioli returned in 1494, Venice had become the publishing capital of southern Europe, with more than 268 printing shops run mostly by experts from Germany and France.


pages: 247 words: 68,918

The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations? by Ian Bremmer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, centre right, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, household responsibility system, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, open economy, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Privately funded ventures like the merchant Marco Polo’s gave way to state-subsidized projects led by explorers like Columbus, Vasco da Gama, John Cabot, and Magellan, men charged with opening new trade routes and helping their benefactors amass new wealth—and in some cases, new territory. The acquisition of new land brought fresh supplies of raw materials with which to produce goods for export in return for more gold. Conflicts over trade routes and colonies became inevitable.11 So did transatlantic slavery. Growing bureaucracies, colonialism, and trade competition stoked conflicts. To thwart the efforts of competitors to build a positive trade balance, mercantilist governments imposed tariffs, taxes, and quotas on imports, particularly of manufactured goods, while promoting the interests of their export merchants through subsidies, tax rebates, and monopoly licenses.


Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity by Brian Hare, Vanessa Woods

autism spectrum disorder, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, desegregation, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, drone strike, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Law of Accelerating Returns, meta-analysis, microbiome, Milgram experiment, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, out of africa, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, smart cities, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, zero-sum game

But this period of time, now known as the Upper Paleolithic, was remarkable for more than just an upgrade in weapons and living conditions.35 It was around this time that we began to leave evidence of unique forms of cognition, especially our expanding social networks.36 Jewelry made from shells has been found hundreds of miles inland, implying that an object with no practical value was either worth carrying some distance or was obtained from someone else who had traveled on one of our first trade routes.37, 38 We painted animals on rocks so skillfully that the contours of the stone rippled beneath their bodies and gave them a third dimension. In what can be regarded as the creation of protocinema, a cave wall bears the illustration of a bison with eight legs that would have seemed to gallop in firelight.

Nyugen suggests subsidized housing in the cities, or close to transit lines, that can efficiently move people to job centers. “Exposure creates tolerance,” she points out. Cities should be places where people from different backgrounds, perspectives, and lived experiences can freely mix and exchange ideas. For our ancestors, these were settlements along trade routes, where far-flung travelers could share ideas, technology, and merchandise. For us, these are common areas—parks, cafés, theaters, restaurants—where we can meet and become familiar with neighborhood faces. Our habitat has changed, but we have not. We are at our most productive when we live in large, cooperative groups.


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Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction by Judith Grisel

cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, double helix, epigenetics, Haight Ashbury, impulse control, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, phenotype, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), seminal paper, systems thinking, trade route, traumatic brain injury

I prefer the Bantu Lozi description of the falls and the island, roughly translated as “smoke that thunders” and “place of the rainbow.” At any rate, Livingstone dropped out of missionary service because he felt a spiritual calling to political and economic action, hoping to work against slavery by opening up trade routes in Africa. He wasn’t especially effective, in part because his expeditions to find new trade routes generally failed. He’d been ill and out of touch for several years by the time the Welsh explorer H. M. Stanley located him in 1871. Livingstone died about a year and a half later of malaria and dysentery at the age of sixty. 2. Eric Wiertelak, Steven Maier, and Linda Watkins, “Cholecystokinin Antianalgesia: Safety Cues Abolish Morphine Analgesia,” Science 256, no. 5058 (1992). 5: THE SLEDGEHAMMER: ALCOHOL 1.


pages: 415 words: 127,092

Dawn of Detroit by Tiya Miles

British Empire, classic study, European colonialism, food desert, gentleman farmer, gentrification, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, profit motive, trade route, transit-oriented development, urban planning, white flight

South, white men developed an extremely profitable “fancy trade” in which African American women, most often of mixed-race ancestry, were sought for sexual slavery. Marketed at exorbitant prices, these women referred to as “fancy girls” or “fancy maids,” were sexually abused by slave dealers in slave pens, markets and prisons along trade routes, as well as by a string of buyers. While we do not have a record as explicit in its ugliness as that which exists in the South, this particular order for young girls in Askin’s letter whispers of unseemly ends, especially when viewed in the context of the numerous Native women who were bearing babies to unknown fathers in Detroit.

When the Moravians finally reached “the city” and saw “the whole country round about, on both sides [of] the river . . . about a mile wide,” they had passed through a territory made wild by the vagaries of a natural water-rich environment as well as by the vicissitudes of an unpredictable war.76 The Moravians had likewise passed through lands inhabited by indigenous people whose villages and trade routes surrounded Detroit from as near as the Detroit River to the southern reaches of Ohio and into the Cherokee territory of the Southeast. The scene was similar far north of Detroit where Fort Michilimackinac was situated and far west of the city at the southeastern shores of Lake Michigan: Native people and Native lands encompassed Detroit, a center for distributing goods, passing information, and crafting wartime strategy that pulled in people of various colors, cultures, and creeds.

Schlosser, June 12, 1762, Sterling Letter Book. I am grateful to Jonathan Quint for pointing out the reference to Native women in this letter. 89. Dowry: Crouch, “Black City,” 25; James Sterling to [?], February 26, 1765, Sterling Letter Book; quoted in Marrero, “Founding Families,” 281; Marrero, “Founding,” 282–83. 90. Independent trade routes: Crouch, “Black City,” 25. 91. Crouch, “Black City,” 1, 4; James Sterling to [?], Sept 29, 1765, Sterling Letter Book. Christian Crouch was the first to analyze Sterling’s preference for black male laborers. In her paper, “The Black City,” she carefully considers and leaves open the question of why Sterling preferred black male laborers, speculating that black men had a greater facility in travel because of a learned ability to get along with native people lacking in white men like Morrison. 92.


pages: 401 words: 122,457

Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky

British Empire, clean water, Deng Xiaoping, domestication of the camel, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, Honoré de Balzac, invention of movable type, long peace, Mahatma Gandhi, spice trade, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route

THE SEARCH FOR salt has challenged engineers for millennia and created some of the most bizarre, along with some of the most ingenious, machines. A number of the greatest public works ever conceived were motivated by the need to move salt. Salt has been in the forefront of the development of both chemistry and geology. Trade routes that have remained major thoroughfares were established, alliances built, empires secured, and revolutions provoked—all for something that fills the ocean, bubbles up from springs, forms crusts in lake beds, and thickly veins a large part of the earth’s rock fairly close to the surface. Almost no place on earth is without salt.

Ramsauer’s investigation of these salt miners began to challenge the perception of northern Europe’s Iron Age barbarians. ONLY IN THE 1990s did Westerners become aware of the mummies that had been found in the Uyghur Autonomous Region of China. They had been discovered in and near the Tarim Basin, west of Tibet, east of Samarkand and Tashkent, between China and central Asia along the Silk Road, the principal trade route between the Mediterranean and Beijing. It was the road of Marco Polo, but these people had lived more than three millennia earlier, about 2000 B.C. As with the early Egyptian burials that are 1,000 years older, the corpses had been preserved by the naturally salty soil. The condition of the bodies and their bright colored clothing was spectacular.

The last Lot’s wife collapsed several years ago, and the current one, featured in postcards and on guided tours, will go very soon, according to geologists. In biblical times, Mount Sodom was the most valuable Dead Sea property. It was long controlled by the king of Arad, who had refused entry to Moses and his wandering Hebrews from Egypt. One of the most important trade routes in the area was from Mount Sodom to the Mediterranean—a salt route. Not far from Mount Sodom, in the motley shade of a scraggly acacia tree, are a few stone walls and the remnants of a doorway. They are the remains of a Roman fort guarding the salt route. A little two-foot-high stone dam across the wadi, the dry riverbed, after flash floods still holds water to be stored in the nearby Roman cistern.


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Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet by Jeffrey Sachs

agricultural Revolution, air freight, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, biodiversity loss, British Empire, business process, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, digital divide, Edward Glaeser, energy security, failed state, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Global Witness, Haber-Bosch Process, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, mass immigration, microcredit, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, peak oil, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, unemployed young men, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, zoonotic diseases

By 1950, this had reached the 50 percent mark as shown in Figure 2.5. Since then, extreme poverty has continued to decline to below 25 percent in 1992 and to just 15 percent today. The challenge now is that extreme poverty is concentrated in the toughest places: landlocked, tropical, drought-prone, malaria-ridden, and off the world’s main trade routes. It is no accident that today’s poorest places have been the last to catch the wave of globalization. They have the most difficulty in getting on the ladder of development. THE CHALLENGE OF GLOBAL COOPERATION To solve the remaining dire problems of environmental degradation, population growth, and extreme poverty, we will need to create a new model of twenty-first-century cooperation, one that builds on past successes and overcomes today’s widespread pessimism and lack of leadership.

In the subsequent 175 years, the global population has risen sixfold, from 1 billion to 6.5 billion, in 2005. In the preindustrial era, societies learned gradually to master the local environment—crop choices, water control, soil management, domestication of animals, mining of minerals, land clearing for pasture and fuel wood—in order to support larger populations. Each opening of new trade routes, such as the silk road from China to Europe during the Roman Empire or the sea routes from Europe to the Americas at the time of Columbus, gave opportunity for another step increase in human populations because increased productivity came along with increased trade. Trade allowed the exchange of crops, animals, technologies, and, of course, human populations.

Sea-based transport costs are lower in main trading lanes than in remote reaches of the world. Transport costs are obviously lower to reach a neighboring market than a distant market. These differences give Singapore a profound economic advantage over, say, Fiji. Singapore is on the world’s main trade route between Europe and Asia. A ship going from Osaka, Japan, to Rotterdam, Netherlands, will pass by Singapore as it traverses the Strait of Malacca. Fiji, by contrast, is far away in the South Pacific. That may contribute to its exotic reputation, but it certainly does not contribute to its economic development.


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Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization by Iain Gately

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business climate, Cape to Cairo, financial independence, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, Isaac Newton, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, Neil Kinnock, profit motive, surplus humans, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, women in the workforce

It is possible that in a country motivated by Zen and the spirit of minimalism, an antidote to gluttony was not a priority. In Japan, tobacco had been abstracted from the rituals of and reasons for its consumption, and it flourished in their absence. Tobacco arrived in many other Asian countries via the trans-Pacific trade route that the Spanish had opened up between Mexico and the Philippines in 1571. From the Philippines it was dispersed to Thailand, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Goa. From Goa its use spread rapidly throughout the Indian subcontinent, so that within a few years of its introduction an English ambassador to the court of the Great Mogul was able to report: ‘They sow tobacco in vast plenty and smoke it much.’

Even government-owned tobacco companies, fearful of missing opportunities, have participated in ‘General Trade’ as the market for smuggled cigarettes is known. For example, Japanese International Tobacco, a state-owned behemoth with more than half of the Japanese market, sells most of its cigarettes into Taiwan via the UK and Switzerland using the General Trade route to circumvent an embargo on imports ex-Japan. Eighty-six per cent of Japanese International Tobacco’s sales volume in Taiwan in 1993 was General Trade. Tobacco is the contraband of choice all over the world. Real camels carry loads of their namesake along the ancient silk route. Cigarette adverts with the useful reminder ‘Available in Duty Free’ appear in countries where the product is not officially available anywhere else.

Reynolds 212, 223–4, 274–5, 316, 334–5 Highly Leveraged Transaction, target for 335–6 Roberts, Julia 349 Robinson, Edward, G. 250 rock ’n’ roll 270–1, 312 Rogers, Sir Philip 294 Rolfe, John 70–2, 74, 80, 105 Rolling Stones 299 Roman Catholic clergy and snuff 36, 80 Röntgen, Wilhelm 218 Roosevelt, Eleanor 252 Roosevelt, Franklin 257 Roosevelt, Theodore 222 Rosenblatt, Stanley 356 Rosie, George 261–2 Rousseau 132 Rowlands, Samuel 49 Royal College of Physicians 292 Royal Navy 102, 104, 141 tobacco rations 232 Vigo, battle of 120–1 Russia 85, 93, 94–5, 258, 261, 269, 270, 337–8 Napoleon’s blockade, resistance to 145 Napoleon’s defeat 152 Napoleon’s invasion 145–6 Peter’s beard tax 95 smoking habits 146, 337 Russian Orthodox Church 94–5 Ryamin, Valery 337 Saba 84 Saddam Hussein 341 Saigon 91 St Croce, Prospero 40 St Eustatius 84 St Kitts 76–7 St Maarten 84 Saka, Dr 57 Salons, The (Baudelaire) 180 Saluzzo, Bishop of 40 San Agustín 51 San Francisco 44 see also United States of America San Salvador 22 Sands of Iwo Jima, The 268 Sandwich Islands 171 Santa Fe, California 166 Santa Maria, capture of 56 Santo Domingo 51, 79 Sassoon, Siegfried 232, 233 Saturday Night Fever 313 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning 281 Sauckel, Gauleiter Fritz 263 Saxony 95 Schairer, Eberhard 255 Schöniger, Eric 255 Scientific Committee on Tobacco and Health (SCOTH) 346 Scotland 100–5 colonization attempt 102 Edinburgh 100 England, union with 104 Glasgow 105, 140–1 Highlands 100–2 Lowlands 102 slave trade 105 tobacco growing 141 Scott, Captain Robert Falcon 219 Scott, Sir Walter 159 Scouting for Boys (Baden-Powell) 217 Scuttertnull of Glen Moran (legend) 101–2 Sears, Roebuck & Co. 225 SEITA 180–1 Serbia 231 Serturner, Friedrich Wilhelm 161 Seven Years War 136, 137 Seville 80, 115 Fabrica del Tobacos 115–16, 146–7, 177–9 Sex Pistols 314 Shakespeare, William 50, 78, 83 shamans 6–7, 8, 9–10, 27, 283 Shaw, George Bernard 220 Shelley, Percy 159 Siberia 87 Sirius convict ship 134 slavery and the slave trade 63–4, 77, 106, 110–13, 138, 183–4 abolition of in USA 184 American tobacco plantations, life on 111–12 Dickens offended by 176–7 Dutch 84 names, choosing of 112 Scots 105 tobacco as trigger 73 Small Faces 299 Smith, Adam 126 Smith, Captain John 72 smoke-blowing ritual 7 smoking: age barriers among Victorians 193 apparel 158 arts, represented in 82–3, 220, 280–1 children, warnings to 194 curiosity to craze, change from, in England 46 decline during nineties 345 divans 159 English rituals 47 films, portrayed in 246–51, 267–8, 271, 348–50 product placement 331–4 giving-up-smoking books, courses and counselling 310–11 health issues 274, 283, 321 see also lung cancer health warnings 296–7, 302, 309, 311 ‘It Girls’ 240 Johnson’s observation 123 meditation link 97 no-smoking areas 306–7, 310, 341 London Underground trains 341 opposition 195–6, 215–18, 229–31, 241, 317, 320 propaganda battle 347 passive (Environmental Tobacco Smoke (ETS)) 329–31, 346–7 cot death 346 punishments: China 86–7 Islamic countries 86 Japan 86 Lüneburg (Lower Saxony) 95 Persia 92 Russia 85 ‘reeking gallants’ 47 ritual blowing 7 scientific research 161–3, 218, 255, 315, 318–19, 321 segregation 158 smoking rooms 193 teenage females, proportion of smokers rises in UK 351 tribal customs, North America 17 versus snuff 123–4 see also cigarettes; cigars; nicotine; pipes; tobacco Smoking and Health (Royal College of Physicians) 292 Smoking and Health Now (Royal College of Physicians) 311 Smoking and Health: Report of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service (USA) 292–3 ‘Smoking Kills’ (White Paper) 352, 353 smuggling 98–9, 358–60 snuff 4, 7, 9, 31–2, 42, 63, 80, 117–24 adulteration 122, 124 boxes 101 Brummell 154 English etiquette 121, 152, 154 Fabrica del Tobacos, Seville 115–16 French fashion 119 in Ireland 101 Martinique blend 154 as medicine 124 Morocco blend 154 ‘Nicotian Herb’ 40 in Prussia 117 in Scotland 100–1 ‘snuffy [Queen] Charlotte’ 138, 154 taxes 124 versus smoking 123–4 snuffing machines 9 Sofala 59 Solly, Samual 195 Song of Hiawatha, The (Longfellow) 168 South Africa 361 Spain 43–4, 113–15, 146–8, 357–8 Armada 56 bandoleros 149–50 Bible and fairy-tale morality 23 Bonaparte, Joseph, as king 146 Britain’s 1808 expeditionary force 150 Caribbean islands’ population, extermination of 25 conquistadores 21, 25 Aztec temples, overthrow of 30 contraband under French rule 149 crown’s regulations in colonies 113 decree limiting tobacco growing 79–80 disease, spreaders of 25–6 Ferdinand and Isabella 21, 22 Inca, subduing and extermination of 9, 34–5 infidels, cruel towards 23 Inquisition 115 papelote, punishments for using 148–9 population’s tobacco preferences 147–8 slaughter, Biblical ‘justification’ for 25 Tabacalera (tobacco company) 80 tobacco, growing techniques 71–2 trans-Pacific trade route 58 Venezuela, tobacco production banned in 113–14 Vigo, battle of 120–1 Spanish Inquisition 115 Spenser, Edmund 49 sports sponsorship 207, 298, 313 Formula One 353 Sri Lanka 58, 90 Stalin, Joseph 265 Stallone, Sylvester 332–3 Stanley, Henry 200 Stephen Mitchell & Sons 213 Strychnine 162 Sublime Tobacco (Mackenzie) 283 Sunday, Billy 241 Superman II 331–2 supernatural forces 6 Swanson, Gloria 247 Sweden 81 Switzerland 43, 95 Sydney Opera House 135 syphilis 27 Tabacalera (tobacco company) 80 Tachard, Guy 89 Tahiti 127, 128–9, 131–3, 135–6 as New Scythera 133 Taiwan 337, 359 Talleyrand-Périgord, Charles Maurice de 164 Tatler 121 taxation of tobacco 69, 85, 104, 208, 209, 255, 312, 353–4, 358–60 taxonomy 118 Team Lotus 298 television 276–7 cigarette advertising banned in UK 297 cigarette advertising banned in USA 309 commercial, in UK 278 soap operas 276 sponsorship of shows 277 television ads banned in Japan 357 temperance movement 195, 216, 241, 294, 351 Tempest, The (Shakespeare) 78 Teniers, David, the Younger 82 Tennessee 216 Tennyson, Lord Alfred 187 Terry, Luther 292–3 Tess of the D’Urbevilles (Hardy) 192 Tezcatlipoca 13 Thackeray, William 159 Thailand 58, 359 Thevet, André 33 Thirty Years War 81 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Freud) 228 Thunderball 284 Thurman, Uma 349 To Have and Have Not 267 Tobacco Industry Research Committee (USA) 288 Tobacco Smoking and Cancer of Lung 286 tobacco: addiction 25, 68, 226, 314–15, 317–19, 324, 340–1 additives 211 adulteration by apothecaries 51–2 bandoleros 149–50 Bright 211 British Empire, growing encouraged throughout 199 British excise bill and consequent riots 124 Burley 211 cancer, potential cure for 39–40 see also lung cancer Cartier’s description 31 centre of origin 3 chewing 7–8, 173–6, 339 ingredients 175 Chinese medicine 58 Christians’ spiritual aversion 27 cleansing and fertility 5 clyster 8, 186 companies as targets for Highly Leveraged Transaction (HLT) 335–6 company diversification 335 consumption leaps in industrial world 219–20 cost 42–3, 50–1 as currency 108 Devil, association with 38, 41, 67 domestic production 43 Double Happiness brand 303 as drink 7, 8 duty raised in USA 216 enemas 8, 186, 196 English import statistics 51 essence de tabac 162 Europeans, first to smoke 23 exchange, instrument of 88 first smoking of 4 flavour enhancers 19 as fumigant 5 habit spread by seamen 56–7 as hallucinogen 5 home growing See Appendix 1 as hunger suppressant 10, 24, 245, 351 as insecticide 5 as intoxicant 46 James I’s prohibition 78–9 law suits 289, 294, 355 legends 91 Scottish 101–2 licking 8–9 longevity claim 96 Master Settlement Agreement 355–6 Mayan farms 11 medicinal use 5–6, 16–17, 41 in animals 41 in bubon-c plague 83–4, 96 military rations 231–2 Monardes’ pamphlet 40–1 name, etymological debate about 32–3 Napoleon I’s influence 144 Nicotiana: benthamiana 130 excelsior 130 gossei 130 ingulba 130 Linnaeus’s taxonomy 118 rustica 2, 3, 118 tabacum 2, 3, 70, 118 Orinoco brand 74, 84, 100, 102 oversupply and consequent price drop 106–7 papelote 148–9, 179 becomes ‘cigarette’ 179 ‘picado’ (minced) 147 Piedmont leaf 184 pigtail 186 Prince Albert brand 223 prohibition of sale to young in UK 217–8 prohibition, first ever 36 religious attitudes 65–6 as rite of passage 5 ritual 7, 9, 89 salaries paid in 107–8 Salem brand 303 sex, association with 177–8 shag 186 shamans 6–7, 8, 9–10, 27, 283 Silk Cut 87 Skoal Bandits 339 slave trade, introduction of 73 smuggling 98–9, 358–60 ‘sotweed’ tag 46 Southern States growers’ co-operatives 221 spiritual functions 54 spittoons 174, 175 sports sponsorship 207, 298, 313 Formula One 353 taxation 69, 85, 104, 208, 209, 255, 312, 353–4, 358–60 twist 186 Vatican crop 40 war causes demand 146, 302 ‘yallacure’ 184, 210 youth market targeted by manufacturers 316–17 see also cigarettes; cigars; nicotine; pipes; smoking; snuff Todd, Geoffrey 294 Tolstoy, Leo 145 Tom Jones (Fielding) 122 Tophane 94 Torres Strait 91 Torres, Luis de 23, 24 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de 220 Trafalgar, battle of 145 Travis, Dave Lee 339 Travolta, John 349 Tropic of Cancer 90 Twain, Mark 175–6 Tyler, John 175 Under Two Flags (Ouida) 197 United States of America 140–1 Castro, attempt to overthrow 309 child smokers 216 cigarette consumption, fall in 213 cigarette consumption, growth in 205, 209, 212 cigarette habit, nation dismayed by 205 Civil War 184 Declaration of Independence 140 diplomatic relations with Britain’s enemies, establishment of 141 Lewis and Clark 164–5 Louisiana Purchase 164 migration west 165–6 tobacco duty raised 216 tobacco exports 141 War of Independence 140–3 Treaty of Paris 142–3 USA Today 348 Utopia (More) 77 van Gough, Vincent 220 Van Riebeck, Jan 89 Vanity Fair (Thackeray) 156, 159 Vauquelin, Nicolas 162 Venezuela 27, 79 tobacco production banned 113–14 Venice 183 tobacco tariff 80 Venitia 182 Vespucci, Amerigo 32 Vicious, Sid 314 Victoria, Queen 173 Vietnam 91 War 302–3 Vigo 120–1 Vile Bodies (Waugh) 240 Virginia 53–5, 107–8 Britain’s firing of tobacco fields 142 Company 69–70 dissolved by James I 74–5 first tobacco taken to London 72 Orinoco brand 74, 84, 100, 102 population growth 105 slaves 110 thriving tobacco trade 105 tobacco, French preference for 181 Tobacco Inspection Act (Virginia) 108 tobacco, salaries paid in 107–8 see also United States of America Volstead Act (USA) 241 Wagner, Honus 223 Wahlstatt, Field Marshal Prince Blucher 152, 159 Wales 103 Walker, John 202 Wallis, Captain Samuel 127 Walpole, Horace 136 War and Peace (Tolstoy) 145–6 Washington, George 136, 137, 139 Waterloo 156–7 Waugh, Evelyn 240, 251 Wayne, John 268 W.


The Regency Revolution: Jane Austen, Napoleon, Lord Byron and the Making of the Modern World by Robert Morrison

British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, financial independence, full employment, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, New Urbanism, railway mania, stem cell, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, wage slave

IV In pursuit of wealth and treasure, Britons also traveled far beyond the Levant. The British East India Company was the largest and most powerful multinational corporation in the world. Founded in 1600, it had by the time of the Regency transformed itself from a mercantile body into an empire builder, with a vast series of highly lucrative trade routes under its control and hundreds of thousands of people in its employ, including the soldiers of its own private army. India, with its rich stores of silk, cotton, tea, coffee, and spices, was the company’s most prized possession, and from its base in Calcutta (as it was then known), it extended its influence across the subcontinent until, in the Regency, it achieved a stranglehold.

Probably the oldest drug known to humankind, it is obtained by slightly incising the unripe seed capsules of the poppy plant, Papaver somniferum. The East India Company exported it from Bengal to China, and then used the revenue from the sales to buy Chinese luxury items like spices, ivories, porcelain, silk, and, especially, tea, all of which were in great demand in Regency Britain. Better, shorter, and more well-established trade routes, however, meant that Turkey supplied the vast majority of the opium consumed in Britain. Turkish opium was also a good deal stronger than the Indian variety. Opium pills were available, but most people consumed the drug as “laudanum,” a tincture “made by pouring the best French brandy, or spirits of wine, upon crude Opium.”

Britain extended its reach in West Africa even further in 1816 when its soldiers moved from Sierra Leone north to The Gambia, purchased St. Mary’s Island from the chief of Kombo, and founded the town of Bathurst (Banjul). Named after the colonial secretary, Henry Bathurst, third Earl Bathurst, it became for Britain another power base from which its ships checked the slave trade, its merchants explored trade routes and opportunities, and its missionaries promulgated European ideals and the Christian faith. In the West Indies, meanwhile, it was business as usual. British plantation owners had increased their numbers of enslaved people prior to the passage of abolition, and thus continued the frequently barbaric exploitation of black women, men, and children in order to produce two major Regency commodities: rum and sugar.


pages: 708 words: 176,708

The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to US Empire by Wikileaks

affirmative action, anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Edward Snowden, energy security, energy transition, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, experimental subject, F. W. de Klerk, facts on the ground, failed state, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, high net worth, invisible hand, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, liberal world order, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Northern Rock, nuclear ambiguity, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, statistical model, Strategic Defense Initiative, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game, éminence grise

When the billionaire New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman spoke of the “hidden fist” of the US military making the world safe for Silicon Valley and McDonald’s,1 what was most arresting about his claim was not the assertion of America’s overpowering military dominance, but the connection he drew between politico-military power and economic power. Pre-modern empires tended to be about the acquisition of fertile or resource-rich territory for landed oligarchies, the enslavement of populations for exploitation, and the conquest of trade routes. The Roman Empire annexed land for its rich landowners. The Dutch Empire used piracy to take control of trade routes. And the Spanish Empire’s colonization of Southern America, put crudely, turned the continent into vast gold- and silver-mining enterprise, and its population into slave labor. The modern American empire is a different beast. Its network of military bases from Greenland to Australia is not part of a system of territorial occupation or annexation, but rather serves to localize American military power in convenient ways, so that it can maintain a system of states whose features suit its interests.

While a sea, desert, or mountain could be crossed or bypassed at some expense, and energy resources discovered or stolen, the ability to project an empire’s desires, structure, and knowledge across space and time forms an absolute boundary to its existence. Cultures and economies communicate using all manner of techniques across the regions and years of their existence, from the evolution of jokes shared virally between friends to the diffusion of prices across trade routes. This does not by itself make an empire. The structured attempt at managing an extended cultural and economic system using communications is the hallmark of empire. And it is the records of these communications, never intended to be dissected, and so especially vulnerable to dissection, that form the basis for understanding the nature of the world’s sole remaining “empire.”

Its network of military bases from Greenland to Australia is not part of a system of territorial occupation or annexation, but rather serves to localize American military power in convenient ways, so that it can maintain a system of states whose features suit its interests. In general, the United States wants access to trade routes, and can back up its claims with impressive naval power, but does not need to control them directly. And it has learned, by and large, to do without slavery since 1865, as waged labor has proved adequate. In the modern era, we have trade agreements, debt bondage, and structural adjustment. What the United States wants is to expand the domain of markets.


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Diamonds, Gold, and War: The British, the Boers, and the Making of South Africa by Martin Meredith

back-to-the-land, banking crisis, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, Great Leap Forward, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, liberation theology, Nelson Mandela, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, trade route

INTRODUCTION When Britain took possession of the Cape Colony in 1806 during the course of the Napoleonic Wars it was a slave-owning outpost, three months’ sailing distance from London, previously run as a Dutch commercial enterprise that had teetered on the edge of bankruptcy for years. Britain’s only interest in the Cape was its use as a naval base at the foot of Africa halfway along the vital trade route between Europe and Asia - a stepping stone that the British government was determined to keep out of French hands. Its wartime occupation was not expected to be permanent. The white colonial population, descendants of Dutch, German and French Huguenot settlers, was small, no more than 25,000 in all, scattered across a territory of 100,000 square miles.

But not only did his actions enrage the freebooters, they infuriated Rhodes and Robinson who wanted Cape expansion, not imperial trusteeship. Rhodes’ campaign to extend the Cape’s boundaries gathered momentum during 1884. Addressing parliament in July, he repeated his warning of the previous year: Is this House prepared to allow these petty republics to form a wall across our trade routes? Are we to allow the Transvaal and its allies to acquire the whole of the interior? Bechuanaland is the neck of the bottle and commands the route to the Zambesi. We must secure it, unless we are prepared to see the whole of the North pass out of our hands . . . I do not want to part with the key to the interior, leaving us settled just on this small peninsula.

Rhodes endeavoured too to appeal to the trek geest - the trekking spirit - of the Afrikaners. ‘I feel that it is the duty of this Colony, when, as it were, her younger and more fiery sons go out and take land, to follow in their steps with civilised government.’ In line with this, he declared that ‘what we want now is to annex land, not natives’. To wine farmers he offered a free-trade route to the interior for their products, seeking to harness Afrikaner support for northern expansion. To his fellow Englishmen, he stressed the need for white colonial unity. ‘You cannot have real prosperity . . . until you have first established complete confidence between the two races [English and Afrikaner].’


pages: 699 words: 192,704

Heaven's Command (Pax Britannica) by Jan Morris

British Empire, Cape to Cairo, centralized clearinghouse, Corn Laws, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, gentleman farmer, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, Magellanic Cloud, mass immigration, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, trade route

It was specifically a trading company, but it was incidentally an instrument of policy—the three little ships of its first expedition failed in their attempts to find a northern route to Cathay, but instead the company opened up trade with Russia, founded the first British trading stations or ‘factories’ in foreign territory, and learnt a great deal about the geography of Central Asia. The Muscovy Company never aspired to foreign dominion, but in establishing diplomatic contacts, in assembling intelligence, in exploration and in the establishment of trade routes, its merchants were in effect doing the work of the State. By the early decades of Victoria’s reign two great exemplars of this tradition survived, and were now assuming a new role in national affairs. The relationship between trade and dominion was becoming more complex. As Disraeli said of that traditional colonial commodity, sugar, all considerations now mingled in it: ‘not merely commercial, but imperial, philanthropic, religious; confounding and crossing each other, and confusing the legislature and the nation lost in a maze of conflicting interests and contending emotions’.

As Dilke wrote in 1868, ‘the power of America is now predominant in the Pacific: the Sandwich Islands are all but annexed, Japan is all but ruled by her, while the occupation of British Columbia is but a matter of time, and a Mormon descent upon the Marquesas is already planned’. To the British the island groups had seemed irrelevant, for they were utterly detached from the great imperial trade routes, and seemed to offer neither threat nor promise to the imperial aspirations. Successive British Governments had declined to assume new responsibilities there, though urged to do so by Australians and New Zealanders, and repeatedly supplicated by island kings and queens. In many parts British missionaries had converted the islanders to Christianity and western civilization, more or less; in many others British traders had been active and influential for generations; but to provide administrations for these remote and infinitesimal communities, to be saddled with the cost of garrisons or the bore of moral responsibility, to take on yet another rivalry with the Americans, was the last thing British Governments had desired.

Only Empire, it seemed to many businessmen, could restore the proper status quo: with new markets, with new sources of raw material, and with convenient barriers, actual if not explicit, against foreign competition. Strategically the impulses of the new imperialism were also largely defensive. If the London military planners wished to acquire new territory, it was generally to prevent foreigners acquiring it first, or to protect some existing possession, or guard a threatened trade route. The grand assurance of Waterloo and Trafalgar had waned rather with the years. The Britain of the 1870s was no longer beyond challenge. The Americans, in their civil war, had shown themselves capable of immense military exertion, and had for a few years possessed not merely the most experienced, but actually the largest armies in the world.


When Cultures Collide: Leading Across Cultures by Richard D. Lewis

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, business climate, business process, colonial exploitation, corporate governance, Easter island, global village, haute cuisine, hiring and firing, invention of writing, Kōnosuke Matsushita, lateral thinking, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, open borders, profit maximization, profit motive, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, trade route, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

The exploitation of this market, with its enticing mix of such ingredients as high GDP per capita, low labor costs and skilled workforces, could be more attractive and viable in the long term than many areas of Southern Europe and elsewhere. The historical opportunity beckons, as the Danes and Swedes link their countries with the Oresund Bridge and the eastern Baltic states, encouraged by Finland, seek to revive the old Hanseatic trade routes. The three Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) qualified for and were admitted to the European Union in 2004. In the past, the three nations have rarely cooperated effectively, divided as they have been by language, religion, foreign rulers and dreams of separation and independence. Lithuanians, an emotional and grandiloquent people, feel more at home with Slavic Poles and Russians than they do with Latvians and Estonians.

The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was the largest and most powerful state in Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century. Lutheran Latvians, blond and stocky, are more like northern Germans, who colonized them as early as the thirteenth century. Estonians, also Lutheran and even more reserved, strongly resemble their Finnish cousins and speak a Finno-Ugrian tongue. If the Hanseatic highway and trade routes are to be resurrected—and this would bring enormous benefit and prolific growth to the region—the three small Baltic states will have to cooperate closely with one another, as well as with other nations on the Baltic shores. A subtle but important consideration in this regard is the common sprinkling among the Balts of a sizeable number of Russophones (speakers of Russian).

Develop a personal working relationship based on mutual affection. Show sentiment and be willing to indulge in soulsearching with them—it is a favorite pastime. MOTIVATION KEY Cross-century mood Good manners combined with liveliness They share the Baltic states’ hopes of reviving the old Hanseatic trade routes. ✦ They were happy to be in the EU—they point out that Vilnius is the geographic center of Europe! ✦ Motivating Factors Share their strong sense of national identity. ✦ Show some interest in their language—it is the oldest and most archaic IndoEuropean language. ✦ (continued) 372 WHEN CULTURES COLLIDE MOTIVATION (continued) ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ Discussion can be livelier than in the other two Baltic states—you can express personal opinions strongly, but with good taste.


The Rough Guide to Sweden (Travel Guide eBook) by Rough Guides

carbon footprint, centre right, congestion charging, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, large denomination, Peace of Westphalia, place-making, sensible shoes, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, urban planning, WikiLeaks

To experience the setting at its most frenetic, come in August during Medieval Week, when people put a huge effort into dressing the part. Brief history Visby, Gotland’s capital, has always been the scene of frenetic activity of some kind. Its temperate climate and position attracted the Vikings as early as the sixth century, and the lucrative trade routes they opened, from here through to Byzantium and western Asia, guaranteed the island its prosperity. With the ending of Viking domination, a “golden age” followed, with Gotland’s inhabitants maintaining trading posts abroad and signing treaties as equals with European and Asian leaders. However, by the late twelfth century, their autonomy had been undermined by the growing power of the Hanseatic League.

But there is evidence that the Swedish Vikings were among the first to leave home, the impetus being rapid population growth, domestic unrest and a desire for new lands. Sweden being located on the eastern part of the Scandinavian peninsula, the raiders largely turned their attention further eastwards, in the knowledge that the Svear had already reached the Baltic. By the ninth century, the trade routes were well established, with Swedes reaching the Black and Caspian seas and making valuable trading contact with the Byzantine Empire. Although more commercially inclined than their Danish and Norwegian counterparts, Swedish Vikings were quick to use force if profits were slow to materialize. From 860 onwards Greek and Muslim records relate a series of raids across the Black Sea against Byzantium, and across the Caspian into northeast Iran.

The Black Death reached the country in 1350, wiping out whole parishes and killing around a third of the population. Subsequent labour shortages and troubled estates meant that the nobility found it difficult to maintain their positions. German merchants had driven the Swedes from their most lucrative trade routes: even the copper and iron-ore mining that began around this time in Bergslagen and Dalarna relied on German capital. Magnus soon ran into trouble, and was threatened further by the accession of Valdemar Atterdag to the Danish throne in 1340. Squabbles concerning sovereignty over the Danish provinces of Skåne and Blekinge led to Danish incursions into Sweden; in 1361, Valdemar landed on Gotland and sacked Visby.


pages: 695 words: 189,074

Fodor's Essential Israel by Fodor's Travel Guides

bike sharing, call centre, coronavirus, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Mount Scopus, New Urbanism, Pepto Bismol, sensible shoes, starchitect, stem cell, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban planning, Wall-E, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Tel Hatzor National Park 8 km (5 miles) north of Rosh Pina, 14 km (9 miles) east of Tzfat. On the Via Maris—the major trade route linking Egypt and Mesopotamia—Hatzor is referred to several times in documents from ancient archives in both lands, and scholars believe a huge archive may someday be found here. GETTING HERE AND AROUND From Rosh Pina, head north on Route 90; from Tzfat, head east on Route 89, then north on Route 90. s Sights Tel Hatzor National Park RUINS | This site on the Via Maris, an ancient trade route, is a good stop for archaeology buffs—its massive mound is made up of the remnants of 21 cities.

Visitors from around the world flock to this controversial and politically charged white-stone structure and write handwritten wishes or prayers (Ch. 3). CRUSADER RUINS OF AKKO In the 12th century, the Crusaders made Akko their chief port city, valuing its strategic location as an entry point into the flourishing trade route of the greater Levant region. Some of the most fascinating ruins in this UNESCO World Heritage Site City are underground (Ch. 6). TOMB OF KING DAVID On Mount Zion, outside of Jerusalem’s Old City and with views of the nearby Temple Mount, lies what is believed to be the burial site of the ancient Israeli King David.

When Moses led the Israelites to the Promised Land and asked to pass through Edom, he was denied. By the 7th century BC, a new group had swept in from Arabia: the Nabateans. The spectacular tombs and carved monuments of these intrepid traders draw travelers to Petra today. With a wealthy empire that at its height reached from Damascus to the Sinai, the Nabateans controlled the region’s trade routes, their caravans bearing frankincense and myrrh, Indian silks, and African ivory. Most of Petra’s famous tombs—which fuse Greco-Roman, Egyptian, and Mesopotamian styles—were carved during the 1st century AD, before the Nabatean kingdom was subsumed into the Roman Empire. Although the combination of a necropolis and a capital city may seem strange today, this custom was common among ancient peoples, who established cemeteries at the entrances to many of their capitals.


pages: 1,309 words: 300,991

Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations by Norman Davies

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, classic study, Corn Laws, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, labour mobility, land tenure, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, Red Clydeside, Ronald Reagan, Skype, special economic zone, trade route, urban renewal, WikiLeaks

A couple of decades later, the bishop of Basle went one step further by creating a ‘prince-bishopric’, and ruling not only over his episcopal see, but also over nearby lands once confiscated from Rainald III.75 Large parts of the future Switzerland were also carved out of the imperial Kingdom of Burgundy. Sometime early in the thirteenth century, a peasant migration occurred from the lands of the bishop of Sion in the Valais eastward to the Grisons. The migrants took bridge-building techniques with them, opened up the Schollenen Gorge to travellers and provided access to the valuable trade route over the St Gotthard pass into Italy. In August 1291 the men of Uri, Schweiz and Unterwalden, who operated tolls on the pass, swore an oath to resist outside interference. They had performed the founding act of the Swiss Confederation.76 Provence, by contrast, drifted apart from Burgundy through a succession of marriages.

An international folk festival is held every August at Amélie-les-Bains (Els Banys d’Arles).9 Unlike Roussillon, Cerdagne (Cerdanya in Catalan, Cerdaña in Spanish) is entirely landlocked, and is nowadays split into French and Spanish halves. It grew strong through its relative inaccessibility, and rich from an ancient trans-Pyrenean trade route. Its historic capital and county seat stood at Llívia. The counts of Cerdagne-Conflent, who reached their apogee during the eleventh century, founded the abbeys both of St Michel de Cuxa and of Montserrat, before bequeathing their inheritance to their descendants, the counts of Barcelona. Their legacy stayed intact until the seventeenth century.

The Pyrenean ridge, dominated in this section by the peaks of the Aneto and the Perdido, creates a formidable barrier. A few oases of greenery nestle in the steep, upland valleys, but the only area suitable for large-scale agriculture spreads out below the mountains among the wheat fields, orchards and vineyards that line the Ebro. One of the oldest trans-Pyrenean trade routes runs across the pass of the Port de Canfranc from Zaragoza to Béarn. Here, towards the end of the first millennium, Christian lords ruling the north-eastern perimeter of Iberia started to fight back against the Muslim Moors, who had ruled over most of the peninsula since crossing from North Africa some two centuries earlier.


The Rough Guide to Morocco by Rough Guides

colonial exploitation, colonial rule, European colonialism, facts on the ground, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, mass immigration, Murano, Venice glass, place-making, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban renewal, walkable city

Some of the flanking columns are of Roman origin, particularly well suited to the small display of mosaics and finds from Volubilis. Within other rooms are well-presented artefacts discovered in and around Tangier, with origins dating from the Palaeolithic era up until Portuguese occupation. Other exhibits include a map depicting international trade routes, a section dedicated to the Islamization of Tangier, and an interesting room concerned with Roman religion and funeral rites. Opposite the museum’s entrance, and off the main interior courtyard, are the herb- and shrub-lined palace gardens, shaded by jacaranda trees.

If you just want a day-trip from Fez, the Middle Atlas is most easily accessible at Sefrou, a relaxed market town 28km southeast of the city, though Azrou should be on most itineraries as well, an interesting Berber settlement with an excellent and authentic souk, and ideally located for forays into the surrounding cedar forests. At Azrou, the road forks and you can take one of two routes. The N13 heads southeast to the former mining town of Midelt and on to Er Rachidia, a journey that traces the old Trek es Sultan, or Royal Road, an ancient trading route that once carried salt, slaves and other commodities with caravans of camels across the desert from West Africa. Heading southwest, the N8, the main route to Marrakesh, skirts well clear of the Atlas ranges, and is lined with dusty, functional market centres, though Beni Mellal is something of a transport hub along the way.

Most travellers’ first taste of the region is the Tizi n’Tichka, the dizzying pass up from Marrakesh, and the iconic kasbashs at Telouet and Aït Benhaddou – an introduction that is hard to beat. Benhaddou is less than an hour’s drive from Ouarzazate, a modern town created by the French to “pacify” the south and one of the area’s few urban centres of any significance, buoyed in recent years by its association with the film industry. From here, you can follow the old trading routes: south through the Drâa to Zagora and the fringes of the desert at M’Hamid; or east through the Dadès to the towering Todra Gorge and, ultimately, the dunes at Erg Chebbi near Merzouga. These are beautiful journeys, the roads rolling through crumbling mud-brick villages and past long ribbons of deep-green palmeries as they stretch out towards the Sahara.


pages: 1,477 words: 311,310

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000 by Paul Kennedy

agricultural Revolution, airline deregulation, anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, imperial preference, industrial robot, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, long peace, means of production, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, night-watchman state, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, oil shock, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Potemkin village, price mechanism, price stability, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, zero-sum game

Printing by movable type had already appeared in eleventh-century China, and soon large numbers of books were in existence. Trade and industry, stimulated by the canal-building and population pressures, were equally sophisticated. Chinese cities were much larger than their equivalents in medieval Europe, and Chinese trade routes as extensive. Paper money had earlier expedited the flow of commerce and the growth of markets. By the later decades of the eleventh century there existed an enormous iron industry in north China, producing around 125,000 tons per annum, chiefly for military and governmental use—the army of over a million men was, for example, an enormous market for iron goods.

The fact was that in Europe there were always some princes and local lords willing to tolerate merchants and their ways even when others plundered and expelled them; and, as the record shows, oppressed Jewish traders, ruined Flemish textile workers, persecuted Huguenots, moved on and took their expertise with them. A Rhineland baron who overtaxed commercial travelers would find that the trade routes had gone elsewhere, and with it his revenues. A monarch who repudiated his debts would have immense difficulties raising a loan when the next war threatened and funds were quickly needed to equip his armies and fleets. Bankers and arms dealers and artisans were essential, not peripheral, members of society.

In the sixteenth century, indeed, “to most European statesmen the loss of Hungary was of far greater import than the establishment of factories in the Orient, and the threat to Vienna more significant than their own challenges at Aden, Goa and Malacca; only governments bordering the Atlantic could, like their later historians, ignore this fact.”28 Yet when all these reservations are made, there is no doubt that the development of the long-range armed sailing ship heralded a fundamental advance in Europe’s place in the world. With these vessels, the naval powers of the West were in a position to control the oceanic trade routes and to overawe all societies vulnerable to the workings of sea power. Even the first great clashes between the Portuguese and their Muslim foes in the Indian Ocean made this clear. No doubt they exaggerated in retrospect, but to read the journals and reports of da Gama and Albuquerque, describing how their warships blasted their way through the massed fleets of Arab dhows and other light craft which they encountered off the Malabar coast and in the Ormuz and Malacca roads, is to gain the impression that an extraterrestrial, superhuman force had descended upon their unfortunate opponents.


Vanished Kingdoms by Norman Davies

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, classic study, Corn Laws, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, labour mobility, land tenure, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, Red Clydeside, Ronald Reagan, Skype, special economic zone, trade route, urban renewal, WikiLeaks

A couple of decades later, the bishop of Basle went one step further by creating a ‘prince-bishopric’, and ruling not only over his episcopal see, but also over nearby lands once confiscated from Rainald III.75 Large parts of the future Switzerland were also carved out of the imperial Kingdom of Burgundy. Sometime early in the thirteenth century, a peasant migration occurred from the lands of the bishop of Sion in the Valais eastward to the Grisons. The migrants took bridge-building techniques with them, opened up the Schollenen Gorge to travellers and provided access to the valuable trade route over the St Gotthard pass into Italy. In August 1291 the men of Uri, Schweiz and Unterwalden, who operated tolls on the pass, swore an oath to resist outside interference. They had performed the founding act of the Swiss Confederation.76 Provence, by contrast, drifted apart from Burgundy through a succession of marriages.

An international folk festival is held every August at Amélie-les-Bains (Els Banys d’Arles).9 Unlike Roussillon, Cerdagne (Cerdanya in Catalan, Cerdaña in Spanish) is entirely landlocked, and is nowadays split into French and Spanish halves. It grew strong through its relative inaccessibility, and rich from an ancient trans-Pyrenean trade route. Its historic capital and county seat stood at Llívia. The counts of Cerdagne-Conflent, who reached their apogee during the eleventh century, founded the abbeys both of St Michel de Cuxa and of Montserrat, before bequeathing their inheritance to their descendants, the counts of Barcelona. Their legacy stayed intact until the seventeenth century.

The Pyrenean ridge, dominated in this section by the peaks of the Aneto and the Perdido, creates a formidable barrier. A few oases of greenery nestle in the steep, upland valleys, but the only area suitable for large-scale agriculture spreads out below the mountains among the wheat fields, orchards and vineyards that line the Ebro. One of the oldest trans-Pyrenean trade routes runs across the pass of the Port de Canfranc from Zaragoza to Béarn. Here, towards the end of the first millennium, Christian lords ruling the north-eastern perimeter of Iberia started to fight back against the Muslim Moors, who had ruled over most of the peninsula since crossing from North Africa some two centuries earlier.


pages: 256 words: 75,139

Divided: Why We're Living in an Age of Walls by Tim Marshall

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Donald Trump, end world poverty, facts on the ground, gentrification, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, it's over 9,000, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, openstreetmap, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, the built environment, trade route, unpaid internship, urban planning

And it is these divides that may pose the greatest threat to the prospects of long-term prosperity and unity in China. It’s a threat taken very seriously by the Communist Party. It has learned the lessons of history and knows what happens when the state is weakened by a fragmented population. In the nineteenth century, China saw a major reversal in the way its trading operated. The land trade routes through Central Asia had always been the economic priority, but now the sea lanes became the primary route. This reversal was not entirely by choice – the British and other foreign powers had used their military strength to force favourable trading terms upon China. As a result, the focus of trade shifted to the Pacific coast, which helped the communities in that region to develop, but it weakened the trading prospects of the interior, which in turn reduced the amount of money spent on its infrastructure.

Crossing the Iron Curtain into Eastern Europe, on the other hand, required a passport, paperwork and security checks, and was done in the knowledge that your every movement would be monitored. The Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall were the stark physical reminders that a continent with a shared history, interlinked cultures and ancient trading routes had been completely riven by ideology and Great Power politics. In the aftermath of the Second World War, as the communist and capitalist victors sized each other up across this new divide, the Soviet economic system quickly started to fail its citizens. Just by looking out of a window or crossing a street, ordinary people in the East could see the spectacularly successful rebuilding of West Germany.


pages: 317 words: 76,169

The Perfect House: A Journey With Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio by Witold Rybczynski

A Pattern Language, financial independence, Frank Gehry, functional programming, invention of the printing press, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Murano, Venice glass, trade route

The chief reason to conquer these territories was to control the overland trade routes from Venice to northern Europe, but starting in the 1540s, exactly the time that Palladio embarked on his architectural career, the role of the terraferma changed. Wealthy Venetians began to invest heavily in mainland agriculture—land reclamation, irrigation canals, and drainage schemes. Historians do not agree about the exact reason for this newfound interest, but it was probably a combination of factors. Thanks to the growth of the Turkish empire, the discovery of alternative trade routes, and the growing naval power of the Baltic states, England, and the Low Countries, Venice was no longer dominant in international trade, and wealthy Venetians needed new vehicles for their investments.


pages: 276 words: 78,061

Worth Dying For: The Power and Politics of Flags by Tim Marshall

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, colonial rule, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, It's morning again in America, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, trade route, white picket fence

It reminds us of blood and incites us to victory.’ More interesting, arguably, is that the coat of arms in the centre of the flag is set on an armillary sphere. This was an instrument used for navigation and is symbolic of the Age of Discovery, when Portuguese sailors were at the forefront of opening up new trade routes to what were, for the Europeans, undiscovered lands. The coat of arms is based on a design that dates back to 1139, and it is also deeply Christian. It features five white dots on five blue shields – a reference to the Battle of Ourique, fought in Portugal in 1139, in which Alfonso I defeated five Moorish kings ‘In the name of the five stigmata of Christ’.

They have been used both at sea and on land for thousands of years, much longer than in the West.’ Smith argues that we owe to the Chinese the focus on attaching cloth to a staff laterally, rather than fixing an object such as an animal carving to its top. What is unclear is whether silk flags then spread to the Near East, or if it was just that the silk arrived through the trade routes and was fashioned into flags by people who were already using versions of them. What is more certain is that the Western world began copying the flags of the Arabs during the Crusades. Several hundred years later, things came full-circle. The Chinese used a huge variety of flags for shipping and military purposes, but never bothered to come up with one to symbolize China and the Chinese.


pages: 352 words: 80,030

The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World by Peter Frankopan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, cashless society, clean water, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, global supply chain, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, land reform, Londongrad, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Meghnad Desai, Nelson Mandela, Paris climate accords, purchasing power parity, ransomware, Rubik’s Cube, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, trade route, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, urban planning, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

We are living through a transformation and a shift that is epochal in its scale and character, similar to what happened in the decades that followed the crossing of the Atlantic by Columbus and those who soon followed him, and the near-simultaneous rounding of the southern tip of Africa by Vasco da Gama that opened up new maritime trade routes between Europe, the Indian Ocean, South Asia and beyond. Those twin expeditions, just over 500 years ago, laid the ground for a dramatic shift in the world’s centre of economic and political gravity, placing western Europe at the heart of global trade routes for the first time in history.74 Something similar is happening today, albeit in reverse. Asia and the Silk Roads are rising – and they are rising fast. They are not doing so in isolation from the west, nor even in competition with it.


pages: 247 words: 78,961

The Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-First Century by Robert D. Kaplan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, always be closing, California gold rush, collective bargaining, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, kremlinology, load shedding, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, no-fly zone, oil-for-food scandal, one-China policy, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, the long tail, trade route, Westphalian system, Yom Kippur War

The Mongols, whose Yuan Dynasty ruled China in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, were, in fact, “early practitioners of globalization,” seeking to connect the whole of habitable Eurasia in a truly multicultural empire. And Yuan China’s most compelling weapon was—despite the Mongols’ bloody reputation—not the sword but trade: gems, fabrics, spices, metals, and so on. It was trade routes, not the projection of military power, that emblemized the “Pax Mongolica.”*9 Mongol grand strategy was built on commerce much more than on war. If you want to understand China’s grand strategy today, look no further than Kublai Khan’s empire. Yet, for Kublai Khan it didn’t altogether work.

Indian warships are in the South China Sea while Chinese warships sail throughout the Indian Ocean, with China deeply involved in port development projects in the Bay of Bengal and Arabian Sea that virtually surround India on three sides. The high wall of the Himalayas no longer separates these two great civilizations, and hasn’t for some time. Trade routes linking China and India, by way of Tibet, Nepal, West Bengal, and Myanmar—joining Lhasa, Kathmandu, and Kolkata—will only further mature, with peaceful commerce cushioning the impact of this new strategic geography.*35 But these widened tentacles of vehicular transport also might be used for Chinese tanks to enter India.


pages: 333 words: 76,990

The Long Good Buy: Analysing Cycles in Markets by Peter Oppenheimer

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, computer age, credit crunch, data science, debt deflation, decarbonisation, diversification, dividend-yielding stocks, equity premium, equity risk premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, gentrification, geopolitical risk, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, household responsibility system, housing crisis, index fund, invention of the printing press, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kondratiev cycle, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Live Aid, low interest rates, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, open economy, Phillips curve, price stability, private sector deleveraging, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, railway mania, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, stocks for the long run, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, tulip mania, yield curve

The creation of publicly financed, but limited liability, insurance companies changed the nature of risk-sharing, thereby allowing for a significant increase in appetite for funding risky endeavours. Meanwhile, technological changes (in maritime navigation, for example) made possible the opening up of the Atlantic trade routes, a shift that was game-changing; the new trade routes among Europe, Africa and the Caribbean, which were financed partly as a result of the new risk-sharing instruments, became the dominant trade system through to the early 19th century and resulted in what was arguably one of the first major forms of globalisation. The combination of risk appetite, funding conditions, a vehicle that offered attractive returns and technological advances in navigation that enabled the opportunity to be exploited provided a fertile backdrop for speculation.


The "Talmud" by Wimpfheimer, Barry Scott.

conceptual framework, trade route

The questioner seeks the history of the composition of rabbinic literature, and Rav Sherira Gaon obliges with a history of the rabbis from Temple times to his day focusing on institutions and works of literature. Much of this is historically imprecise by modern critical standards, but the work remains valuable, particularly for its description of the Geonic period. Responsa largely traveled via trade routes. Scribes at nodes on these trade routes would sometimes copy the responsa in transit. Some rabbis retained handwritten copies of their own responsa. Medieval responsa usually come to us from such collections. Occasionally, they were preserved through other avenues. A sixteenthcentury rabbi, Bezalel Ashkenazi, who lived in Ottoman Election 131 Palestine, is the source of an important anthology of medieval Talmud commentary to several tractates.


pages: 447 words: 141,811

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Atahualpa, British Empire, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, David Graeber, Easter island, Edmond Halley, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, glass ceiling, global village, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income per capita, invention of gunpowder, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, life extension, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, personalized medicine, Ponzi scheme, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, zero-sum game

The idea of progress is built on the notion that if we admit our ignorance and invest resources in research, things can improve. This idea was soon translated into economic terms. Whoever believes in progress believes that geographical discoveries, technological inventions and organisational developments can increase the sum total of human production, trade and wealth. New trade routes in the Atlantic could flourish without ruining old routes in the Indian Ocean. New goods could be produced without reducing the production of old ones. For instance, one could open a new bakery specialising in chocolate cakes and croissants without causing bakeries specialising in bread to go bust.

The empires built by bankers and merchants in frock coats and top hats defeated the empires built by kings and noblemen in gold clothes and shining armour. The mercantile empires were simply much shrewder in financing their conquests. Nobody wants to pay taxes, but everyone is happy to invest. In 1484 Christopher Columbus approached the king of Portugal with the proposal that he finance a fleet that would sail westward to find a new trade route to East Asia. Such explorations were a very risky and costly business. A lot of money was needed in order to build ships, buy supplies, and pay sailors and soldiers – and there was no guarantee that the investment would yield a return. The king of Portugal declined. Like a present-day start-up entrepreneur, Columbus did not give up.

Mercenary armies and cannon-brandishing fleets cost a fortune, but the Dutch were able to finance their military expeditions more easily than the mighty Spanish Empire because they secured the trust of the burgeoning European financial system at a time when the Spanish king was carelessly eroding its trust in him. Financiers extended the Dutch enough credit to set up armies and fleets, and these armies and fleets gave the Dutch control of world trade routes, which in turn yielded handsome profits. The profits allowed the Dutch to repay the loans, which strengthened the trust of the financiers. Amsterdam was fast becoming not only one of the most important ports of Europe, but also the continent’s financial Mecca. How exactly did the Dutch win the trust of the financial system?


The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber, David Wengrow

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Atahualpa, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, degrowth, European colonialism, founder crops, Gini coefficient, global village, Hernando de Soto, Hobbesian trap, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, labour mobility, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, means of production, Murray Bookchin, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, public intellectual, Scientific racism, spice trade, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl

Each hamlet seems to have developed its own expertise (stone-grinding, bead-carving, shell-processing and so on), and industries were often associated with special ‘cult buildings’ or seasonal lodges, pointing to the control of such skills by guilds or secret societies. By the ninth millennium bc, larger settlements had developed along the principal trade routes. Lowland foragers occupied fertile pockets of land among the drainages of the Jordan valley, using trade wealth to support increasingly large, settled populations. Sites of impressive scale sprang up in such propitious locations, some, such as Jericho and Basta, approaching ten hectares in size.25 To understand the importance of trade in this process is to appreciate that the lowland crescent was a landscape of intimate contrasts and conjunctures (very similar, in this respect, to California).

We know something about the mass production of woollen garments and other commodities in temples; we can also infer that – somehow or other – these woollens and other temple manufactures were being traded for wood, metal and precious stone that were not available in the river valleys, but abounded in the surrounding high country. We know little about how this trade was organized in its earliest days, but we do know from archaeological evidence that Uruk was establishing colonies, tiny versions of itself, at many strategic points along the trade routes. Uruk colonies appear to have been both commercial outposts and religious centres, and traces of them are found as far north as the Taurus Mountains and as far east as the Iranian Zagros.75 ‘Uruk expansion’, as it is called in the archaeological literature, is puzzling. There’s no real evidence of violent conquest, no weapons or fortifications, yet at the same time there seems to have been an effort to transform – in effect, to colonize – the lives of nearby peoples, to disseminate the new habits of urban life.

Mercenaries and traders went both ways, pilgrimages and diplomatic visits followed; immigrants from Teotihuacan built temples in Maya cities, and there was even a Maya neighbourhood, replete with murals, at Teotihuacan itself.15 How do we resolve the puzzle of this Mayan depiction of Teotihuacan kings? Well, first of all, if history teaches us anything about long-distance trade routes, it’s that they are likely to be full of unscrupulous characters of various sorts: bandits, runaways, grifters, smugglers, religious visionaries, spies – or figures who may be any combination of these at a given time. This was no less true in Mesoamerica than anywhere else. The Aztecs, for instance, employed orders of heavily armed warrior-merchants called pochteca, who also gathered intelligence on the cities where they traded.


Greece Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, capital controls, car-free, carbon footprint, credit crunch, haute couture, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, low cost airline, pension reform, period drama, sensible shoes, trade route, urban sprawl

Alexander spread the Greek culture and language widely, creating a Hellenistic society that would be absorbed by the Romans. Later, after their empire split into eastern and western halves in the 4th century AD, the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire emerged. Thessaloniki became Byzantium’s second city, a vital commercial, cultural and strategic centre on the Balkan trade routes. However, 6th- and 7th-century-AD Slavic migrations brought new populations and challenges. The empire frequently battled with the medieval Bulgarian kingdom from the 9th century to the 11th century. In 1018 Emperor Basil II finally defeated Bulgarian Tsar Samuel, who had ruled much of the southern Balkans from Macedonia’s Mikri Prespa Lake.

Taxis from Litohoro to Dion cost from €12. Castle of PlatamonasCASTLE (Κάστρο Πλαταμώνα %23250 44470; Platamonas; adult/child €2/free; h8am-3pm daily) Looming from a coastal bluff near Platamonas village, 20km south of Plaka Litohorou, this well-preserved 11th-century castle was once defended by brave Byzantines, safeguarding trade routes and scanning for pirates. Today, however, the only stratiotes (soldiers) you're likely to see are handymen with weed whackers and the occasional lumbering turtle. Taxis from Litohorou town cost about €22. From the parking area, pass the (unstaffed) booth and take the hilly path 150m to the castle and ticket booth.

Secret rituals were associated with Orpheus, the mythical, tragic Thracian father of music. Powerful Greek city-states vied with the Persians for Thrace's coast. Athens prevailed at the Battle of Plataea, though Philip II of Macedon took over in 346 BC. Later, with the Roman Empire’s AD 395 division, Thrace's strategic positioning on the Via Egnatia trade route made it important. Constantinople's defensive zone was the Thracian plain, though its flatness made it vulnerable to marauding Goths, Huns, Vandals, Bulgars, Pechenegs, Cumans and poorly behaved Latin Crusaders – relatively few historic structures thus remain predating the Ottomans' 14th-century invasion.


pages: 297 words: 83,563

The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And Their Race to Save the World's Most Precious Manuscripts by Joshua Hammer

crowdsourcing, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, no-fly zone, pre–internet, trade route, unemployed young men, WikiLeaks

Great original books as well came out of Timbuktu, by a swelling number of local scientists, historians, philosophers, and versemakers. Anthologies of poems celebrated everything from the Prophet to romantic love to more mundane subjects such as green tea. The Tariq Al Sudan presented, in thirty-eight chapters, an unparalleled history of life on the Middle Niger under the Songhai emperors, describing in great detail trade routes, battles, invasions, and daily life in cities such as Djenné, famed for its thirteenth-century Great Mud Mosque. “The land of Djenné is prosperous and densely inhabited, with major markets every day of the week. It is said there are 7,077 villages in that land, all close to one another,” the author observed.

Belmokhtar traded in both counterfeits produced in China and Vietnam and genuine Western brands, which typically entered West Africa from the United States and Europe through Ghana, Benin, Togo, and Guinea, and reached Mali by road or by boat along the Niger. Belmokhtar and his colleagues charged a tax for safe passage of the cigarettes or smuggled the product themselves through the Sahara along established salt-trading routes by SUVs, trucks, and motorcycles. The final destinations were Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia, which together consume nearly half of Africa’s cigarettes, much of them purchased on the black market. Belmokhtar was, by all accounts, a cunning, energetic, and resourceful gangster. Within a couple of years, by building an entrenched network of support through the desert, and intimidating would-be competitors, he gained so great a share of the trans-Saharan contraband business that he became known in the region as “Mr.


pages: 299 words: 89,342

The Places in Between by Rory Stewart

Ayatollah Khomeini, clean water, Khyber Pass, out of africa, trade route, upwardly mobile

When I had the idea of an Asian walk five years earlier, such legacies of the Silk Road had fascinated me. There would once perhaps have been lapis lazuli here, carried west from the mines of Afghanistan to make the blue in medieval Sienese paintings, and amber cut from tree fossils in the Baltic and brought east for Tibetan necklaces. Even more mysterious objects had moved down such trading routes: diamonds that could make you a king, Buddhist texts on birch-bark scrolls in characters that could no longer be deciphered, Chinese astrolabes to mystify the Vatican. But now that I was walking, I found it more difficult to be interested in the Silk Road. Such things had little to do with modern Afghanistan and I doubted whether the people who lived in this building had a clear idea of its past.

I guessed, however, that the international community would not act before it was too late, and I was right.38 Just before I left the site of the Turquoise Mountain, Abdullah, Bushire's son, showed me three pieces he'd found that morning. They suggested the Ghorid dynasty was in some ways more open to the world in the twelfth century than the government in Herat is today. One was a fragment of porcelain that appeared from the delicate design in under-glaze red to have been imported eight hundred years ago from China on a trading route four thousand kilometers long. The other was a coin depicting Zoroastrian fire worshippers, one element in the complex religious patchwork from which the minaret emerged: The Hebrew tombstones showed there had been Jews; the indigenous people had perhaps been Hindus; while the Ghorids' second capital of Bamiyan was dominated by two giant Buddhas.39 The third piece was a fragment from the rim of a plate.


pages: 449 words: 85,924

Lonely Planet Maldives (Travel Guide) by Planet, Lonely, Masters, Tom

British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, haute cuisine, income inequality, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, sustainable-tourism, trade route, women in the workforce

There are six frequent ferries connecting most of the inhabited islands in the two atolls, including Kaadedhoo. The network is centred on the Gaafu Dhaalu’s capital island Thinadhoo, and to a lesser extent on Gaafu Alifu’s capital Viligili. Gaafu Dhaalu Geographically isolated from Male, but strategically located on the Indian Ocean trade routes, Gaafu Dhaalu – or Huvadhoo Atoll, to use its geographical name – had independent tendencies dating back many years. It had its own direct trade links with Sri Lanka, and the people spoke a distinct dialect almost incomprehensible to other Maldivians. The island of Thinadhoo was a focal point of the ‘southern rebellion’ against the central rule of Male during the early 1960s, so much so that troops from Male invaded in February 1962 and destroyed all the homes.

At one stage, when the Portuguese first arrived on the scene, there were actually two ruling dynasties, the Theemuge (or Malei) dynasty and the Hilali. For a detailed overview of Maldivian history see www.maldivesstory.com.mv. The Portuguese Early in the 16th century the Portuguese, who were already well established in Goa in western India, decided they wanted a greater share of the profitable trade routes of the Indian Ocean. They were given permission by the sultan to build a fort and a factory in Male, but it wasn’t long before they wanted more from the Maldives. In 1558, after a few unsuccessful attempts, Portuguese Captain Andreas Andre led an invasion army and killed Sultan Ali VI. The Maldivians called the captain ‘Andiri Andirin’ and he ruled Male and much of the country for the next 15 years.


pages: 290 words: 82,220

Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age by Annalee Newitz

biofilm, Black Lives Matter, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, David Graeber, Easter island, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, megacity, off-the-grid, rent control, the built environment, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl

Beset by political woes from outside, facing a crumbling infrastructure inside, the city transformed from a dense hub to a rambling sprawl of farming villages. Still, it would be several centuries of expansion before Angkor went full Koh Ker. During that time, Suryavarman’s laborers built up the empire’s trade routes and bureaucracy, while Suryavarman II improved its infrastructure. And then, in 1181, Angkor underwent its most profound urbanization. A new king rose, Jayavarman VII, who is still often called “the great king.” His workers built thousands of roads, hospitals, and schools. His reign is referenced so frequently in Angkorian history that archaeologists refer to him by the nickname J7.

Ohkay Owingeh author Rebecca Roanhorse writes popular fantasy novels like Trail of Lightning, which incorporates indigenous histories and culture. One recent novel takes place partly at Cahokia, and I caught up with her as she was in the process of writing it. Speaking from her home in New Mexico, she told me that Cahokia is important to her because she wants readers to know that “there were extensive, sophisticated cities and trade routes in the Americas before European invasion.” She imagines the city as very cosmopolitan, with Iron Age technology, busy streets, pens full of animals, and a rivalry with the urbanites living in Chaco Canyon to the south. Unlike many of the archaeologists I spoke with, Roanhorse says she’s not particularly focused on the spirituality of the people who lived at Cahokia.


pages: 70 words: 22,172

How We'll Live on Mars (TED Books) by Stephen Petranek

Apollo 11, California gold rush, Colonization of Mars, Dennis Tito, Elon Musk, Hyperloop, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, out of africa, Richard Feynman, TED Talk, trade route

And every person’s view of what the world was expanded, contracted, and multiplied. A voyage to Mars will make the Age of Discovery look like a minuscule event in human history. Our world will suddenly encompass an entire solar system instead of one planet. Our abilities to geoengineer something as large as a planet will flourish. Trade routes that would have seemed impossible to previous generations will be established. The Earth will gain metals it desperately needs and the technical knowledge to very possibly save its environment. Opportunity for a new life elsewhere will give hope to millions. We must work desperately and devotedly to save our home planet—there is simply nothing else like it anywhere that we know of.


pages: 928 words: 159,837

Florence & Tuscany by Lonely Planet

Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, European colonialism, haute couture, Kickstarter, period drama, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-work, retail therapy, sensible shoes, Skype, trade route, urban planning

These fruits of the forest and other regional delicacies, including Zeri lamb, freshly baked focaccette, crisp and sweet rotella apples, boiled pork shoulder, caciotta (a delicate cow’s-milk cheese), bigliolo beans, local olive oil and Colli di Luni wines, are reason alone to visit. Pontremoli POP 7820 It may be small, but this out-of-the-way town presided over by the impressive bulk of Castello del Piagnaro has a decidedly grand air – a legacy of its strategic location on the pilgrimage and trading route of Via Francigena . Its merchants made fortunes in medieval times, and adorned the Old Town with palaces, piazzas and graceful stone bridges. The Old Town is a long sliver stretching north–south between the Magra and Verde rivers, which have historically served as defensive barriers. Meandering its streets takes you beneath colonnaded arches, through former strongholds of opposing Guelph and Ghibelline factions, and past a 17th-century cathedral and an 18th-century theatre.

They secretly allied with Hannibal to bring about the ignominious defeat of the Romans – one of the deadliest battles in all of Roman history – at Lago Trasimeno in neighbouring Umbria: 16,000 Roman soldiers were lost in approximately three hours. After that Rome took a more hands-off approach with the Etruscans, granting them citizenship in 88 BC to manage their own affairs in the new province of Tuscia (Tuscany) and in return securing safe passage along the major inland Roman trade route via the Via Flaminia. Little did the Romans realise when they paved the road that they were also paving the way for their own replacements in the 5th to 8th centuries AD: first came German emperor Theodoric, then Byzantine emperor Justinian, then the Lombards and finally Charlemagne in 800. MEDIEVAL SCANDAL Best Etruscan Ruins » Vie Cave, Pitigliano » Parco Archeologico di Baratti e Populonia, Golfi di Baratti » Necropoli, Sovana Political power constantly changed hands in medieval Tuscany.

The Middle Ages: the Rise of the Comune Best Art Galleries » Uffizi Gallery, Florence » Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence » Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena » Museo Nazionale di San Matteo, Pisa » Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence While communities sprang up around hermits and holy men in the hinterlands, cities began taking on a life of their own from the 13th and 14th centuries. Roman road networks had been serving as handy trade routes starting in the 11th century, and farming estates and villas began to spring up outside major trading centres as a new middle class of merchants, farmers and skilled craftspeople emerged. Taxes and donations sponsored the building of hospitals such as the Ospedale Santa Maria della Scala in Siena.


pages: 519 words: 148,131

An Empire of Wealth: Rise of American Economy Power 1607-2000 by John Steele Gordon

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, clean water, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial independence, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Ida Tarbell, imperial preference, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, margin call, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, postindustrial economy, price mechanism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War

In 1453 the Turks had taken Constantinople, the ancient capital of the eastern Roman Empire. A Muslim power now sat athwart the trade routes to the East, extracting taxes on all goods that passed. More, the Turks were expanding into Europe itself, and by the middle of the sixteenth century would be at the very gates of Vienna. Christendom felt itself under attack as it had not since the Dark Ages a thousand years earlier. But thanks to the full-rigged ship, western Europeans could do an end run around the Muslim control of the ancient trade routes. By the end of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese had rounded the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa and reached India.

Geopolitically, that situation resembled England’s, only on a much grander scale. Until the second half of the twentieth century, North America was largely immune from foreign attack, and the hand of government (and thus the tax man) lay very lightly indeed upon it for most of that time. And just as Great Britain was perfectly situated on the map to dominate the trade routes of northern Europe as that area began to dominate European and world affairs, the United States was perfectly positioned to take advantage of the emergence of a fully globalized economy. The United States is the only Great Power to front on both the Atlantic and the Pacific and the only one whose national territory sprawls across arctic, temperate, and tropical climate zones.


pages: 582 words: 160,693

The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State by James Dale Davidson, William Rees-Mogg

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, borderless world, British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Columbine, compound rate of return, creative destruction, Danny Hillis, debt deflation, ending welfare as we know it, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Gilder, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Isaac Newton, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Macrae, offshore financial centre, Parkinson's law, pattern recognition, phenotype, price mechanism, profit maximization, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, spice trade, statistical model, telepresence, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto

For example, it is possible that microbiological barriers to the exercise of power, equivalent to malaria but more virulent, could have halted the Western invasion of the periphery in its tracks. The first intrepid Portuguese adventurers who sailed into African waters could have contracted a deadly retrovirus, a more communicable version of AIDS, that would have stopped the opening of the new trade route to Asia before it even began. Columbus, too, and the first waves of settlers in the New World might have encountered diseases that decimated them in the same way that indigenous local populations were affected by measles and other Western childhood diseases. Yet nothing of the kind happened, a coincidence that underlines the intuition that history has a destiny.

The catalysts for these changes were new technologies, from gunpowder weapons to the printing press, which changed the boundaries of life in ways that few could grasp. 73 By the final decade of the fifteenth century, explorers like Columbus were just beginning to open an approach to vast, unknown continents. For the first time in the immemorial ages of human existence, the whole world was compassed. Galleons, new high-masted improvisations on Mediterranean galleys, circumnavigated the globe, charting the passages that were to become trade routes and thoroughfares for disease and conquest. Conquistadors wielding their new bronze cannon on sea and on shore blasted open new horizons. They found fortunes in gold and spices, planted the seeds of new cash crops, from tobacco to potatoes, and staked out new grazing lands for their cattle. The First Industrial Technology Just as the cannon was opening new economic horizons, the printing press opened new intellectual horizons.

They could draw on tight kinship relations to defend against most violent threats on a limited scale, which were the only sort they were likely to encounter. When they encountered larger threats, organized by states, they were overpowered and subjected to rule monopolized by outside groups. This happened over and over. Wherever societies have formed at a scale above bands and tribes, especially where trade routes brought different peoples into contact, specialists in violence have always emerged to plunder any surplus more peaceful people could produce. When technological conditions raised the returns to violence, they doomed societies that were not organized to channel large resources into making war.


pages: 487 words: 147,891

McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld by Misha Glenny

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, BRICs, colonial rule, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Firefox, forensic accounting, friendly fire, glass ceiling, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, joint-stock company, low interest rates, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Nick Leeson, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, Pearl River Delta, place-making, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, trade liberalization, trade route, Transnistria, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile

The vote imposing an embargo on Yugoslavia immediately rendered all Bokan’s trade illegal in international law, as Serbia was the center of his trading empire. Sanctions had a negligible impact on the European Union and America. Most Western companies could afford to stop trading with Belgrade, an insignificant market, especially as their governments threatened tough penalties if anybody violated them. Serbia lies at the heart of all Balkan trading routes—its roads and its markets are almost as essential for its neighbors as they are for Serbia itself. The UN, of course, issued warnings to the surrounding countries that they must break all links with Serbia and Montenegro. For Balkan countries, the sanctions were a catastrophe. Even though the Bulgarian government could no longer officially buy and sell to Serbia, businessmen such as Ilya Pavlov felt less constrained.

Not a penny of assistance or compensation was offered to Yugoslavia’s neighbors—they were all expected to shoulder the costs of the international community’s moral indignation about Serbia’s behavior in Bosnia. So the only way they could pay pensions, wages, and health care was by allowing the mob to shore up its control of the country’s main trading routes, and claim ignorance, helplessness, or both. As the crisis deepened, so did this damaging symbiotic relationship between politics and crime. In Serbia itself, Vanja Bokan was quick to arrange shipments of oil and metals into Yugoslavia. Criminals and businessmen throughout the region worked feverishly to create a dense web of friendships and networks to subvert the embargo.

Civil war devastated the east until 1970, when Biafra—broken, battered, and famished—surrendered. Ever since then, the Igbo have complained that they have been excluded from the riches of Nigeria by the Yoruba and Hausa. The rich of the west and the north became even richer, while the Igbo returned to their old ways. For hundreds of years, the Igbo had forged trading routes along the coast of West Africa as far as South Africa. In collaboration with the emirs of the Hausa and their trading counterparts from Lebanon, they also pioneered a trans-Saharan route that stretched as far as Mecca, Medina, and Jeddah in what is now Saudi Arabia. Thanks to wars and apartheid, these traditional routes were less easily negotiated in the 1970s than was once the case (although some of the many Nigerians studying in the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies assisted in the delivery of supplies to the ANC in southern Africa).


pages: 874 words: 154,810

Lonely Planet Florence & Tuscany by Lonely Planet, Virginia Maxwell, Nicola Williams

Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Costa Concordia, G4S, haute couture, Kickstarter, period drama, post-work, retail therapy, Skype, trade route

End the tour 12km south in Aulla, known for its abbey founded in AD 884 and housing the remains of St Caprasio, the hermit monk who inspired the spread of monastic life in Provence from the 5th century. Top of Chapter Pontremoli pop 7820 It may be small, but this out-of-the-way town presided over by the impressive bulk of Castello del Piagnaro has a decidedly grand air – a legacy of its strategic location on the pilgrimage and trading route of Via Francigena. Its merchants made fortunes in medieval times, and adorned the centro storico with palaces, piazzas and graceful stone bridges. The centro storico is a long sliver stretching north–south between the Magra and Verde rivers, which have historically served as defensive barriers.

They secretly allied themselves with Hannibal to bring about the ignominious defeat of the Romans – one of the deadliest battles in all of Roman history – at Lago Trasimeno in neighbouring Umbria: 16,000 Roman soldiers were lost in approximately three hours. After that, Rome took a more hands-off approach with the Etruscans, granting them citizenship in 88 BC to manage their own affairs in the new province of Tuscia (Tuscany), and in return securing themselves safe passage along the major inland Roman trade route via the Via Flaminia. Little did the Romans realise when they paved the road that they were also paving the way for their own replacements in the 5th to 8th centuries AD: first came German emperor Theodoric, then Byzantine emperor Justinian, then the Lombards and finally Charlemagne in 800. Medieval Scandal Political power constantly changed hands in medieval Tuscany.

For medieval pilgrims unaccustomed to multiplexes and special effects, entering a space that had been covered from floor to ceiling with stories told in living colour must have been a dazzling, overwhelming experience. The Middle Ages: The Rise of the Comune While communities sprang up around hermits and holy men in the hinterlands, cities took on a life of their own from the 13th and 14th centuries. Roman road networks had been serving as handy trade routes starting in the 11th century, and farming estates and villas began to spring up outside major trading centres as a new middle class of merchants, farmers and skilled craftspeople emerged. Taxes and donations sponsored the building of hospitals such as the Ospedale Santa Maria della Scala in Siena.


pages: 462 words: 150,129

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, food miles, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Large Hadron Collider, Mark Zuckerberg, Medieval Warm Period, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, packet switching, patent troll, Pax Mongolica, Peter Thiel, phenotype, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, spice trade, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, working poor, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

First the Milesians then the Athenians and their allies grew wealthy by trading among small, independent ‘citizen states’, not by uniting as an empire. Having copied the Phoenicians’ ships and trading habits, Miletus, the most successful of the Ionian Greek cities, sat ‘like a bloated spider’ at the junction of four trade routes, east overland to Asia, north through the Hellespont to the Black Sea, south to Egypt and west to Italy. But though it established colonies all over the Black Sea, Miletus was not an imperial capital: it was first among equals. The city of Sybaris, a preferred trading partner of Miletus on a fertile plain in the toe of southern Italy, grew to perhaps several hundred thousand people and became a byword for opulence and refinement before it was destroyed by its enemies and buried under the diverted river Crathis in 510 BC.

It was ruled at its zenith in 250 BC by Asoka, a warrior who turned into a Buddhist pacifist once he had won (funny, that) and was as economically benign a head of state as you could wish. He built roads and waterways to encourage the movement of goods, established a common currency and opened maritime trade routes with China, south-east Asia and the Middle East, sparking an export-led boom in which cotton and silk textiles played a prominent part. Trade was carried on almost entirely by private firms (sreni) of a recognisably corporate kind; taxation, though extensive, was fairly administered. There were remarkable scientific advances, not least the invention of zero and the decimal system and the accurate calculation of pi.

Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 170 ‘advanced by David Hume’. This argument goes back to David Hume’s History of Great Britain, and has been pursued recently by Douglass North. p. 170 ‘Miletus, the most successful of the Ionian Greek cities, sat “like a bloated spider” at the junction of four trade routes’. Cunliffe, B. 2001. The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek. Penguin. p. 172 ‘Humanity’s great battle over the last 10,000 years has been the battle against monopoly.’ Kealey, T. 2008. Sex, Science and Profits. Random House. p. 172 ‘The Mauryan empire in India’. Khanna, V. S. 2005.


pages: 618 words: 146,557

Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979-89 by Rodric Braithwaite

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, clean water, en.wikipedia.org, friendly fire, full employment, Khyber Pass, Mikhail Gorbachev, trade route, V2 rocket

Peter ordered Alexander Bekovich, a captain in the Life Guards and a converted Muslim prince from the North Caucasus, to find out more. He gave Bekovich a force of over six thousand men – horse, foot, guns, and a clutch of merchants – to build fortresses along the Amu Darya, to persuade the Khan of Khiva to help find the gold, and to open the trading route to India. Bekovich reached Khiva in the summer of 1717. After an initial welcome, the Khan treacherously slaughtered him and his men, stuffed his head with straw, and sent it to the Khan of Bukhara. A few years later, in 1728, the Russians collided for the first time with the Afghans, when their troops encountered an Afghan army which had invaded Persia.

Its people are Tajiks, devout but not fanatical Sunni Muslims, often at odds with the Pushtuns to the south. Alexander the Great went this way in an epic winter march in pursuit of Bessus, the last claimant to the imperial Persian throne. Later the locals made a living by extracting tribute from the rich caravans from China which passed through the valley, until the twentieth century one of the main trade routes northwards from Kabul. The painters of the European Renaissance used lapis lazuli mined around the upper valley for making the blue paint for the robes of their Madonnas. The mines generated an income of more than $5 million a year even during the war; they were carefully camouflaged, heavily protected against air attack, and exploited with the help of Japanese and West German engineers.

The mines generated an income of more than $5 million a year even during the war; they were carefully camouflaged, heavily protected against air attack, and exploited with the help of Japanese and West German engineers. Because of their economic importance to the resistance, the mines were attacked – unsuccessfully – in June 1981 by long-range bombers from bases in the Soviet Union.47 After the road over the Salang Pass was built, the valley lost its significance as a trade route. But despite its diminished importance, its position – dangerously close to Bagram, the main Soviet airbase, to the main Soviet supply line across the Hindu Kush through the Salang Tunnel, and to Kabul itself – meant that guerrilla forces operating out of the valley were a thorn in the Russians’ side from the first day of the Soviet occupation to the last (see Map 4).


The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations by Daniel Yergin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 3D printing, 9 dash line, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, British Empire, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, commodity super cycle, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, failed state, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, LNG terminal, Lyft, Malacca Straits, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, new economy, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, paypal mafia, peak oil, pension reform, power law, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, super pumped, supply-chain management, TED Talk, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, women in the workforce

“As I stand here and look back to that episode of history, I could almost hear the camel bells echoing in the mountains and see the wisp of smoke rising from the desert.”1 Zhang Qian’s reports marked the beginning of the development of trade routes that ran to the west, first to Central Asia and Persia, and then, at least intermittently, as far as the Roman Empire. This transcontinental trade route had no particular name. Only in 1877 was it dubbed Die Seidenstrasse—“the Silk Road”—by Baron Ferdinand von Richthoften, a German geologist and geographer who had been dispatched to China to scout mining opportunities and a possible route for a railroad to Europe.

China is expanding its reach in all dimensions: geographically, militarily, economically, technologically, and politically. The “workshop of the world,” it now seeks to move up the value chain and become the global leader in the new industries of this century. China is also asserting its own map for almost the entirety of the South China Sea, the most critical oceanic trade route in the world, and now the sharpest point of strategic confrontation with the United States. Energy is an important part of that claim. China’s Belt and Road Initiative is designed to redraw the economic map of Asia and Eurasia and beyond, putting what was once the “Middle Kingdom” in the middle of a reordered global economy.


The Rough Guide to Norway by Phil Lee

banking crisis, bike sharing, car-free, centre right, company town, Easter island, glass ceiling, Nelson Mandela, North Sea oil, out of africa, place-making, sensible shoes, sustainable-tourism, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, walkable city, white picket fence

CRUISING THE BLINDLEIA Lillesand’s nautical highlight is the three-hour cruise aboard M/B Øya (July to early Aug Mon–Sat daily at 10am; 255kr one-way, 420kr return; 95 93 58 55, blindleia.no), a dinky little passenger ferry which wiggles its way south to Kristiansand in part along a narrow channel separating the mainland from the offshore islets. Sheltered from the full force of the ocean, this channel – the Blindleia – was once a major trade route, but today it’s trafficked by every sort of pleasure craft imaginable, from replica three-mast sailing ships and vintage tugboats to the sleekest of yachts. Other, faster, boats make the trip too, but the M/B Øya is the most charming. If the sailing schedule of the M/B Øya does not suit, contact Lillesand tourist office for details of a wide variety of local boat trips, from fishing trips and cruises along the coast to the summertime badeboot (bathing boat), which shuttles across to Hestholm bay on the island of Skauerøya, where swimmers don’t seem to notice just how cold the Skagerrak actually is.

THE TELEMARKSKANAL Dalen is the terminus of the passenger ferry that wends its way southeast along the Telemarkskanal to Skien (ferries mid-May to early Sept 3–6 weekly; 800kr one-way; 35 90 00 30, telemarkskanalen.no), a journey that takes a little under nine hours, leaving around 8am. Extending 105km, the canal links a string of lakes and rivers by means of eighteen locks that negotiate a difference in water levels of 72m. Completed in 1892, the canal was once an important trade route into the interior, but today it’s mainly used by pleasure craft and vintage passenger ferries. It’s also possible to make shorter excursions out by boat and back by bus. The jetty is 750m beyond the Dalen Hotel. Dalen Trailing along the valley between steep forested hills, the sleepy little town of DALEN is a pleasant place in a pleasant setting, its string of modern houses somewhat reminiscent of small-town USA.

The hotel is about 2.5km south of the Breheimsenteret on Highway 604; the Glacier Bus from Sogndal passes close by. 930kr The Sognefjellsveg The mountain roads of Norway are some of the most melodramatic in Europe, but the wildest of them all is perhaps the Sognefjellsveg (Highway 55; sognefjellet.com), which runs the 110km from Skjolden, a dull little town at the head of the Lustrafjord, over to Lom. Despite the difficulty of the terrain, the Sognefjellsveg – which is closed from late October to May depending on conditions – marks the course of one of the oldest trading routes in Norway, with locals transporting goods by mule or, amazingly enough, on their shoulders: salt and fish went northeast, hides, butter, tar and iron went southwest. That portion of the road that clambers over the highest part of the mountains – no less than 1434m above sea level – was only completed in 1938 under a Great Depression “make-work” scheme, which kept a couple of hundred young men busy for two years.


pages: 79 words: 24,875

Are Trams Socialist?: Why Britain Has No Transport Policy by Christian Wolmar

active transport: walking or cycling, Beeching cuts, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, BRICs, congestion charging, Crossrail, Diane Coyle, driverless car, financial independence, full employment, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Network effects, railway mania, trade route, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, wikimedia commons, Zipcar

There are two key aspects of the Swiss system that underpin its success: it is based on cooperation rather than competition (the derogatory description would be ‘monopoly’) and it is a product of a highly decentralized political system where much decision making is made at the local level. Although it is difficult to imagine, Switzerland at the beginning of the twentieth century was a poor country and, while it was not a participant, suffered economically from both world wars as the country’s trading routes were disrupted. When the economy recovered after World War II, the priority was to ensure that transport facilities were developed quickly and it was seen as inefficient to create services that competed within or between modes. Unrestrained market forces are seen as wasteful. Transport services are mostly locally controlled and financed.


pages: 262 words: 73,439

Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise (Expertise: Cultures and Technologies of Knowledge) by Penny Harvey, Hannah Knox

BRICs, centre right, classic study, dematerialisation, informal economy, Kickstarter, land reform, new economy, the built environment, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, urban renewal

On Sundays Zlatter and Stambor would come down to the river from their haciendas, looking for gold and keen to hunt and fish. On one occasion they used dynamite to fish, but after the explosion only three small fish floated to the surface. The name Kimsa Challwa registered their petty failure. By now this was now a major trading route, with mule trains of up to two hundred animals bringing goods down from the Andes to service the miners who were flooding into the region. There was work loading and unloading the animals. Goods for the shops were winched across the river on pulley systems while the animals swam across below. However many things were brought in, there was never enough because there were so many people now living in the area.

The power of Kalinowski’s tale about his encounter with the Amarakaeri hinged on his shock at discovering an enduring connection between contemporary lowland Amazonia and the colonial highlands. This opaque reference to an enduring connection between Andean and Amazonian people beyond the better known trading routes and missionary incursions stands in stark contrast to more common renderings of this region of the Amazon forest as the home of peoples never before contacted by outsiders (Slater 2002).1 If Gupta and Ferguson encourage us to be attentive to rethinking difference through connection, Kalinowski’s story reminds us that not all histories of connection are equally legible.


pages: 327 words: 90,542

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril by Satyajit Das

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collaborative economy, colonial exploitation, computer age, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Emanuel Derman, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, geopolitical risk, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, margin call, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, PalmPilot, passive income, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Fry, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, the payments system, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

The relationship between the developed and emerging worlds is long, complex, and fraught with tension. Historically, the developing world was seen as a new frontier to be conquered. From the 1500s, the European powers expanded, acquiring land and new resources to complement the increasingly intensive exploitation of their homelands. Voyages of exploration and discovery opened up trade routes. Trading relationships evolved into colonial empires. Conquest of these often sophisticated countries was made possible by Europe's superior military power. This in turn was supported by superior industrial and scientific technologies, as well as highly evolved legal systems, property rights, politics, and systems of government.

By the nineteenth century, England, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Italy, France, and Germany had established major colonies in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, built upon what English naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace termed “the unblushing selfishness of the greatest civilized nations.”1 The objective was to strengthen economic and political power by controlling key resources and strategic trading routes, and to deny these advantages to sovereign rivals. Over time, the colonies came to resemble modern global supply chains. In a thoroughly contemporary twist, Britain even outsourced the management of its colonies to private interests, the British East India Company. Colonialism provided access to low-cost raw materials, fueling the growth and prosperity of the Old World.


pages: 334 words: 93,162

This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America by Ryan Grim

airport security, Alexander Shulgin, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Burning Man, crack epidemic, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, failed state, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, global supply chain, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, mandatory minimum, new economy, New Urbanism, Parents Music Resource Center, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, Tipper Gore, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, women in the workforce

But the act did come at a time when Americans readily gave up their civil liberties in the name of the war effort. The infamous Espionage Act was passed in 1917, banning “disloyal” speech and leading to the imprisonment of Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs. World War I affected the American drug market in other ways. First, the global conflagration disrupted drug trade routes and diminished supply. Second, prohibitionist sentiment merged with nationalist fervor to promote the idea that sobriety was a way to strengthen the nation. Xenophobia played a major role. Anything German was despised: sauerkraut was renamed Victory Cabbage, and beer fell out of favor. A 1918 New York Times editorial exemplified the nexus of the period’s antidrug and anti-German attitudes:Into well-known German brands of toothpaste and patent medicines—naturally for export only—habit-forming drugs were to be introduced; at first a little, then more, as the habit grew on the nonGerman victim and his system craved ever-greater quantities.

Donald Semesky, the DEA’s chief of financial operations, has noted that 90 percent of the 1.7 billion euros that were registered as having entered the United States in 2005 came through Latin America, “where drug cartels launder their European proceeds.” As the cocaine market has shifted, use along its new trade routes has grown. A UN report notes increases in use not only in South and Central America but also in Africa, where seizures jumped tenfold from 2003 to 2006 and then doubled again between 2006 and 2007. West African nations, which make Colombia and Mexico look like models of transparent governance, have become important stopping-off points for coke traffickers on the way to Europe.


pages: 322 words: 92,769

The Alps: A Human History From Hannibal to Heidi and Beyond by Stephen O'Shea

car-free, clockwork universe, Edward Snowden, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Large Hadron Collider, plutocrats, Snapchat, trade route

THE CHILLON CASTLE stands just offshore, perched on a rocky island the same color as its tawny fortifications. It is a multiturreted jewel, a small masterpiece sited in a place of scenic perfection. The castle’s landward walls are almost windowless, with watchtowers, sentry walks, and slits for archers that show its role as a jealous guardian of the Via Italica, the age-old trade route linking Burgundy with Lombardy by way of the nearby Great St. Bernard Pass. Lakeward, the façade is punctuated by graceful Gothic windows to take in the view long enjoyed by the ruling family of the region, who regularly summered at Chillon and held feasts in the four great halls of the castle.

Mozart gave his first concert here, at age six. We cross the Salzach and find our way to Steingasse. The baroque vanishes in favor of the medieval. This tiny, cobbled lane, once home to butchers, potters, and dyers (professions needing the waters of the nearby Salzach), also constituted the main trade route into and out of the city—a rather amazing reminder of how cramped urban life was in the Middle Ages. Today the lane is a quiet place, with children walking their bicycles into recessed doorways. A plaque indicates that Steingasse is the birthplace of Joseph Mohr, who in the early nineteenth century wrote the lyrics to the carol “Silent Night.”


pages: 378 words: 94,468

Drugs 2.0: The Web Revolution That's Changing How the World Gets High by Mike Power

air freight, Alexander Shulgin, banking crisis, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, drug harm reduction, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, fiat currency, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, frictionless, fulfillment center, Haight Ashbury, independent contractor, John Bercow, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Leonard Kleinrock, means of production, Menlo Park, moral panic, Mother of all demos, Network effects, nuclear paranoia, packet switching, pattern recognition, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, pre–internet, QR code, RAND corporation, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sexual politics, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, trade route, Whole Earth Catalog, Zimmermann PGP

Do not list anything related to pedophilia [sic].’ The site has Norwegians selling Cambodian mushrooms, Canadians selling Afghan heroin, and Brits selling concentrated cannabis tinctures from ancient Nepalese cannabis landraces grown under artificial sunlight in lofts that may well be in Basildon. Appropriately for a site named after a trade route that first brought these drugs to the West, there are also opiates, including opium, prescription morphine, and white and brown heroin from Afghanistan. Most of the products are illegal, but whether you want a quarter gram of heroin or a gram of glittering Peruvian escama de pescado cocaine, you’re in the right place, and there’s not a great deal the police or customs can do to stop you.

There’s high-grade kush marijuana, with enthusiastic recommendations from satisfied customers for one particular vendor, detailing how he vacuum-sealed and wrapped and triple-packed the highly fragrant goods into an envelope small enough to be posted through most standard letterboxes, negating the need to sign for the packets – or for the raising of any red flags at customs. That the strain is one of the world’s oldest and earliest genetic examples of the plant, brought to Europe and thence to the US along traditional trading routes, is an irony probably not lost on the Silk Road’s intelligently combative and articulate owner, who operates under the pseudonym Dread Pirate Roberts. Buying is a simple matter of adding the goods to your shopping cart, and paying for them. The money is held in an escrow account hosted at the site, and although you have to supply a delivery address, this can be encrypted, and is deleted as soon as you have received the goods.


pages: 342 words: 88,736

The Big Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural Crisis by Ruth Defries

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, Columbian Exchange, demographic transition, double helix, Easter island, European colonialism, food miles, Francisco Pizarro, gentleman farmer, Gregor Mendel, Haber-Bosch Process, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Jevons paradox, John Snow's cholera map, out of africa, planetary scale, premature optimization, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, social intelligence, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

The cells form the trade winds—so named for the routes they opened for exchange between the Old and New Worlds—on either side of the Equator. These engines of the trade winds are sometimes called the Hadley cells, a name honoring the English amateur meteorologist George Hadley, who noted the link between the rotating Earth and the trade routes of his era in 1735. The trade winds carried Columbus westward, where he landed in the Bahamas in October 1492. He returned via the northward loop of a Hadley cell that blows winds eastward toward Europe. The New World that Columbus opened to other conquistadors and explorers—Hernando Cortés, Francisco Pizarro, and Vasco Nuñez de Balboa—during the wind-powered Age of Discovery had little resemblance to the Old World.

In Search of the Soybean Soybeans, the third in the triumvirate of the industrializing agriculture of the Midwest in the early twentieth century, took another path. The Chinese first domesticated the bean in the northeastern part of China several thousand years ago, and it had gone on to become one of the sacred grains of Chinese civilization, along with rice, wheat, barley, and millet. Trade routes spread the bean throughout Asia, where miso, tempeh, and tofu, all produced from high-protein soy, became a cornerstone of nutrition in the region. Missionaries and scholars brought soybeans to Europe in the late sixteenth century and throughout the seventeenth, but the crop failed to take a prominent place in European agriculture.


A Second Chance by Jodi Taylor

Donald Trump, Eratosthenes, financial independence, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, out of africa, publish or perish, trade route

Using the big screen, I brought up such maps as we had been able to find. Plus a few artists’ impressions, just to give everyone an idea. ‘This is our objective – the city of Troy and its surrounding areas. Situated on the coast of north-west Turkey and flanked by the two rivers Simoeis and Scamander, Troy’s position on the major east/west trade routes and guarding the entrance to the Black Sea has ensured it has become the most important and richest city in this part of the world. Troy has accumulated massive wealth by collecting tributes and tolls and generally skimming everyone’s profits. ‘The ruling family is headed by King Priam. He has a large family, mostly sons, nineteen of whom are legitimate.

A breach of the rules of hospitality that should have resulted in both of them being returned to Menelaus with Priam’s compliments, apologies, and an invitation to dispose of them as he pleased. No, I was convinced the Trojan War was about money and power, not a queen, no matter how beautiful she might have been. Troy was the most important city in that part of the world, strategically placed to control the maritime trade routes of the time. Mycenae coveted that role. Hence Agamemnon’s move against them and the massive following he was able to muster. It was a power struggle. We would see this again with Rome and Carthage. I continued. ‘Doctor Black will be at Site A and Doctor Peterson at Site B. ‘Mr Roberts, you’ll be at Site A.


pages: 207 words: 27,556

DIY Kombucha: 60 Nourishing Homemade Tonics for Health and Happiness by Katherine Green, Rana Chang

clean water, trade route

It is brewed throughout Asia and Eastern Europe, and lore indicates that kombucha SCOBYs have been passed down within families and villages for countless generations. Thought to have made its first appearance during the Chinese Qin dynasty of the third century BC, kombucha had its first boom as trade routes extended into India and Russia. The energizing tea is said to have improved the vitality of long-marching armies, travelers, and traders. The elixir grew in popularity, and in AD 415, a Korean physician named Dr. Kombu reportedly brought it to Japan. Because cha is the Japanese word for tea, stories suggest that kombucha was named after this doctor, who treated Japanese emperor Inyoko with the invigorating drink.


pages: 1,118 words: 309,029

The Wars of Afghanistan by Peter Tomsen

airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, disinformation, drone strike, dual-use technology, facts on the ground, failed state, friendly fire, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, Internet Archive, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, plutocrats, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, trade route, union organizing, uranium enrichment, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The European imperial expansion followed maritime trade routes around Africa into Asia, obviating the potential revival of the age-old land-centered Eurasian trade corridors through Afghanistan. Instead of a crossroads of trans-Eurasian commerce, the Afghan highland became a battleground18 for neighboring larger powers—a role that it has continued to play into contemporary times. The Indian Mughals and Persian Safavids fought to dominate the Afghan highland separating their empires. Neither was willing to commit the resources necessary to establish a lasting presence, or to restore the centuries-old international trade routes. Both recruited Afghan mercenaries, the Persians from the Durrani and Ghilzai tribes in southern Afghanistan, the Mughals from the eastern Ghilzai tribes.

He then escalated tensions by blocking all trade routes across the Durand Line. The restriction cut off the centuries-old annual winter migration of over a million Afghan Pashtun nomads into Pakistan. More important, the Pakistani blockade severed Afghanistan’s main economic and trade corridors to the outside world. Daoud looked to Moscow for help. Soviet planes airlifted Afghanistan’s entire 1961 fruit crop to markets in the USSR and Eastern Europe. Afghanistan and the Soviet Union signed new transportation agreements to offset closed Afghan-Pakistani trade routes by constructing new roads to the northern Soviet-Afghan border.

The Huns, and then the Turks and Mongols, continued to invade Afghanistan over the next 1,300 years.7 In the first century A.D. the Kushans overran Afghanistan and built an empire based near Peshawar in the region of Gandhara. Kushan kings adopted Buddhism.8 Their empire profited from its location at the center of the Great Silk Road network of trade routes linking Han China to the Roman Empire. Caravans traversed Eurasia east to west, passing through the Afghan cities of Balkh, Kabul, Bamian, and Herat, and robust trade also moved along the north-south corridors linking Balkh, Kabul, Jalalabad, Peshawar, and Delhi. During the third to fifth centuries A.D., Buddhist missionaries traveling the Silk Road carved two giant Buddha statues into the soaring mountain cliffs of the Bamian Valley about 70 miles northwest of Kabul.


pages: 778 words: 227,196

The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, British Empire, Charles Babbage, Copley Medal, Dava Sobel, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Jenner, Etonian, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Harrison: Longitude, music of the spheres, placebo effect, polynesian navigation, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade route, unbiased observer, University of East Anglia, éminence grise

Here, it was said, lay a great West African metropolis, packed with treasures and glittering with towers and palaces roofed with gold. It was strategically situated astride the fabled river Niger, at the confluence of the Arabic and African trade routes. Beyond Timbuctoo, it was thought that the mysterious Niger might flow due eastwards, providing a trade route across the entire African continent, and eventually meeting up with the Nile in Egypt. But to the Europeans nothing was known for certain, though many speculative maps had been drawn by military cartographers, such as Major John Rennell’s ‘Sketch of the Northern Parts of Africa’, presented to the Association in 1790.

He was allowed to take along his best friend, his wife’s brother Dr Alexander Anderson, as a companion, and a young Edinburgh draughtsman, George Scott, as the expedition’s official artist. Banks had spent many months trying to organise this expedition, but as war with France continued, its raison d’être had clearly altered. It was now transformed from a geographical survey to that of an armed trading caravan, its main purpose to seek to establish a commercial trade route down the Niger. Banks had secretly sent the outline of a grand imperial ‘project’ to the President of the Board of Trade, the Earl of Liverpool, as early as June 1799. The Niger expedition would form just one small element in this strategy. ‘Should the undertaking be fully resolved upon, the first step of Government must be to secure to the British Throne, either by conquest or by Treaty, the whole of the Coast of Africa from Arguin to Sierra Leone…’ For a moment Banks had a heady vision of a vast, benign commercial empire stretching over the dark continent and bringing light and happiness in its wake: ‘I have little doubt that in a very few years a trading Company might be established under the immediate control of Government, who…would govern the Negroes far more mildly, and make them far more happy than they now are under the Tyranny of their arbitrary Princes…by converting them to the Christian Religion…and by effecting the greatest practicable diminution of the Slavery of mankind, upon the Principles of natural Justice and commercial Benefit.’

But equally, his intensely romantic attachment to his wife Allison did not prevent him from returning to the Niger, and the high likelihood of death. His agreement to lead an armed expedition, to accept a military commission and payment (and in effect a form of life insurance) from the Colonial Office, suggests a quite new kind of professionalism. So too does his acceptance of a commercial mission, to search for a ‘new trade route into the Sudan’, as well as his decision to learn Arabic before he set out. On his first trip he traded mostly in amber and cloth; on his second, in guns and gunpowder. Whether all this means that Mungo Park had consciously undertaken an ‘imperial’ mission in his second expedition remains ambiguous.


pages: 753 words: 233,306

Collapse by Jared Diamond

biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, California energy crisis, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Donner party, Easter island, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, job satisfaction, low interest rates, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megaproject, new economy, North Sea oil, Piper Alpha, polynesian navigation, prisoner's dilemma, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Stewart Brand, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, unemployed young men

Ironically, raising sheep in Greenland doesn't pay even in the short run: the government has to give each sheep-farming family about $14,000 each year to cover their losses, provide them with an income, and induce them to carry on with the sheep. The Inuit play a major role in the story of the demise of Viking Greenland. They constituted the biggest difference between the histories of the Greenland and Iceland Norse: while the Icelanders did enjoy the advantages of a less daunting climate and shorter trade routes to Norway compared to their Greenland brethren, the Icelanders' clearest advantage lay in not being threatened by the Inuit. At minimum, the Inuit represent a missed opportunity: the Greenland Vikings would have had a better chance of surviving if they had learned from or traded with the Inuit, but they didn't.

is the world's leading importer nation: we import many necessities (especially oil and some rare metals) and many consumer products (cars and consumer electronics), as well as being the world's leading importer of investment capital. We are also the world's leading exporter, particularly of food and of our own manufactured products. Our own society opted long ago to become interlocked with the rest of the world. That's why political instability anywhere in the world now affects us, our trade routes, and our overseas markets and suppliers. We are so dependent on the rest of the world that if, 30 years ago, you had asked a politician to name the countries most geopolitically irrelevant to our interests because of their being so remote, poor, and weak, the list would surely have begun with Afghanistan and Somalia, yet they subsequently became recognized as important enough to warrant our dispatching U.S. troops.

Two other overview papers by Weisler are "The settlement of marginal Polynesia: new evidence from Henderson Island" (Journal of Field Archaeology 21:83—102 (1994)) and "An archaeological survey of Mangareva: implications for regional settlement models and interaction studies" (Man and Culture and Oceania 12:61-85 (1996)). Four papers by Weisler explain how chemical analysis of basalt adzes can identify on what island the basalt was quarried, and thus can help trace out trade routes: "Provenance studies of Polynesian basalt adzes material: a review and suggestions for improving regional databases" (Asian Perspectives 32:61-83 (1993)); "Basalt pb isotope analysis and the prehistoric settlement of Polynesia," coauthored with Jon D. Whitehead (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA 92:1881-1885 (1995)); "Interisland and interarchipelago transfer of stone tools in prehistoric Polynesia," coauthored with Patrick V.


The Rough Guide to Jerusalem by Daniel Jacobs

centre right, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, Frank Gehry, gentrification, haute cuisine, Khartoum Gordon, low cost airline, Mount Scopus, Skype, Suez canal 1869, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban planning, Wall-E

Later referred to as Jebus (Judges 19:10), the city is first called “Yerushalayim” (Jerusalem) when David brings Goliath’s head here in I Samuel 17:54. The name may be a corruption of Ir Shalem (“City of Salem”, Salem being the city’s Canaanite patron god, and presumably Melchizedek’s “most high God”). Whatever the origins of its name, the site has been settled since the early Bronze Age, around 2600 BC, but as it wasn’t on a trade route its importance was always more strategic than commercial. Ancient Jerusalem receives its first documentation on “execration texts” (lists of Egypt’s enemies and rebellious vassal states, inscribed in hieroglyphics on bowls and figurines which were then broken) dating from the nineteenth century BC.

The revelation which prompted the change of the qibla (direction of prayer) is set out in the second sura of the Koran, which established the Ka’aba in Mecca (Saudi Arabia) as the religious centre to which all Muslims have turned in prayer ever since. Mohammed claimed Abraham and his son Ishmael (Isma’il in Arabic) as founders of the Ka’aba and of Arabian monotheism, thus predating and independent of both Judaism and Christianity. Mohammed was born in 571 AD in Mecca and worked for a merchant for whom he travelled along trade routes as far north as Damascus. He met Jews and Christians, and it may be that their religions inspired him to reject Arab polytheism in favour of a single God. But the new monotheistic faith that Mohammed introduced into his native city of Mecca met with opposition and persecution so that, in 622 AD, he and his followers were forced to flee to Medina.

A collection of scholarly articles by eminent Israeli archeologists, covering excavations across the Old City, with the emphasis on what they reveal about daily life in Jerusalem during biblical and postbiblical times. History Meir Ben-Dov Historical Atlas of Jerusalem. Lots of photos, maps and detailed plans accompany this historical description of Jerusalem from Jebusite times to the present, which not only discusses the city itself, but also shows how it fitted in with regional politics and trade routes at different times in its history. Meron Benvenisti City of Stone: the Hidden History of Jerusalem. A well-balanced account of Jerusalem’s history – and most especially its modern history – by an Israeli former deputy mayor of the city. 05 Jerusalem contexts 265-290.indd 285 | Books K.J. Asali (ed) Jerusalem in History.


pages: 1,243 words: 167,097

One Day in August: Ian Fleming, Enigma, and the Deadly Raid on Dieppe by David O’keefe

anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, card file, Charles Babbage, computer age, conceptual framework, friendly fire, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Suez canal 1869, trade route, trickle-down economics

Due to a combination of factors, all exacerbated by the Bletchley code-breakers’ sudden inability to read the German messages and locate enemy submarines before they attacked, merchant shipping losses in the Atlantic suddenly skyrocketed, seriously threatening Britain’s vital oceanic supply and trade routes. There was near panic in some circles over the perceived threat to the Allies’ command of the vital sea lanes essential to ultimate victory in the war. Fortunately for the Allies, when the Germans introduced their updated four-rotor Enigma, they possessed only enough of these machines to equip their Atlantic fleet, leaving for the moment all the other areas of operation – the Mediterranean Sea, the Baltic, Norway and the German home waters – with the three-rotor machine and still vulnerable to Bletchley’s code-breaking skills.

Although it was questionable that Hitler would reach this target, Churchill, the chiefs of staff, the Admiralty and the NID were nonetheless all deeply worried. Submarines, however, were not the only problem. The Germans also possessed a small but potent surface raiding fleet that posed a major threat to Great Britain’s Atlantic trading routes, even though it was not yet large enough to rival the Royal Navy ship for ship. Admiral Erich Raeder, the head of the Kriegsmarine, was no fool: he had nothing like the Kaiser’s Grand Fleet of the earlier war, but he knew that merely maintaining a ‘fleet in being’ to make periodic convoy raids would do more to tie up British resources than actually engaging in a traditional Götterdämmerung-style showdown with the Royal Navy.

The cryptanalysts had dug up a series of out-of-date decrypts from April, and although the first messages did not reveal anything overt, on May 21, Bletchley Park sent the following message to the OIC: ‘Bismarck embarked five prize crews with necessary charts at the end of April and been carrying out practices in the Baltic with Prinz Eugen.’11 The Operational Intelligence Centre responded immediately: ‘prize crews’ used for manning captured merchant ships plus requests for charts of the North Atlantic could mean only one thing. It informed Admiral John Tovey, the Commander-in-Chief of the Home Fleet, that ‘it is evident that these ships intend to carry out a raid on trade routes.’12 With the original message so far in the past, Tovey initially regarded the OIC’s interpretation with some suspicion, thinking that the Bismarck might be sortieing for a ‘winner takes all’ showdown with the British ships. However, based on the accumulating evidence, Tovey accepted the OIC’s breakout theory.


pages: 632 words: 163,143

The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth by Michael Spitzer

Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, Asperger Syndrome, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, Douglas Hofstadter, East Village, Ford Model T, gamification, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hive mind, horn antenna, HyperCard, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, language acquisition, loose coupling, mandelbrot fractal, means of production, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, out of africa, planetary scale, power law, randomized controlled trial, Snapchat, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, talking drums, technological singularity, TED Talk, theory of mind, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, Yom Kippur War

We hear this ‘Orientalism’ (Edward Said’s term – see chapter 2) in Mozart’s flirtation with Turkish marching bands (see the Rondo alla Turca from his Piano Sonata no. 11 in A major, K. 331), and the Moorish sighs of the Spanish guitar. This love affair began in ancient Egypt. Figure 6.1 Animal musicians in a Dynasty 19 papyrus Egypt’s relationship with ‘the Orient’ was part of a system of exchanges spanning most of Asia. Much later, this system would coalesce into a network of trade routes, stretching from China to the Mediterranean, called the Silk Roads. We will explore the musical Silk Road in Chapter 7. The point to stress now is that the traditional Euro-centric view of ancient music, fostered by our obsession with classical Greece and Rome, is way out of kilter. Its true centre of gravity was Asia Minor.

The West had polyphony (with notes and notation). Islam had ornament. India pursued taste. And China’s power was colour or timbre. Far from standing in stately isolation, these giants of ancient music bumped, jostled and blended. And cultural blood flowed between them through the arteries of the Silk Road, the system of trade routes stretching from the steppes of Central Asia to the Mediterranean and North Africa, from China to Rome. The Silk Road continues to fascinate because it shunts the spotlight of history from Europe to Eurasia. As Peter Frankopan has observed, if ever there was a misnomer, it was the word ‘Medi-terranean’, the ‘centre of the Earth’.95 By the same token, all roads nowadays lead to China.96 The Silk Road was also a musical superhighway for melodies, scales and modes, instruments and performance techniques.

Mendieta goes on to confess that their pieces ‘have been adjudged superior works of art when shown to Spanish masters of composition. Indeed the Spanish masters often thought they could not have been written by Indians.’ Across the opposite hemisphere, precisely the same conversion was being effected at Manila in the Philippines, Spain’s transpacific entrepôt in the trade route between America and Asia. Ships from Mexico conveyed not just musical manuscripts and musical instruments (organs, guitars, harps and bandurrias), but the skilled craftsmen who built them. Intramuros, Manila’s walled city centre, contained the thickest concentration of convents and churches anywhere in the world, and these interiors resounded with sacred music performed in Latin by Filipino singers.


pages: 535 words: 167,111

An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan by Jason Elliot

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, clean water, Easter island, Eratosthenes, trade route

Alexander founded a number of important cities in Afghanistan along his bloody route to India, but Kabul does not seem to have been one of them. The closest of Alexander’s cities to Kabul, Alexandria-ad-Caucasum, lies in a similarly contested site near the junction of the Panjshīr and Kabul rivers about fifty miles north of Kabul, next to the modern town of Jebel as-Serāj. Kabul itself lay off the main trade routes and became the seat of power in Afghanistan only in the sixteenth century. Certainly Greek rulers squabbled over control of the Kabul valley and beyond after Alexander’s departure, and the names on the coins they minted are resoundingly Greek: Diodotus, Antimachus, Demetrius, Menander, Hippostratus, Straton.

There would be collection sites in every town with seed and livestock bonuses for the first comers. Word would quickly get around that money was available and the guns could be gathered up by the truckload; soon even the most corrupt commanders would be robbed of their very armies; Pakistan would be forced to give up its old dream of manipulating the trade routes to central Asia through Afghanistan, and the general population could begin the task of rebuilding their shattered land. All that was needed was to establish the taste of peace. A hundred million dollars would do it: the budget of the latest Hollywood blockbuster … * * * After the mountains, Faizābād seemed like a place of high civilization; yet against it, Kabul was a megalopolis.

Every day and night the opposing armies writhed snake-like in combat along the southern front, winning and losing pockets of territory in the fight for the capital. It was a crucial time. Rocket and artillery fire fell in the streets with the same terrifying unpredictability, and the level of hardship grew. The nights were steadily colder. Disruption of the usual trade routes to the north and south meant firewood was in short supply, and the cost of alternative fuel was increasingly beyond the reach of ordinary families. One morning, as we were sitting in the house reading and writing, we heard five thumps in succession from the hills to the south. Tim began to count and we moved away from the window.


pages: 356 words: 103,944

The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy by Dani Rodrik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, full employment, George Akerlof, guest worker program, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Multi Fibre Arrangement, night-watchman state, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Paul Samuelson, precautionary principle, price stability, profit maximization, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, tulip mania, Washington Consensus, World Values Survey

The territorial control of the company did not end for some two hundred years, until 1870, at which point the company turned possession of Rupert’s Land over to the Dominion of Canada in exchange for £300,000 ($34 million in today’s money).6 The Canadian fur trade was comparatively small and the Hudson’s Bay Company no more than a footnote in the extensive mercantile system of long-distance trade of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The major trade routes lay elsewhere. There was of course the infamous Atlantic triangular trade, which carried slaves to the Americas in exchange for sugar, cotton, and tobacco (with the Europe-Africa leg providing an important connecting link). There was also the ever important trade with India and Southeast Asia, which could now bypass Venetian and Muslim intermediaries thanks to Vasco da Gama’s passage of the Cape of Good Hope in 1497–98.

oid=134655&sn=Detail. 37 Alexander Hamilton, Report on Manufactures, Communication to the House of Representatives, December 5, 1791. 9. The Political Trilemma of the World Economy 1 See the interview with Domingo Cavallo at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/ shared/pdf/int_domingocavallo.pdf. 2 This account draws on Dani Rodrik, “Reform in Argentina, Take Two: Trade Rout,” The New Republic, January 14, 2002, pp. 13–15. 3 Cavallo would later argue that the true culprit was loose fiscal policy in the years preceding the crisis. See the interview cited in note 1. From a narrow economic perspective, he may well be right. With enough fiscal austerity, price deflation, and belt-tightening, the Argentine economy would have been able to service external debts and maintain financial market confidence.


pages: 393 words: 91,257

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, company town, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, deplatforming, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guest worker program, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job polarisation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, life extension, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Occupy movement, Parag Khanna, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Satyajit Das, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, technological determinism, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population, Y Combinator

Where class privilege remained in place over a shifting base, particularly in France, the Third Estate rose up in a violent assault on the last vestiges of feudalism.1 The entrepreneurs who chipped away at the feudal order did not generally come from the nobility, who in some cases were prohibited or socially discouraged from engaging in commerce.2 Aristocratic elites did sometimes give valuable funding and sponsorship to entrepreneurs, many of whom were from groups that had long been persecuted, including itinerant workers and dissenting Protestants, as well as Jews.3 These commercial risk takers played a major part in creating our modern world, as their technological improvements, opening of trade routes, and building of cities ushered in an era of unprecedented economic growth.4 Liberal capitalism laid the basis for Western economic hegemony. In the year 1000, the gross product of China and of India each easily exceeded that of all western Europe combined, and the same was true of the Islamic empire.

But the large numbers of slaves brought in as the empire grew displaced many self-sufficient farmers and artisans, who then became dependent on the public provision of bread for sustenance. The best advice for Romans, said Juvenal, was to emigrate from the Eternal City.12 Urban culture deteriorated after the empire collapsed, and especially after the Muslim conquests and incursions cut off lucrative trade routes.13 Cities turned into fortresses where barbarian chieftains and ecclesiastical authorities could live sheltered behind protective walls. But for centuries these fortress-towns were peripheral to the lives of most people: barely 5 percent of the medieval European population lived in cities. As commerce quickened again in the later Middle Ages and a substantial merchant class emerged, city walls were extended to include growing populations.14 During the Early Modern era, cities became generators of prosperity again.


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The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties That Helped Create Modern China by Jonathan Kaufman

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, company town, cotton gin, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, gentleman farmer, Great Leap Forward, Honoré de Balzac, indoor plumbing, joint-stock company, life extension, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, rent control, Steve Jobs, trade route

The defining issue of his life—his flight from Baghdad—had been triggered by his misreading the politics of Baghdad and believing the sultan would side with him against Baghdad’s rulers. He was determined that he and his family would never make that mistake again. David arrived in India at a fortunate time. The expanding British Empire wasn’t opening just trade routes, it was opening the British mind. Britain itself remained a stratified society, with clubs and landed aristocrats looking down on “outsiders.” But business and politics were displaying more tolerance. In India, the British needed ambitious entrepreneurs to extend trade to the frontiers of a growing empire.

Jardine relied on its long-established network of smugglers and corrupt Chinese officials. But with the opium trade now legalized, Elias saw a more efficient—and cheaper—way to reach customers. He negotiated with the Chaozhou, a Chinese minority group that had settled near the China coast but had contacts along trade routes throughout China. In return for a share of the profits, the Chaozhou sold the Sassoons’ opium to other Chinese. To undercut Jardine and other dealers, the Sassoons sometimes sold their opium at discount or lent money to Chinese opium shops. The Chaozhou profited enormously from working with the Sassoons.


pages: 320 words: 95,629

Decoding the World: A Roadmap for the Questioner by Po Bronson

23andMe, 3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, altcoin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, edge city, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eyjafjallajökull, factory automation, fake news, financial independence, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, income inequality, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Mars Rover, mass immigration, McMansion, means of production, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, power law, quantum entanglement, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, trade route, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

Good ultramarine was more expensive than gold. During the Renaissance, using lots of ultramarine was mandated in artists’ contracts. Blue became a highly desired color. To satisfy the desire for blue apparel, trade routes with India were established to import plant indigo. Both Germany and England banned indigo, to protect their inferior woad industries until they could set up their own trade routes. The history of indigo is a history of exploitation of the global south by wealthier countries. In the 1800s, the British convinced Bengali farmers to grow indigo instead of food; they loaned the farmers money, but paid the farmers only 2.5 percent of the market value of the indigo, so these farmers lived in permanent debt, which was inherited by their children.


Lonely Planet Mexico by John Noble, Kate Armstrong, Greg Benchwick, Nate Cavalieri, Gregor Clark, John Hecht, Beth Kohn, Emily Matchar, Freda Moon, Ellee Thalheimer

AltaVista, Bartolomé de las Casas, Burning Man, call centre, clean water, colonial rule, company town, Day of the Dead, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, informal economy, language acquisition, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, New Urbanism, off grid, off-the-grid, place-making, Rosa Parks, Rubik’s Cube, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, traffic fines, urban sprawl, wage slave

With their odd mix of brutality and bravery, gold lust and piety, the Spanish conquistadors of the Americas were the natural successors to the crusading knights of the Reconquista. * * * The Broken Spears: Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico, edited by Miguel Leon-Portilla, is a rare piece of history from the losers’ point of view. * * * Spain’s Atlantic location placed it perfectly to lead the search for new westward trade routes to the spice-rich Orient. Its explorers, soldiers and colonists landed first in the Caribbean, establishing bases on the islands of Hispaniola and Cuba where they quickly put the local populations to work mining gold and raising crops and livestock. The Spanish then began seeking a passage through the land mass to their west, and soon became distracted by tales of gold, silver and a rich empire there.

Within a century they become the most powerful tribe in the Valle de México, going on to rule an empire extending over nearly all of central Mexico. 1487 Twenty thousand human captives are sacrificed for the dedication of Tenochtitlan’s Great Temple. 1492 Christopher Columbus, searching for a new trade route from Spain to the Orient, comes across the Bahamas, Cuba and Hispaniola. In the following years further Spanish expeditions explore the Caribbean and found settlements there. 1519–20 A Spanish expedition from Cuba, under Hernán Cortés, makes its way to the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán. Initially well-received, the Spaniards are attacked and driven out on the ‘Noche Triste’ (Sad Night), June 30, 1520. 1521 The Spanish, with 100,000 native Mexican allies, take three months to finally capture Tenochtitlán, razing it building by building.

Outlying Paquimé settlements, such as Cuarenta Casas and Cueva Grande, built their dwellings on cliffsides for protection against attack. Colonial times brought Spaniards to find and mine precious metals and save indigenous souls. Known as Nueva Vizcaya, the region sat astride the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro (Royal Road of the Interior), a 2560km trade route from Mexico City to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Chihuahua became a frontier state with Mexico’s loss of Texas and New Mexico in the 1830s, ’40s and ’50s. Like neighboring Sonora and Coahuila, Chihuahua and Durango states were prime movers in the Mexican Revolution of 1910–20. Unrest in the mines and the inequities of land ownership contributed to this, and the revolutionary División del Norte, an army led by legendary Durango-born Pancho Villa, was in the forefront of several major battles.


pages: 1,060 words: 265,296

Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David S. Landes

Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bartolomé de las Casas, book value, British Empire, business cycle, Cape to Cairo, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, computer age, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial intermediation, Francisco Pizarro, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, Index librorum prohibitorum, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, land tenure, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Murano, Venice glass, new economy, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, out of africa, passive investing, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, Robert Solow, Savings and loan crisis, Scramble for Africa, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

The clerics did leave their parish­ ioners some newly composed prayers for protection by the Almighty, but the altar was not a g o o d refuge, for the Vikings knew where the plunder lay and headed straight for churches and casdes. Also coming from the sea, across the Mediterranean, were Saracens (Moors), who set up mountain bases in the Alps and on the Côte d'Azur, and went out from these to raid the trade routes between northern and southern Europe. These fastnesses, hard of access and yet linked to Muslim lands by the sea, were inexpugnable, and folk legend has it that to this day some villagers in the high Alps carry the color and appearance o f their Maghrébin origins. Finally, from the east overland, but highly mobile for all that, rode the Magyars or Hungarians, one more wave of invaders from Asia, pa­ gans speaking a Ural-Altaic language (a distant cousin of Turkish), sweeping in year after year, choosing their targets by news of European dissensions and dynastic troubles, swift enough to move in a single campaign from their Danubian bases into eastern France or the foot of Italy.

In the course of all this, the Dutch simply threw the Portuguese out of the Spice Islands, the original point of the ex­ ercise. Portugal's day had come and gone, but pride thrives on re­ verses, and they clung to what they could. Thus they held Goa until 1961 (long after it had lost wealth and commercial importance), when 2 TRADE ROUTES IN THE EASTERN SEAS This regional (country) trade flourished well before the Europeans arrived in the sixteenth century. 130 T H E W E A L T H AND POVERTY OF NATIONS a far stronger Indian government marched in and took it over, with­ out provocation or pretext. N o self-respecting independent country could live with such a colonial boil on its flank.

.* This the Portuguese did by purchase or seizure, compensating by force for the obstacles that Muslim mer­ chants put in their way. In the early decades, these measures garnered a large share o f the trade. At the peak, some 4 0 percent of the pepper imported into Europe was going around the Cape of G o o d H o p e , and the Venetians were hurting. But with time, the older trade routes reasserted themselves. The direct Portuguese share fell back to about 20 percent, still important but no longer dominant. In 1570, the Por­ tuguese crown gave up its monopoly of the trade between Lisbon and the east (Goa). The king ceased to be a merchant and instead sold concessions, frequently to foreign traders.


pages: 897 words: 242,580

The Temporal Void by Peter F. Hamilton

corporate governance, dark matter, forensic accounting, linked data, megacity, place-making, trade route

‘Lady, we’ve got him,’ Boyd told the others, giving them a broad thumbs up. ‘What do you mean?’ Chae asked. ‘He’s come to gloat,’ Edeard told him. His own farsight showed him the squads from Bellis and Neph hurrying through Pholas Park. As expected, they had already crossed into Sampalok via the bridge over Trade Route Canal, which put them a lot closer to the hideaway than Edeard. They’d arrive a good ten minutes early. ‘What are you thinking?’ Kanseen asked shrewdly. Edeard halted the squads, and beckoned Felax forward. He handed an envelope over to the young probationary constable. ‘I want you to go directly to the house in Whitemire Street and deliver this to the sergeants from the other squads.’

Quite a few farming families have arrived in the city since New Year. I spoke with some of them; they were forced off their land.’ ‘I know.’ ‘He will come back.’ ‘Thank you, Edeard. You’re a lovely man.’ After the meal they settled down to read a book Jessile had brought. Kadril’s Voyage, which told of the legendary merchantmen captain who’d opened up the trade route to the south, finding a navigable route through the Straits of Gathsawal. Edeard enjoyed the tales of ocean life and fights against pirates, even though he suspected the author had enlivened the tales somewhat. They took it in turns to read to each other, slowly sipping red wine as the coal in the stove hissed and snapped.

Take them out one at a time.’ ‘You might be right,’ Edeard said. He wasn’t sure. The size and animosity of the response had caught him off guard. But then Sampalok residents always had a chip on their shoulder, it wouldn’t take much to rile them. He went over to the watcher crew at the end of the concourse next to Trade Route Canal to find out which of the Hundred was nearby. Before he’d even spoken to anyone the sergeant at the middle bridge into High Moat was longtalking that the crowd was rampaging along the streets, breaking into shops and businesses. Looting had begun. Edeard’s farsight flicked over to the area, sensing a deluge of anger and glee.


pages: 768 words: 252,874

A History of Judaism by Martin Goodman

British Empire, classic study, deep learning, liberation theology, mass immigration, place-making, spice trade, the market place, trade route, wikimedia commons, Yom Kippur War

The urbanization of Mesopotamia, a process dependent on both the region’s fertility and development of irrigation systems, long predated the birth of Abraham in Ur, whatever date might be assigned to this event – the internal chronology of the Bible places his birth in the first half of the second millennium BCE, but this chronology is highly unlikely to have been based on any firm ground. An extensive network of trade routes across the fertile crescent in the second millennium BCE provides the background to the stories of his migration to Canaan. The stability of the kingdom of Egypt through the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, in the second half of the same millennium, with foreign policy dedicated to expansion to the north, explains the centrality of Egypt in the narratives of Israelite patriarchs and the exodus.

The connection of intellectual talmudic scholarship to the practical concerns of European Jews was facilitated by a new role for individual rabbis as local communal arbitrators in Jewish communities in the Rhineland and in France from the eleventh century. As commercial practices grew more complex in new settlements of Jews in urban centres along the great trade routes of northern Europe, communal legislation by appointed or elected representatives and the authority of rich merchants as lay communal leaders sometimes proved insufficient for the resolution of internal disputes between Jews, and communities turned instead to rabbis as experts in Jewish law. The selection of a rav, the title used from the second part of the eleventh century to refer to the rabbi of a city, seems to have been by consensus of lay leaders rather than any formal procedure.

More ambivalent as a source of moral authority was recognition of a rabbinic appointment by the Christian state, as in the appointment in 1270 by the king of Naples and Sicily of ‘Maborach Fadalchassem the Jew, inhabitant of Palermo, our faithful who has been elected by you in order to exercise the priestship in your synagogue, to slaughter in your butchery and to hold the notary’s seal among you’.1 Diversity encouraged by such local rabbinic jurisdiction was counter-balanced by thriving interregional contacts along trade routes across the Mediterranean and along the great rivers and old Roman roads of Europe. Local rabbis sought advice in difficult cases from more learned colleagues. In any one region there was often just one rabbinic sage widely recognized as the ‘leader of his generation’. Books travelled through the copying of manuscripts, of which increasing numbers have been preserved in European collections amassed from the twelfth century onwards.


pages: 201 words: 33,620

Lonely Planet's Best in Travel 2020 by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, bike sharing, car-free, carbon footprint, Easter island, food desert, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), off-the-grid, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, sustainable-tourism, trade route

High-speed rail services connect Guiyang and a handful of smaller cities to neighbouring Yunnan, Guangxi and Sichuan and further afield in China. Regional bus and train services help you get around; hiring a driver is recommended to reach some of the provincew’s most rural areas and small villages. TELL ME MORE… Remote Guizhou is largely unknown to modern travellers, though it was once a main artery on the Tea-Horse Road trading route between ancient China and the Tibetan plateau. Guizhou stayed secreted away, its tiny wooden villages left untouched in the province’s signature misty mountains. Change began a few years ago, when impoverished Guizhou became a technological destination of choice – such companies as Apple, Huawei and Tencent began moving in to take advantage of the province’s cool year- round climate for big data storage.


pages: 349 words: 109,304

American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road by Nick Bilton

bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, crack epidemic, Edward Snowden, fake news, gentrification, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, Ross Ulbricht, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Ted Kaczynski, the market place, trade route, Travis Kalanick, white picket fence, WikiLeaks

There were not “hundreds of open cases” on the Silk Road, as his training officer had claimed. There were none. Jared thought for a moment and then decided to go to the next-best technology that any seasoned government official uses to search for something important: Google. The first few results were historical Web sites referencing the ancient trade route between China and the Mediterranean. But halfway down the page he saw a link to an article from early June of that year on Gawker, a news and gossip blog, proclaiming that the Silk Road was “the underground website where you can buy any drug imaginable.” The blog post showed screenshots of a Web page with a green camel logo in the corner.

A vile and putrid prison system kept those people locked away; lives destroyed because the government wanted to tell people what they could and could not do with their own bodies. This new Web site he was working on could change that. Coming up with a name for his store was a challenge, but he finally settled on the Silk Road, a title borrowed from the ancient Chinese trade route of the Han dynasty. The biggest challenge now was finding the time to actually work on the project, given that he was still involved with Good Wagon Books and had even taken over most of the operation. Still, he had hired a couple of employees to do most of the book work, so Ross could hole up in his messy bedroom and toil away on the site, work that was difficult, even for someone as capable as Ross.


pages: 482 words: 106,041

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

British Empire, carbon-based life, company town, conceptual framework, coronavirus, invention of radio, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, optical character recognition, out of africa, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, the High Line, trade route, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche

Again, Tsavo was emptied. Again, in the absence of humans, it filled with animals. Sandpaper trees laden with yellow saucerberries overgrew the World War I battlefields, hosting families of baboons. In 1948, stating that people had no other use for it, the Crown declared Tsavo, one of human history’s busiest trade routes, a wilderness refuge. Two decades later, its elephant population was 45,000—one of Africa’s biggest. That, however, was not to last. As the white single-engine Cessna takes off, one of the Earth’s most incongruous sights unfolds beneath its wings. The wide savanna below is Nairobi National Park, where elands, Thomson’s gazelles, cape buffalo, hartebeest, ostriches, white-bellied bustards, giraffes, and lions live jammed against a wall of blocky high-rises.

In the opposite direction, until recent improvements halved travel time, the rutted road southwest from Flores took three miserable hours, ending at the scruffy outpost of Sayaxché, where an army machine gun placement perched atop a Mayan pyramid. Sayaxché is on the Río Pasión—the Passion River—which lolls through the western Petén province to the confluence of the rivers Usamacinta and Salinas, together forming Guatemala’s border with Mexico. The Pasión was once a major trade route for jade, fine pottery, quetzal feathers, and jaguar skins. More recently, commerce includes contraband mahogany and cedar logs, opium from Guatemalan highland poppies, and looted Mayan artifacts. During the early 1990s, motor-driven wooden launches on a sluggish Pasión tributary, the Riochuelo Petexbatún, also carried quantities of two modest items that in the Petén are veritable luxuries: corrugated zinc roofing and cases of Spam.


pages: 332 words: 106,197

The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions by Jason Hickel

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Attenborough, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, degrowth, dematerialisation, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, European colonialism, falling living standards, financial deregulation, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Howard Zinn, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, James Watt: steam engine, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land value tax, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, Mahatma Gandhi, Money creation, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration

Originally, imperialism had been organised around direct, coercive appropriation of wealth. In some cases – as with the Spanish and Portuguese in the Americas – it focused on stealing precious metals such as gold and silver or on the use of slavery on plantations and in mines. In other cases its goal was securing access to trade routes, as with the French in Canada and the Dutch in South Africa. In all cases, the basic idea was to gain access to existing sources and flows of wealth. But when England got involved in the imperial project, the logic of imperialism changed. And it started in Ireland. In 1585, English colonisers made their first attempt at reproducing the new system of enclosure and ‘improvement’ in a foreign territory.

There, the process of enclosure and improvement in the late 19th century led to human suffering on a scale that outstripped that visited on both the Irish and indigenous North Americans, if such tragedies can be compared. It is a story that truly boggles the mind, although it is very little known. The colonisation of India began in the early 1600s as a corporate affair. It was led by the East India Company, which focused on securing control over trading routes east of the Cape of Good Hope. But the Company’s mandate gradually expanded, and by the 1800s it had established direct administrative power over most of the subcontinent, which it eventually handed over to the British government. Wielding this power, the main intervention that the British made in India was to reorganise the farming system, once again according to the logic of improvement.


pages: 399 words: 107,138

Alexandria: The Quest for the Lost City by Edmund Richardson

Khyber Pass, trade route

He was outraged when the East India Company’s spymaster did not believe him and (as the spymaster wearily recorded in his own report) ‘laments that he should not be believed in all that he writes, whereas if a sahib filled his situation, everything he wrote would be received as Gospel’.45 Karamat Ali’s rapid downward spiral had an unexpected side effect. Masson’s gossipy letters to Pottinger became the best intelligence the East India Company had coming out of Afghanistan. Early 1834 found Masson in Bimaran, a tiny, tumbledown village of twenty houses built on an ancient trading route, about ninety miles from Kabul.46 Five gigantic artificial mounds towered over the village. Masson now knew that they were Buddhist sites. In fact, the mounds were ruined stupas: huge domes, built of brick and earth, which contained sacred relics. For centuries, when Afghanistan was a Buddhist country, the stupas were sites of devotion.

‘You have laid before me the rocks which endanger every movement,’ Burnes thanked Masson, ‘and so foul is the path that I much fear, with such a beacon, I shall yet be involved in great embarrassments.’42 ‘I shall,’ Burnes reported to Macnaghten, ‘owe much to Mr Masson, whose high literary attainments, long residence in this country, and accurate knowledge of people and events, afford me, at every step, the means of coming to a judgment more correct than, in an abrupt transition to Kabul, I could have possibly formed.’43 Dost Mohammad was tired of sleeping with one eye open. He wanted to be free from the threat of invasion from Persia and from Ranjit Singh. He also wanted Ranjit Singh to hand over Peshawar, the city which commanded the Khyber Pass and the trade routes from India to Afghanistan. Ranjit Singh had captured it from one of Dost Mohammad’s brothers in 1834. ‘I had and have a great desire to make friendship with the British government,’ Dost Mohammad wrote to Burnes, ‘and to drive the Sikhs from Peshawar through the advice of that government.’44 There was, unfortunately, a considerable snag.


pages: 619 words: 177,548

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

Now he was looking for his next big adventure, preferably one that would strike a blow against France’s public enemy number one, the British Empire. Realizing that French naval forces were too weak to support an invasion of Britain itself, Napoleon proposed instead to undermine British interests in the Middle East and open new trade routes to Asia. Besides, as he put it to a colleague, “We must go to the Orient; all great glory has always been acquired there.” The “Orient” was a stage upon which the European ambitions could be played out. Invading Egypt would, in Napoleon’s condescending view, help Egyptians modernize (or at the very least, this provided a good excuse).

Armed with their statements of support, Lesseps paid one of his regular visits to the prime minister, Lord Palmerston. Disappointingly, however, Palmerston was consistently not well disposed to the canal, which he saw as continuing the Napoleonic tradition of trying to cut Britain out of lucrative global trade routes. The British government remained deeply skeptical and worked hard to throw up obstacles in Cairo, Constantinople, and anywhere else it had influence. Undeterred, in October 1858, after two years of intense publicity, Lesseps was finally ready to sell stock. Lesseps resolved to get as many investors as possible directly involved, bypassing all intermediaries.

But this seems strange as a general proposition, given that England and other parts of the British Isles were an economic backwater at least until the sixteenth century. For thousands of years, most European prosperity remained concentrated around the Mediterranean basin. Even when the Age of Discovery opened trade routes through the Atlantic, Britain remained significantly behind Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands in benefiting from new colonial opportunities. As we discussed in Chapter 4, from the Norman Conquest in 1066 until the early 1500s, England was a feudal system. The king was strong, and the barons were periodically troublesome, particularly when control of the throne was in question.


pages: 127 words: 39,771

The Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Clason

the market place, trade route

One naturally pictures such a wealthy city as located in a suitable setting of tropical luxury, surrounded by rich natural resources of forests, and mines. Such was not the case. It was located beside the Euphrates River, in a flat, arid valley. It had no forests, no mines — not even stone for building. It was not even located upon a natural trade-route. The rainfall was insufficient to raise crops. Babylon is an outstanding example of man’s ability to achieve great objectives, using whatever means are at his disposal. All of the resources supporting this large city were man-developed. All of its riches were man-made. Babylon possessed just two natural resources — a fertile soil and water in the river.


pages: 437 words: 115,594

The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World by Steven Radelet

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, business climate, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, colonial rule, creative destruction, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, export processing zone, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, megacity, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, off grid, oil shock, out of africa, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, women in the workforce, working poor

Over this border, “shipping” does not happen by ships, trucks, carts, or even donkeys. Most of it happens on the backs of Sherpas. Distance is measured in the number of days walked. When I arrived at the river, the bridge had been washed out, so people were crossing by jumping from one rock to the next. It was a busy—if tiny—international trade route. A continuous stream of Sherpas appeared out of nowhere on the Tibet side with huge loads of consumer goods on their backs—shoes, clothing, soap, matches—all manufactured in China, transported across the country and through Tibet, and carried by foot into Nepal. As the Sherpas made their way across the rocks, they had to take care to not bump into the Sherpas coming the other way, carrying loads of rice, vegetables, and other foodstuffs from Nepal into Tibet.

It’s so hot in some areas that raindrops evaporate before they reach the ground. It’s pretty hard to grow much on the edges of the desert, even under the best of circumstances. Indeed, countries like Niger are doubly disadvantaged: most of the country is desert or semiarid, and it is also landlocked and isolated from major trade routes. Since agriculture and trade are so foundational to development, it’s hard to get started when there are obstacles to both. It’s all about options and opportunities: the good people of Niger have far fewer options for productive investment, job creation, and economic growth than the people of Indonesia.


A Concise History of Modern India (Cambridge Concise Histories) by Barbara D. Metcalf, Thomas R. Metcalf

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, commoditize, demand response, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentleman farmer, income inequality, joint-stock company, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, scientific management, Silicon Valley, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, telemarketer, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning

Arabic-speaking Muslims had been present much earlier in the subcontinent, establishing a kingdom in Sind in the lower Indus valley in 711 as part of the expansion of the Umayyad dynasty based in Damascus. They were also found by the eighth century as traders along the Malabar coast of the south-west, where they settled, intermarried, and sustained distinctive cultural forms forged from their Arab ties and local setting, and in so doing helped link ‘al-Hind’ to seaborne trade routes. In the years from roughly 1200 to 1500, the movement of goods and peoples through Indian Ocean ports, as well as overland through the Persian-speaking lands, was such that Janet Abu-Lughod has characterized this period as an ‘Islamic world system’ of economic and political interaction. In this system, the Indian subcontinent played a significant part.

Nationalists found in this overseas migration both a heightened image of imperial exploitation that brought shame to India, and, at the same time, as Indians took up residence around the globe, a vision of ‘Greater India’, a nation beyond its borders, that recalled images of ancient glory. Engagement with the plight of diaspora Indians, as we shall see with Gandhi, was a critical stimulus to Indian nationalism. The Indian Army, in similar fashion, was deployed, at the cost of the Indian tax-payer, to protect trade routes and secure imperial interests from China, most notably during the 1900 Boxer rebellion, to East Africa, and to the Middle East. British officials themselves, along with Indian police and secretarial staff, especially technical personnel in such areas as forestry and public works, whose skills were honed in India, found employment in other areas of the Empire.


pages: 457 words: 125,329

Value of Everything: An Antidote to Chaos The by Mariana Mazzucato

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, clean tech, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, full employment, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Hangouts, Growth in a Time of Debt, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, interest rate derivative, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Post-Keynesian economics, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, rent control, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software patent, Solyndra, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two and twenty, two-sided market, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, Works Progress Administration, you are the product, zero-sum game

In the fourth century BC, Aristotle distinguished a variety of more or less virtuous jobs, depending on the class (citizen or slave) of the ancient Greek polis dweller.1 In the New Testament, the apostle Matthew reported that Jesus said it was ‘easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God'.2 During the Middle Ages, the Church disparaged and even denounced moneylenders and merchants who ‘bought cheap and sold dear';3 while they may not have been lazy, they were considered unproductive and vile. Pre-modern definitions of what work was or was not useful were never clear-cut. With the onset of colonialism in the sixteenth century these definitions became even more blurred. European colonial conquest and the protection of trade routes with newly annexed lands were expensive. Governments had to find the money for armies, bureaucracies and the purchase of exotic merchandise. But help seemed to be at hand: extraordinary amounts of gold and silver were discovered in the Americas, and a vast treasure poured into Europe. As these precious metals represented wealth and prosperity, it seemed that whoever bought, owned and controlled the supply of them and the currencies minted from them was engaged in productive activities.

In his influential book England's Treasure by Forraign Trade, Mun summed up the mercantilist doctrine: we must, he said, ‘sell more to strangers yearly than wee consume of theirs in value'.4 Mercantilists also defended the growth of national government as necessary to fund wars and expeditions to keep trade routes open and to control colonial markets. In England, Holland and France, mercantilists advocated shipping Acts, such as England's Navigation Act of 1651, which forced their countries' and colonies' trade exclusively into ships flying the national flag. As mercantilist thinking developed, and people started to conceive of wealth production in national terms, the first estimates of national income - the total amount everyone in the country earned - started to appear.


pages: 374 words: 114,660

The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality by Angus Deaton

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, colonial exploitation, Columbian Exchange, compensation consultant, creative destruction, declining real wages, Downton Abbey, Easter island, Edward Jenner, end world poverty, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge economy, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, new economy, off-the-grid, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, very high income, War on Poverty, zoonotic diseases

Globalization has affected health in many ways: directly through the spread of disease, information, and treatment, and indirectly through economic forces, particularly increased trade and higher economic growth. There have been many periods of globalization in history—sometimes through war, conquest, and imperialist expansion, sometimes through new trade routes, bringing new products and new riches. Disease usually came along for the ride, with consequences that reshaped the world. The historian Ian Morris has described how increased trade around the second century CE merged previously separate disease pools that, since the beginning of agriculture, had evolved in the West, South Asia, and East Asia, “as if they were on different planets.”

The historian Ian Morris has described how increased trade around the second century CE merged previously separate disease pools that, since the beginning of agriculture, had evolved in the West, South Asia, and East Asia, “as if they were on different planets.” Catastrophic plagues broke out in China and in the eastern outposts of the Roman Empire.25 The Columbian exchange after 1492 is an even better-known example.26 Many historical epidemics started from new trade routes or new conquests. The plague of Athens in 430 BCE was attributed to trade, and bubonic plague was brought to Europe in 1347 by rats aboard trading ships. The cholera epidemic of the nineteenth century is thought to have come from Asia thanks to the activities of the British in India, and its subsequent spread through Europe and North America was speeded by the new railways.


Europe: A History by Norman Davies

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, centre right, charter city, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, Defenestration of Prague, discovery of DNA, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equal pay for equal work, Eratosthenes, Etonian, European colonialism, experimental economics, financial independence, finite state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, gentleman farmer, global village, Gregor Mendel, Honoré de Balzac, Index librorum prohibitorum, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, liberation theology, long peace, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, Peace of Westphalia, Plato's cave, popular capitalism, Potemkin village, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Transnistria, urban planning, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois

In ancient times it was variously known as Scythia or Sarmatia, after the peoples who dominated the Pontic steppes long before the arrival of the Slavs, [CHERSONESOS] It occupies the largest sector of the southern European plain, between the Volga crossing and the Carpathian narrows; and it carries the principal overland pathway between Asia and Europe. Its modern, Slavonic name means ‘On the Edge’, a close counterpart to the American concept of ‘the Frontier’. Its focal point at the rapids of the Dnieper, where the steppe pathway crosses the river trade-route, was fiercely contested by all comers, for it provided the point of transition between the settled lands to the West and the open steppes to the East. Ukraine is rich in mineral resources—such as the coal of the ‘Donbass’ and the iron of Krivoi Roh. The loess of its famous ‘black earth’ underlies Europe’s richest agricultural lands, which in the years prior to 1914 were to become the Continent’s leading exporter of grain.

Hence, whilst advanced civilizations akin to those of the Middle East were developing in the Aegean, the peoples of the north-west were passing through the transition from Neolithic to Bronze, [SAMPHIRE] However, talk of ‘advanced’ or ‘backward’ cultures might well be inhibited by the skills of the engineers of Stonehenge, who contrived to transport eighty blue-stones weighing over fifty tons apiece from the distant Presceliy Mountains of South Wales, and to erect them with such precision that awestruck observers have imagined them to be the working parts of a sun-computer.16 Indeed, carvings at Stonehenge of axes and daggers resembling objects found in the shaft-graves at Mycenae gave rise once again to speculation about direct contacts with the Mediterranean. Interregional trade, especially in minerals, is one of the important features of Bronze Age Europe. The Peninsula’s mineral resources were rich and varied, but their distribution was uneven; and a widespread network of trade-routes grew up in response to the imbalances. Salt had been sought from the earliest times, either by mining rock-salt or by evaporating brine from seaside salt-pans. Huge rock-salt mountains occur naturally in several locations, from Cardona in Catalonia to the Salzkammergut in Austria or Wieliczka in Poland.

Melos yielded obsidian; Paros yielded pure white marble; Kythnos yielded copper; Siphnos, and Laurion on the coast of Attica, yielded silver and lead. The wealth and power of Crete, and later of Mycenae, was clearly connected with the command of these Aegean resources and with their role as the termini of the transcontinental trade routes. They were the focus of what has been called the ‘international spirit’ of the Bronze Age. DASA APOPULAR history of mathematics states that the advance of the Beaker Folk into neolithic Europe was accompanied by the spread both of the Indo-European languages and of the decimal system. The statement is supported by lists of number words from a selection of Indo-European languages which use the Base-10 or decimal method of numeration.


pages: 1,213 words: 376,284

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First by Frank Trentmann

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bread and circuses, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, company town, critique of consumerism, cross-subsidies, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equity premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial exclusion, fixed income, food miles, Ford Model T, full employment, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global village, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, index card, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, mass immigration, McMansion, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, moral panic, mortgage debt, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Paradox of Choice, Pier Paolo Pasolini, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, rent control, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, stakhanovite, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

. (© Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/Licensed by DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2015) Images reproduced with the kind permission of the owners, institutions, licence-holders and identifiable copyright owners. No reproduction without permission. List of Figures The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was made. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature on your ebook reader. Ming China, 1600: Internal and external trade routes 45 Possessions among rural households in Leeuwarderadeel, Friesland, 1566–1686 56 Selected possessions in English households, 1675–1725 61 Selected possessions in town and country, England, 1675–1725 62 The divergence in the standard of living 72 The imperial flow of goods and slaves in 1770 82 The requirements of a fair standard of clothing, Philadelphia, 1919 150 Coffee consumption in the world in 1913 164 Thirsty cities: water consumption, 1870–1904 187 Customers of a department store in Germany in 1900 200 Standards of comfort in American owner- and tenant-occupied homes with kitchens, 1950–52 244 United States advertising expenditure, 1920–2005 318 Advertising expenditure per capita in 1980 320 Household saving ratio, 1970–2014 421 Household debt as a percentage of net disposable income, 1995–2013 425 Income share of richest 1% 436 Income share of richest 10% 437 Average weekly hours of work and leisure for all people aged 14+ years in the United States, 1900–2005 446 Average weekly hours of leisure for men by age group in the United States, 1900–2005 446 Average weekly hours of leisure for women by age group in the United States, 1900–2005 447 Percentage of time spent on activities in the United States and France, 2005 454 Misery U-index, by activity, United States and France, 2005 454 Free-time activities of men aged 20 to 74 in Europe, 1998–2002 458 Free-time activities of women aged 20 to 74 in Europe, 1998–2002 459 Leisure cultures by educational background, France, 1997 467 Public social spending in selected OECD countries, in percentage of GDP, 1960–2014 537 Annual fairtrade consumption per capita in 2007, in euros 564 Number of world shops/fair trade shops, 2007 564 Use of remittances by recipient households in selected African countries, by source of remittances, 2009 592 Household access to information and communication technology in selected African countries, by source of remittances, 2009 594 Kilograms of residential waste discarded per capita/annually in New York City in the 20th century 625 United States: total and per capita municipal solid waste generation and recovery, 1960–2012 641 Household waste generation in selected countries, 1980–2005 643 Municipal waste generated and recycled: the three waste regions of Europe, 1995–2013 645 Products in use, in storage and at end of life in the United States, 2009 663 Global development of material use, material intensity, population and GDP, 1900–2009 667 Introduction We live surrounded by things.

., Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire (Oxford, 2013). 2. Peter M. Solar, ‘Opening to the East: Shipping between Europe and Asia, 1770–1830’, Journal of Economic History 73, no. 3, 2013: 625–61. For a visual illustration of the European empires’ changing trade routes between the 1750s and 1820s, drawing on a thousand ship logs, see the maps created by the EU CLIWOC project at: http://pendientedemigracion.ucm.es/info/cliwoc/Cliwoc_final_report.pdf. 3. Pomeranz, Great Divergence; Parthasarathi, ‘The Great Divergence’; P. H. H. Vries, ‘Are Coal and Colonies Really Crucial?’

L. 240 Menger, Carl 3, 151 Mennonites 574 mental health/illness 305, 434, 487, 511, 555 mercantilism 91, 92, 120, 131; mercantilist empire 91, 92, 161, 163, 164; unfitness for mass consumption 162 merchants 25, 69, 103, 109, 129, 130–31, 145, 146; as agents of peace 158; as ambassadors of fashion and taste 38, 81–4; Chinese 24–5, 44, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52–3; merchant houses 49; Renaissance 30, 35; salt 49, 52–3 Mercure 70 Mesopotamia 68 methane 666 Methodism 612 see also Wesleyans Mexico 64, 79, 208–9, 591, 596, 643; Mexican migrants to the US 588–9, 590, 591 Meyer-Ehlers, Grete 250–51 miasma theory of disease 630 microwaves 14, 260, 588 Middle Ages 1, 38, 58 middle classes: American 412, 431; approach to money and goods 342; in Asia 140, 142, 143, 373–5, 380, 392, 519; aspiring 79, 142, 224, 341; borrowing 416; bourgeoisie see bourgeoisie; in Brazil 374; British ‘middling sort’ and 65, 73; and the British state 548; conspicuous consumption 228; consumer culture and a burgeoning middle class 340; and credit 412; cultural poaching 347; and domestic technologies 259; domestic water use 184; English 65; as first to embrace luxuries 117; furniture choice 226–7; garage contents 1, 661–2; homes 224, 246, 247, 341; intimate domesticity 489; mass culture versus educated taste 304; Muslim women 620; and the Ottoman touch 251–2; and thrift 412, 416; unchaperoned middle-class women 196–7; women and ethical consumerism 155 middling sort 65, 73, 374, 398 Midland Bank 416 migration 588–605 see also displacement; mobility; Africa Migration Project 589, 592, 593–5, 594; American deportation of Chinese immigrants 128; within Asia 356, 595; and diffusion of tastes and products 78–9, 165, 214–15, 589, 596–602; economic migrants 379, 588–96 see also remittances, migrant worker; and homogenization 219–20, 527; and ideas of ageing 519; Irish diaspora 599–600; Jewish migrants 86, 598, 600, 615; migrant communities 208, 214, 596–7; migrant food cultures 596–602, 603–5; migrant labour/workers 58, 64, 334, 383, 512; and possessions 596; and property-owning democracy 239, 240; and remittances see remittances, migrant worker; and spread of coffee houses 86; and state regulation of ethnic cuisine 603–4; triangular 596; and tribal culture and identity 347–8; to the US, 1860–1920 598 Migros 349 Milan 35, 310, 348–9 Milka 172 Mill, John Stuart 151 Millar, John 110 Miller, Henry 341 millionaires 434, 439 Mills, C. Wright 435 MIND 555 Ming dynasty 4, 10, 22, 24–5, 43–53, 57, 69, 80, 95, 96, 678; trade routes 45 minimum wage 156, 157, 287 mining towns 524 Mintz, Sidney: Sweetness and Power 79, 162 Mirabeau, Victor de Riqueti, Marquis de 100, 116 mirrors 37, 49, 55, 56, 61, 93, 130, 138, 192, 212, 222, 294, 359, 360 misery U-index 454, 454 missionaries: in Africa 125–6, 133–5, 614–15; as ambassadors of taste 81–4; and Benedict’s rule 134; Catholic 79, 80, 81–4; and the demotion of the consumer 134; England as missionary nation 126; going native 125–6; and Karo women 142; and mission stations as islands of Western lifestyle 126; Moravian Mission 133; wages paid by 133 Mittag, Günter 336 Mitterand, François 552 Miyazawa Kiichi 384, 545 mobile phones 387, 464–5, 470, 471, 482, 493, 591, 594, 622, 658, 664, 681, 686 mobility 94, 216, 301, 496, 528, 661 see also displacement; migration; travel; America’s cycle of freedom, social mobility and democracy 237; and elderly people 498–9, 509, 511–15; and the firm’s loss of control over leisure 528–9; labour/work 76, 661; and leisure activities 458–9, 460; physical 458–60, 469; upward 341, 614 Mobro 642 Mocca 79 modernity 95, 96, 138, 198, 204, 209; Americanization as tool of modernization 378 see also Americanization; in Asia 358, 368, 378, 379–82; childhood seen as invention of bourgeois modernity 486; combined with the traditional 362, 373–87; and disenchantment see disenchantment; metropolitan 208, 220–21; modern living and the home 245–63; modern things as ticket out of extended family/community 260; modern utilities 175–6, 180, 181, 183, 188–9, 220, 248, 249; the ‘modern woman’ 254, 359; modernist artists 199, 319; modernist homes 222; nationalism and consumerist modernity 298; and religion 606; and the separation of man, things and nature 95–7, 230–31 Modigliani, Franco 420–21 Mods and Rockers 498 Modugno, Domenico 351 Moffat, Robert 126 Moldova 590 Mombasans 125 Monboddo, James Burnett, Lord 104 moneylenders 408, 410, 412, 415, 432 see also banks; credit; loan sharks 361, 367, 412, 440 monopolies 49, 89, 120, 133, 139, 161, 162, 182, 183, 388, 549–50; elite 345; healthcare 555; and mini-democracies 287; natural 152, 176, 391 Monopoly (game) 281 Montelupo 30 Montesquieu 100 Montevideo 80 Moody, Dwight 608–9, 612 mopeds 6, 272, 311, 333, 496 moral economy 278, 563, 571, 578, 581 morality see also ethics; fairness: conflict over possible negative effects of increasing goods 279; conspicuous consumption as moral threat 380; ‘consumerism’ and moral failure 677; and credit/debt 405–7; department stores, shopping and moral/sexual anxieties 196, 197; as a framing force 7; and leisure 216; and Marxist/Freudian materialism 284; moral anarchy 305; moral boundaries to Renaissance possessions 34–5; moral defence of private recreation 261; moral geography 573, 583–4; moral panic about young consumers 313; moral pollution 490; moral restraints 143 see also restraint; trade and Renaissance morals 35; and waste 623, 634, 651 Moravia 133, 525, 527 Morelia, Mexico 208–9 Morga, Antonia de 25 Moritz, Karl Philipp 63 Mormons 608, 609–10 Morrisons 568 mortgages 12, 239, 242–3, 244, 405, 409, 413–14, 420, 427, 432, 440; Australian 423, 522; British 242, 420; Danish debt 425; Dutch debt 425; flexible 427, 428; German debt 425; illegal mortgage clauses 558; mortgage packets 532; mortgage relief 540; second 427; sub-prime 426; subsidized 681 Moscow 192–3, 194, 204, 293, 295, 310, 329 Moser, Ameli 117–18 Motivational Research (MR) 315–16 motorways 290 MP3 players 464 Mrs Beeton’s Household Management 598 Mughal empire 137, 138, 142 Muir and Mirrielees 192–3, 194, 204, 295 multi-tasking 471, 689 Mummery, A.


pages: 1,194 words: 371,889

The scramble for Africa, 1876-1912 by Thomas Pakenham

active measures, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, Etonian, European colonialism, God and Mammon, imperial preference, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, out of africa, Scramble for Africa, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

To the uncircumcised, son of the uncircumcised, Colonel Desbordes, may God confound and bring ruin on your friends…. No one is more of a malefactor, no one more of a traitor, no one more wicked than you. You say that you only wish to open up a road for trade. This is false and contrary to sense and reason. Your desire is to destroy the country, to close the trade routes and make war on Believers … Muntaga ended: The day when we meet, the birds of the air will not need to look elsewhere for their food.8 Two years earlier, when Gallieni had been at Nango, negotiating the treaty, the news of Desbordes’s advance to Kita and a provocative attack on Goubanko had reached Ahmadu at Segu.

The nut, one of the few stimulants allowed by Islam, was served as a luxury thoughout Islamic Africa, and the Middle East. To organize this demanding trade came the Dyula, Muslim immigrants from the coast. The Dyula metropolis was Kankan, a teeming village of mud huts on the banks of the river Milo. The lines of trade pushed out and became more sophisticated. The arterial trade routes designed for the delicate and perishable kola nut – fair markets, dry storehouses, trustworthy guards, able porters – could also supply delicate girl slaves from the forests. In return back came ingots of salt from the Sahara and the luxuries of North Africa that the caravans had brought from still further away: fine cloth from Morocco, pottery from Tunis, horses from Arabia.

Emin’s difficulty was Britain’s opportunity. So was Mackay’s difficulty. One of the main objects would be the relief of the British missionaries from the tyranny of King Mwanga and the opening up of Uganda to the ‘3 CS’. However, it now turned out that Stanley was not prepared to lead the expedition if it was to take the regular Arab trading route from the east coast by way of Uganda. Stanley wanted to break new ground. His employer was King Leopold. The King insisted that it would be a great sacrifice to release Stanley at all. He could only permit it if Stanley took the longer route from the west coast, by way of the Congo. Perhaps he could return by way of East Africa.


pages: 125 words: 40,678

The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula K. le Guin

time dilation, trade route

There were more languages than lands, and each with a different dialect for every town that spoke it; there were infinite ramifications of manners, morals, customs, crafts; physical types differed on each of the five Great Lands. The people of Sornol were tall, and pale, and great traders; the people of Rieshwel were short, and many had black fur, and they ate monkeys, and so on and on. But the climate varied little, and the forest little, and sea not at all. Curiosity, regular trade-routes, and the necessity of finding a husband or wife of the proper Tree, kept up an easy movement of people among the towns and between the lands, and so there were certain likenesses among all but the remotest extremes, the half-rumored barbarian isles of the Far East and South. In all the Forty Lands, women ran the cities and towns, and almost every town toad a Men's Lodge.


Tyler Cowen - Stubborn Attachments A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals by Meg Patrick

agricultural Revolution, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, conceptual framework, Fall of the Berlin Wall, framing effect, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, Peter Singer: altruism, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, social discount rate, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, zero-sum game

The Greek city-states and the Roman Empire benefited from maritime trade across the Mediterranean; those regions in turn spread growth-enhancing institutions around Europe, Northern Africa, and the Middle East. The commercial revolution of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance reopened many of the trade routes of antiquity and eventually human beings started to climb out of the Malthusian trap of very low per capita incomes at subsistence. The wealth of the West helped enable the export miracles of the East Asian economies. Today most poor countries seek greater access to wealthier Western and Asian markets and flourish if they can achieve it.12 For all the recent increases in inequality within individual nations, global inequality has declined over the last few decades, in large part because of growth in China and India.


A United Ireland: Why Unification Is Inevitable and How It Will Come About by Kevin Meagher

Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, deindustrialization, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, kremlinology, land reform, Nelson Mandela, period drama, Right to Buy, trade route, transaction costs

Their very bureaucratic utility is a mark not of how peripheral unity is, but how banal. Again, it is small, incremental steps that will see Irish unity become a reality. After all a state, like a human body, is held together by its constituent parts – bone, flesh and a central nervous system – each playing a role in the overall design. So it is with an economy, with trade routes, investment and shared infrastructure each contributing to a bigger whole. (Like the proposed 138km, £200 million north–south electricity grid interconnector project that stretches across the border, linking together power grids across the island of Ireland.) Formal cross-border cooperation is also happening under the aegis of the North–South Ministerial Council, one of the bodies established by the Good Friday Agreement.


pages: 134 words: 41,085

The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

Admiral Zheng, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, defund the police, Deng Xiaoping, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Future Shock, George Floyd, global pandemic, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeremy Corbyn, Jones Act, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, lockdown, McMansion, military-industrial complex, night-watchman state, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parkinson's law, pensions crisis, QR code, rent control, Rishi Sunak, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, trade route, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, Washington Consensus

In the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), Germany alone lost around a third of its population before the Treaty of Westphalia allowed local rulers to dictate their peoples’ religion (“cuius regio eius religio”).9 But conflict also drove innovation: “War made the state and the state made war,” as one historian puts it.10 Desperate to discover soldiers who understood artillery and supply chains, monarchs recruited new men to supplement the old officer class.11 Desperate to fill their treasuries, they handed out charters to merchants to forge trading routes. Thus, tiny Portugal ended up ruling Brazil, while Holland gained control of Indonesia. Britain was very much at the center of all this tumultuous state-building. Oliver Cromwell (a distant relation of Thomas) led a revolution that established a commonwealth in 1649–60, with parliament declaring kingship to be “unnecessary, burdensome, and dangerous to the liberty, safety and public interest of the people.” 12 Britain’s oligarchs welcomed science and ideas.


pages: 140 words: 42,194

Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals by Tyler Cowen

agricultural Revolution, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, butterfly effect, conceptual framework, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Fall of the Berlin Wall, framing effect, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, Peter Singer: altruism, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, social discount rate, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, zero-sum game

The Greek city-states and the Roman Empire benefited from maritime trade across the Mediterranean; those regions in turn spread growth-enhancing institutions around Europe, Northern Africa, and the Middle East. The commercial revolution of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance reopened many of the trade routes of antiquity, and eventually human beings started to climb out of the Malthusian trap of very low per capita incomes at subsistence. The wealth of the West helped to enable the export miracles of the East Asian economies. Today, most poor countries seek greater access to wealthier Western and Asian markets, and flourish if they can achieve it.12 For all the recent increases in inequality within individual nations, global inequality has declined over the last few decades, in large part because of growth in China and India.


pages: 376 words: 121,254

Cocaine Nation: How the White Trade Took Over the World by Thomas Feiling

anti-communist, barriers to entry, Caribbean Basin Initiative, crack epidemic, deindustrialization, drug harm reduction, gentrification, illegal immigration, informal economy, inventory management, Kickstarter, land reform, Lao Tzu, mandatory minimum, moral panic, offshore financial centre, RAND corporation, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Stanford prison experiment, trade route, upwardly mobile, yellow journalism

In writing this book, I didn’t want to get swept up in the all-too-familiar mix of nosiness, envy and sanctimony that masquerades as the ‘public interest’, or the ritual inflation and deflation of mediocrity that passes for ‘celebrity news’. I have not sought the opinions of commentators, politicians or the drug-taking anecdotes of high-rollers. Instead, I wanted to hear from those who work day to day on the cocaine trade routes that run from London and New York via Miami, Kingston and Tijuana to Colombia. I wanted to see the impact of the war on drugs on the consumers, traders and producers of cocaine, and the impact they have on the soldiers, police officers, customs officials and doctors charged with prosecuting the war.

Over 2,400 Mexicans were killed in drug-related violence in 2007. By December 2008, a further 5,600 people had been killed and the death toll looks set to go still higher in 2009.4 Luis Rodriguez, the former gang member I had met in Los Angeles, told me how Mexico had become so important to the traffickers. ‘The DEA made big efforts to destroy the trade routes through Florida, and the Colombians started to think, “Well, let’s go through Mexico.” At first, the Colombians didn’t want to go through Mexico, because it had some of the oldest smuggling organizations on the continent, and they’d have to pay all these old drug lords who had been there for a long time.


pages: 424 words: 121,425

How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy by Mehrsa Baradaran

access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, British Empire, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, credit crunch, David Graeber, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, diversification, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, income inequality, Internet Archive, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kickstarter, low interest rates, M-Pesa, McMansion, Michael Milken, microcredit, mobile money, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Own Your Own Home, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, the payments system, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, working poor

.… I do not think that in the most enlightened rural districts of France there is intellectual movement either so rapid or on such a scale as in this wilderness.”5 Before the telegraph, telephone, car, or railroad was a possibility, rural constituents in every corner of America knew what their congressional representatives were doing and were able to communicate with them. Before the financial giants of America made shipping canals, railroads, highways, and wires that created the most productive and efficient economy in the world, the United States had nationwide trading routes unparalleled in the contemporary world—all made possible by the United States’ postal system. The post office, the primary facilitator of commercial trade, “provided merchants with the only reliable means for transmitting information, bills of exchange, and money.”6 Historian Richard John explained that it was only after the post office created a national marketplace that private entrepreneurs could compete with each other outside local markets.

The founders had not anticipated that ordinary Americans would be able “to actively participate in a truly open-ended national discussion on the leading events of the day, rather than merely to receive periodic broadcasts from the seat of power, as Washington had envisioned, or to engage in carefully structured two-way consultations with their elected representatives, as Madison had hoped.”18 And unfortunately, the same platform that eased informational exchange and enabled national trade routes also helped drive people apart as it forced those with political and cultural differences to deal—and often clash—with each other. This broad public engagement was even beyond the imagination of the great proponents of local control, such as James Madison, whose Federalist essays of 1787 and 1788 only envisioned interactions with representatives during periodic home visits—not the regular contact that the post quickly enabled.19 The continuous conversations between congressional representatives and their constituents augmented even Madison’s vision of public participation in lawmaking.


pages: 481 words: 120,693

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else by Chrystia Freeland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, Bullingdon Club, business climate, call centre, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, double helix, energy security, estate planning, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, high net worth, income inequality, invention of the steam engine, job automation, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberation theology, light touch regulation, linear programming, London Whale, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, NetJets, new economy, Occupy movement, open economy, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, postindustrial economy, Potemkin village, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, the long tail, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, Washington Consensus, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

Venice was an imperial power—the republic financed the Fourth Crusade and established suzerainty over the fertile plains to the north, reaching Lake Garda and the river Adda to the north and west, along the Dalmatian coast deep into what is today Croatia, into the Mediterranean, where it controlled Cyprus, and into the Aegean, where it ruled Crete. La Serenissima’s true power and vocation was commerce. At the republic’s zenith, it dispatched thirty-six thousand sailors and thirty-three hundred ships into the world’s maritime trade routes. Venice dominated the salt business—the oil of that era—and trade with Byzantium and the Near East. A Venetian merchant, Marco Polo played a central role in introducing China to western Europe, with his pioneering account of his visit to the Middle Kingdom; his father, also a trader, had done business with the Golden Horde of the Tatars.

The commenda, the legal innovation that had made Venice (and other Italian city-states) rich, was banned. La Serenissima’s reigning elite were acting in their own immediate self-interest—shutting out the entrepreneurial upstarts meant the vested interests could enjoy sole control over the city’s lucrative trade routes. But in the longer term, La Serrata was the beginning of the end for the city’s oligarchs, as well as for Venetian prosperity more generally. By 1500, the population of Venice was smaller than it had been in 1330. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as the rest of Europe grew, the city that had once been its richest continued to shrink.


pages: 413 words: 119,379

The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa's Wealth by Tom Burgis

Airbus A320, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, BRICs, British Empire, central bank independence, clean water, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, F. W. de Klerk, financial engineering, flag carrier, Gini coefficient, Global Witness, Livingstone, I presume, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, purchasing power parity, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, trade route, transfer pricing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Physical cargoes of African oil and ore go hither and thither, mainly to North America, Europe and, increasingly, China, but by and large the continent’s natural resources flow to a global market in which traders based in London, New York and Hong Kong set prices. If South Africa exports less gold, Nigeria less oil, or Congo less copper, the price goes up for everyone. Trade routes change: the increasing production of shale gas in the United States has reduced imports of Nigerian oil in recent years, for example, with the crude heading to Asia instead. But based on the proportion of total worldwide supply it accounts for, if you fill up your car fourteen times, one of those tanks will have been refined from African crude.11 Likewise, there is a sliver of tantalum from the badlands of eastern Congo in one in five mobile phones.

Obasanjo dispatched Nasir El-Rufai, a northern-born minister with a reputation as a reformer, to try to get Mangal to clean up his act.10 El-Rufai told me he reached an agreement with Yar’Adua, the beneficiary of Mangal’s generous campaign funding and his political protector, and the smuggler would endeavour to transform himself into a legitimate businessman. El-Rufai recalled that Mangal asked him, ‘Why does Obasanjo call me a smuggler? I just do logistics. I don’t buy any of the goods that are smuggled. I’m just providing a service.’ Mangal told El-Rufai that he had a fleet of six hundred trucks plying the trade routes. He promised to switch into refined petroleum products, another time-honoured money spinner for Nigeria’s politically connected trading barons. But the illicit textile trade continued, and Mangal’s operations remained under scrutiny. Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, traditionally nothing more than a vehicle for settling political scores, had gained some teeth and a degree of independence under an energetic fraud-buster called Nuhu Ribadu.


pages: 316 words: 117,228

The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality by Katharina Pistor

Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, global reserve currency, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, initial coin offering, intangible asset, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, means of production, money market fund, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, power law, price mechanism, price stability, profit maximization, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Wolfgang Streeck

It had commerce written all over it, but also the sovereign’s claim to monopolize the trade route to East Asia, by force if necessary. To achieve these conflicting goals, the company needed a sound capital base and therefore forced shareholders to commit their contributions for a ten-year period. When the time came for the shareholders of the VOC to redeem their shares, the political elites feared that a massive outflow of funds would undermine the viability of the company just when Portugal mounted a serious challenge to Dutch dominance over the highly lucrative trade routes by sea to the Far East.41 A charter change forced shareholders to leave their initial contribution with the company for good.


World Cities and Nation States by Greg Clark, Tim Moonen

active transport: walking or cycling, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, business climate, clean tech, congestion charging, corporate governance, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, driverless car, financial independence, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gentrification, global supply chain, global value chain, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, managed futures, megacity, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open economy, Pearl River Delta, rent control, Richard Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stem cell, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

Cities such as Baghdad, Damascus and Samarkand were advanced intellectual and production centres. Other places along the Silk Road, such as Merv in modern‐day Turkmenistan, Bukhara in modern‐day Uzbekistan and Rayy in Persia, were viewed as beautiful trading cities (Frankopan, 2015). In 13th and 14th century Europe, the biggest concentrations of power and control over trade routes were found in cities. Dozens of dense urban centres in modern‐day Italy, Germany, Switzerland and France became autonomous from aristocratic rule, and many acquired budgets larger than any neighbouring kingdom. Sovereign kings and princes often granted rights and privileges to towns in order to protect urban residents from lords.

History of Tokyo’s relationship with central government Tokyo has been the centre of Japanese political and military power for over a century. The Meiji era (1868–1912) radically transformed the country’s urban structure as feudalism was dismantled, social and physical mobility increased and industrialisation took off. Coastal cities, and Tokyo in particular, benefited from a booming export sector and their position along trade routes. Japan’s process of industrialisation was deliberately State‐driven, as the central government was anxious to shore up the country’s capacity to resist Western economic and military might. As a result, firms that could be trusted – that is, with close links to government – were privileged, assisted and protected.


Lonely Planet Amsterdam by Lonely Planet

3D printing, Airbnb, bike sharing, David Sedaris, gentrification, haute couture, haute cuisine, post-work, QR code, Silicon Valley, trade route, tulip mania, young professional

Best Places to Eat A Wolf Atelier A Mossel En Gin A Balthazar's Keuken A Marius A REM Eiland Best Places to Drink A 't Smalle A Monks Coffee Roasters A Brouwerij Troost Westergas A Westergasterras A Café Papeneiland A Cafe Soundgarden Best Places to Shop A Moooi Gallery A Het Oud-Hollandsch Snoepwinkeltje A Lindengracht Market A Robins Hood A Concrete Matter 1Sights 1Jordaan HaarlemmerpoortGATE ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; Haarlemmerplein; j3 Haarlemmerplein) Once a defensive gateway to the city, the Haarlemmerpoort marked the start of the journey to Haarlem, which was a major trading route. The neoclassical structure, with Roman temple–styled Corinthian pillars, was finished just in time for King William II's staged entry for his 1840 investiture, hence its little-known official name of Willemspoort (see the plaque inside). Traffic stopped running through the gate when a bypass was built over the Westerkanaal.

Golden Age (1580–1700) In 1588, Den Haag was established as the seat of the Dutch Republic, but Amsterdam grew rapidly to become the largest and most influential city in the Netherlands. By 1600 Dutch ships controlled the sea trade between England, France, Spain and the Baltic, and had a virtual monopoly on North Sea fishing and Arctic whaling. Jewish refugees taught Dutch mariners about trade routes, giving rise to the legendary Dutch East India and Dutch West India Companies. For a while, the Dutch ran rings around the fleets of great powers, which were too slow or cumbersome to react. In the absence of an overriding religion, ethnic background or political entity, money reigned supreme.


pages: 412 words: 128,042

Extreme Economies: Survival, Failure, Future – Lessons From the World’s Limits by Richard Davies

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Anton Chekhov, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, big-box store, cashless society, clean water, complexity theory, deindustrialization, digital divide, eurozone crisis, failed state, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, gentleman farmer, Global Witness, government statistician, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, it's over 9,000, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, large denomination, Livingstone, I presume, Malacca Straits, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, pension reform, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, rolling blackouts, school choice, school vouchers, Scramble for Africa, side project, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, spinning jenny, subscription business, The Chicago School, the payments system, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, uranium enrichment, urban planning, wealth creators, white picket fence, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

This maritime place has ships, trade and warfare at its core, with the ancient port of Banda Aceh boasting the world’s first female admiral, Laksamana Malahayati. Appointed to lead the sultan’s fleet in the late 1500s, she successfully defended the Malacca Strait, hunting down and killing enemy captains, and building a reputation so strong that she negotiated directly with Queen Elizabeth I about British access to the trade route. She was killed in action against the Portuguese. Today the region’s main commercial port carries Malahayati’s name. While the admiral’s legend is strong, Cut Nyak Dhien is an even greater military hero. Born to an aristocratic family, she rose to lead the Acehnese resistance against the Dutch in the 1890s.

. ———— (2013), World Drug Report 2013, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (United Nations: New York). US Bureau of Justice Statistics (2018), available at www.bjs.gov. US Census Bureau, Historical Income Tables, www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/historical-income-households.html. Vansina, J. (1962), ‘Long-distance Trade Routes in Central Africa’, Journal of African History, 3 (3), 375–90. VOTE (2018), ‘Advancing Justice in Louisiana: Policy Priorities’, Voice of the Experienced, accessed December 2018. CHAPTER 4: DARIEN NOTES The Gap, history, people and famous crossings Burton (1973) discusses the native tribes of Darien, the vegetation and bird life, and the risk to them posed by the Pan-American Highway.


pages: 392 words: 124,069

Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest by Suzanne Simard

air gap, Anthropocene, biofilm, British Empire, clean water, company town, Easter island, government statistician, Mason jar, New Journalism, Skype, trade route, zero-sum game

Barb and I carried more tents farther down the slope to the remaining triplets. I was taking a risk with this experiment, since underground networks were not yet known to form in forests, never mind between trees of different species. Even more far-fetched was the idea that the networks might serve as avenues for collaboration and trade routes for sugar. But I’d absorbed the merits of synergy from growing up in the forest. From hiking the heavily treed slopes up Simard Mountain. From climbing trees and building shelters with Kelly. The sugar train in my imagination didn’t stop at the roots. I’d read that the photosynthate was unloaded from the root tips into the mycorrhizal fungal partners, like freight unloaded off boxcars onto trucks.

Hannah, age twenty-one, working in the bush and eating huckleberries, July 2019 I crossed the Columbia River at Castlegar, only half an hour from home, anxious to see Hannah and Nava, grateful that Mary had made the trip north for the Canadian Thanksgiving. The river was low, the natural flow controlled by the Mica, Revelstoke, and Hugh Keenleyside Dams upstream—three of the sixty in the Columbia watershed. These dams meant the loss of salmon from the Arrow Lakes and the flooding of the villages, burial grounds, and trade routes of the Sinixt Nation, whose ancestral territory spans from the Monashee Mountains east to the Purcells and from the Columbia headwaters to Washington State. I wondered what this land looked like before the Canadian government declared the Sinixt Nation extinct, then dammed, clear-cut, and mined their landscape.


pages: 961 words: 302,613

The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin by H. W. Brands

always be closing, British Empire, business intelligence, colonial rule, complexity theory, Copley Medal, disinformation, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Hacker News, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, music of the spheres, Republic of Letters, scientific mainstream, South Sea Bubble, Thomas Malthus, trade route

The contest had roots in the struggles of the rising nation-states of Europe for control of the new discoveries across the seas. Portugal and Spain were the early leaders, with the Portuguese monopolizing the trade routes to the East via the South (that is, around Africa) and the Spanish capitalizing on their conquests in the Americas, encountered accidentally while searching for trade routes to the East via the West. The English and French were slower to exploit the opportunities of expansion overseas, but after sorting out the squabbles surrounding the Reformation of the sixteenth century—a sorting that left France in the Catholic camp but put England among the Protestants—these northerners launched their own imperial ventures.

Boston may have begun life as a religious refuge for nonconformists, but by the beginning of the eighteenth century it was looking like any number of secular seaports that dotted both shores of the North Atlantic. It was by far the busiest port in English America. More than a thousand ships were registered with Boston’s harbormaster—these in addition to the many more that were registered elsewhere but made Boston a regular stop on the trade routes between the New World and the Old. This merchant armada brought cargoes of silk and spices from the Orient, slaves from West Africa, rum and molasses from the West Indies, manufactured goods from Britain, and foodstuffs and other raw and partially processed materials from elsewhere in North America.

Needless to say, Franklin believed that America’s defensive war against Britain had been just; it was this that excused America’s resort to privateers. But every war entailed injustice on one side or the other, and Franklin judged that the greater justice dictated abolition of this evil practice. He appreciated that America would be giving up more than other countries by such a ban. The rich trade routes of the European powers to the West Indies ran right by American shores, making the merchant vessels of those powers tempting targets for American craft. But privateering under any flag was a heinous business, starting with theft and ending with murder. “It is high time, for the sake of humanity, that a stop be put to this enormity.”


pages: 1,510 words: 218,417

Lonely Planet Norway (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Donna Wheeler

car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, company town, energy security, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, low cost airline, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, North Sea oil, place-making, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban renewal

Hiking Routes The list of possibilities for hiking in Norway is almost endless, but if we had to list our top 10, it would be the following: AJotunheimen National Park The doyen of Norwegian hiking destinations, with countless routes and incomparable high country. ARondane National Park Less-crowded trails than those of Jotunheimen, but arguably as beautiful. AHardangervidda Plateau Trails criss-cross this magnificent plateau, the home of reindeer. AAurlandsdalen Historic four-day hike following ancient trading routes from Geiteryggen to Aurland. ATrollstigen Some wonderful treks through the dramatic Trollstigen range. ADovrefjell-Sunndalsfjella National Park Wildlife- and bird-rich park with the Knutshøene massif as a centrepiece. AStabbursdalen National Park Roadless park with tracks through glacial canyons and the world's northernmost pine forest.

Until 1919 and the construction of the coast road, it was the only means of land communication between the two villages. Allow around three hours. Geiteryggen to Aurland HikeHIKE The classic trek down Aurlandsdalen from Geiteryggen to Aurland follows a stream from source to sea as you tramp one of the oldest trading routes between eastern and western Norway. From mid-July, you can start this four-day walk in Finse, on the Oslo–Bergen rail line, with overnight stops at Geiterygghytta, Steinbergdalen and Østerbø. The final section, usually open between early June and late September, from Østerbø (820m) to Vassbygdi (95m) is the most scenic and makes for a hugely enjoyable day hike (allow six to seven hours).

Three daily car ferries run to/from Gudvangen (car and driver/passenger Nkr620/265, three hours) via Kaupanger (Nkr605/245). WORTH A TRIP BORGUND STAVE CHURCH Borgund Stave ChurchCHURCH (adult/child Nkr80/60; h8am-8pm May-Sep, 10am-5pm Oct-Apr) Some 30km southeast of Lærdalsøyri along the E16, the 12th-century stave church was raised beside one of the major trade routes between eastern and western Norway. Dedicated to St Andrew, it's one of the best known, most photographed and certainly the best preserved of Norway's stave churches. Its simple, inky interior and sublimely rustic alter are deeply moving. Beside it is the only free-standing medieval wooden bell tower remaining in Norway.


pages: 681 words: 214,967

A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East by David Fromkin

anti-communist, British Empire, colonial rule, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Suez canal 1869, trade route

According to a German staff officer attached to the Ottoman armed forces, the grand duke's offensive would "have led to a complete victory and perhaps driven Turkey out of the war in the summer of 1917."1 Yet years later, Lloyd George told the House of Commons that "the collapse of Russia was almbst entirely due" to the Ottoman Empire.2 The basis of Lloyd George's opinion was that by closing off most of Russia's imports and exports, the Young Turk masters of Constantinople had deprived her of armaments and revenues. Those who disagree with Lloyd George's assessment are able to argue that even if the Constantinople trade route had remained open, wartime Russia, with her peasant farmers away in the army, produced less than the normal amount of food and so had less to export, and her Allies had little ammunition to send her. But either observation points to the paradoxical truth that Russia's military successes on the Caucasus front were in a sense irrelevant: the real war had become an economic and social survival contest.

Russia was a country naturally rich in agriculture: the peasantry made up 80 percent of the population, and cereals alone constituted half of her exports.s With the export trade cut off at Constantinople, all the food formerly sent out of the country was available to be consumed at home; and though there was a fall in the production of agricultural estates caused by the loss of labor to the army, more than enough food was produced to feed the country.6 The shortages resulted instead from disruption of transportation and distribution, due in part to bottlenecks and breakdowns, but due also to deliberate maneuvers: speculation, profiteering, and hoarding. The Czar's government recklessly ignored the need to crack down on the profiteers who accentuated the consequences of Turkey's stranglehold on Russia's trade route to the West. Widespread indus-trial strikes and the onset of financial chaos failed to move the government to act. By 1917 current interest and sinking fund payments due on its public debt were greater than the total revenues of the state in 1916, a national insolvency with which the government dealt by printing paper money, so that prices during wartime years rose by 1,000 percent.7 An obvious way out of the crisis was to bring the war to an end.

Germany urgently needed the agricultural and mineral wealth and the railroad system of Georgia, and even more so the oil wells of Azerbaijan, to sustain her war effort. Thinking ahead to the postwar world, German leaders also intended to use Transcaucasia as a spearhead into the markets of the Middle East. The Ottoman leaders also looked to the commercial uses of the provinces across their frontier. They thought in terms of restoring the old trade route with Iran, and of reviving their Black Sea and Crimean commerce. Enver, above all, aimed at the creation of a new Turkish empire that stretched into Central Asia, to which Transcaucasia would be the link. Convinced that Germany had disregarded Turkish interests when she negotiated the terms of the armistice with Russia, Enver proceeded to disregard German interests in Transcaucasia, and sent the flower of his remaining armies across the frontier to conquer Georgia and Armenia and to march on Azerbaijan.


pages: 160 words: 46,449

The Extreme Centre: A Warning by Tariq Ali

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, BRICs, British Empire, centre right, deindustrialization, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, first-past-the-post, full employment, Great Leap Forward, labour market flexibility, land reform, light touch regulation, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, obamacare, offshore financial centre, popular capitalism, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, Wolfgang Streeck

Chinese military doctrine, according to Martin Jacques, is rooted in Sun Zi’s writings: it sets much greater store on seeking to weaken and isolate the enemy than on actually fighting him. Thus China relies exclusively on trade to expand its influence. Despite its vast economic investments, it has yet to acquire a single foreign base (although it is investing in maritime facilities in Pakistan and Myanmar, in case trade routes in the South China Sea become blocked). Many have argued that the US went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq to seize the region’s energy resources, or to secure pipelines. However, the real beneficiary of both wars has been China. It has not only obtained some of the biggest contracts in Iraq, it recently also won a $3.4bn contract – the largest in Afghan history – to mine copper in Logar province.


City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age by P. D. Smith

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, Anthropocene, augmented reality, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, congestion charging, congestion pricing, cosmological principle, crack epidemic, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, en.wikipedia.org, Enrique Peñalosa, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kowloon Walled City, Lewis Mumford, Masdar, megacity, megastructure, multicultural london english, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, peak oil, pneumatic tube, RFID, smart cities, starchitect, telepresence, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, the High Line, Thomas Malthus, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

Trading centres, like Venice, often had colonies of different nationalities where merchants could find inns and lodgings among their own language communities. Indeed, the ancient forerunners of today’s hotels are the caravanserais, where merchants and their heavily laden camels spent the night. Generally these were large, square enclosures, located along trade routes every twenty or so miles (a day’s journey). In cities they were often near the main gate, and the merchants would wait there while the tax on their goods was calculated. The Iranian caravanserai next to the Madrassa Madir-I-Shah, on Isfahan’s Naghsh-e Jahan Square, dates from the eighteenth century.

The Spanish were awestruck when they arrived in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán in 1519 and were particularly impressed by the market with its astonishing display of goods rivalling anything in Europe: an agora of the New World. They calculated that the city needed fifty-five tons of grain, beans and other produce a day, most of which had to be transported in dugout canoes. Tenochtitlán was at the centre of a network of trade routes spread out across what is now Mexico. Tributes and levies of food, raw materials, tropical bird feathers and craft goods were sent to the city, which was the focus of imperial power. By the 1850s, London was the largest city the planet had yet seen, a teeming metropolis of more than one and a half million people.


pages: 477 words: 135,607

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson

air freight, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, flag carrier, full employment, global supply chain, intermodal, Isaac Newton, job automation, Jones Act, knowledge economy, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, oil shock, Panamax, Port of Oakland, post-Panamax, Productivity paradox, refrigerator car, Robert Solow, South China Sea, trade route, vertical integration, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Ports, railroads, governments, and trade unions around the world spent those years studying the ways that containerization had shaken freight transportation in the United States. They knew that the container had killed off thousands of jobs on the docks, rendered entire ports obsolete, and fundamentally altered decisions about business location. Even so, the speed with which the container conquered global trade routes took almost everyone by surprise. Some of the world’s great port cities soon saw their ports all but disappear, while insignificant towns on little-known harbors found themselves among the great centers of maritime commerce.23 Nowhere was the transformation more tumultuous than in Britain. London and Liverpool were by far Britain’s biggest ports in the early 1960s, but their business was remarkably close to home.

From whiskey distillers in Scotland to apple growers in Australia, major users of international shipping abandoned breakbulk freight as soon as regular container service was able to meet their needs. They had no reason to make this switch unless they found container shipping advantageous. Shippers’ overwhelming choice—in economic terms, their “revealed preference”—is very strong evidence that containerization on a trade route lowered the cost of shipping. The willingness of ship lines to share revenues through arrangements such as the North Atlantic Pool in 1971 indicates their desperation as freight rates tumbled.8 Then came the oil crisis. The dramatic oil-price rises that began in 1972 and accelerated after the Yom Kippur War in October 1973 had a disproportionate impact on all transportation industries.


Ukraine by Lonely Planet

Anton Chekhov, Burning Man, call centre, carbon footprint, centre right, gentrification, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, low cost airline, megacity, Skype, stakhanovite, Suez canal 1869, trade route

Eastern European filmmakers love to use this massive fort overlooking the Dnister River as a location; recently refurbished, it served as Warsaw Castle in the highly controversial Russian-language 2009 blockbuster movie Taras Bulba. With walls up to 40m high and 6m thick, today’s stone fortress was built in the 15th-century, replacing an earlier wooden structure. Its location safeguarded river trade routes making it a sought-after prize. The defining moment in its history came in 1621, with a threatened Turkish invasion. The incumbent Poles enlisted the help of 40,000 Cossacks and managed to rout a 250,000-strong Turkish army. This improbable victory made a hero of Cossack leader Petro Sahaydachny, whose huge statue greets you near the fortress’ entrance.

Named after its Moscow equivalent, pr Lenina runs from Avtozaz, the birthplace of the Zaporizhets – USSR’s most ridiculed car model – to the Soviet industrial icon, Dniproges power station. Neither of which are the reason people come here on holiday. The reason is Khortytsya – a rocky forested island where Cossacks set up their all-male free-rule republic, which prospered from raids on neighbouring empires and duties levied on anyone who used the river trade route. Today, it is the place to learn about Cossack culture and history, admire beautiful river vistas and spend a day hiking or bicycling. Sights Khortytsya Island Cossack Stronghold The Zaporizhska Sich on Khortytsya Island was the most important cradle of Ukrainian Cossackdom, where hetman (leader) Dmytro Baida united disparate groups of Cossacks in the construction of a sich (fort) in 1553–54.


How I Became a Quant: Insights From 25 of Wall Street's Elite by Richard R. Lindsey, Barry Schachter

Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, Bob Litterman, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized markets, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, Donald Knuth, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, global macro, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Ivan Sutherland, John Bogle, John von Neumann, junk bonds, linear programming, Loma Prieta earthquake, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, margin call, market friction, market microstructure, martingale, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, P = NP, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, performance metric, prediction markets, profit maximization, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, six sigma, sorting algorithm, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, stochastic process, subscription business, systematic trading, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, transfer pricing, value at risk, volatility smile, Wiener process, yield curve, young professional

I used to tell people that great mathematicians are like the great explorers. Explorers want to discover something new—a new trade route, a new land, gold—by venturing into the unknown. They do so with no guarantees of success. Great explorers are characterized by their courage and their desire to discover something new. Consider Christopher Columbus. His great passion was to find a westward route to the Indies. He doggedly pursued funding for his expedition, first from Portugal and finally from Spain, offering a new trade route in exchange for being named governor of any new lands he discovered and the title of “Great Admiral of the Ocean.”


pages: 422 words: 131,666

Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back by Douglas Rushkoff

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-globalists, AOL-Time Warner, banks create money, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, big-box store, Bretton Woods, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, easy for humans, difficult for computers, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Google Earth, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, loss aversion, market bubble, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative equity, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, peak oil, peer-to-peer, place-making, placebo effect, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, principal–agent problem, private military company, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, RFID, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social software, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, union organizing, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

While there’s some evidence of what we could call branded imagery as far back as the Bronze Age, the modern idea of branding might best be credited to King Louis XIV’s famed finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert. The Dutch, English, and Portuguese had invested heavily in navies and protecting their trade routes, but the French of this era were still heavily committed to regional ground armies and inexperienced in sea battles. They lost their bounties to pirates and their land claims to colonial rivals. France just couldn’t keep up with the heavy competition for resources in the New World, and began to run a trade deficit.

The florin began as an illegal “people’s” money, first minted in 1235 as a silver coin and then in gold in 1252, in a flagrant assumption of power by the people of Florence against Emperor Frederick II. Local municipalities had long been issuing their own currencies, but never in gold and never for long-distance transactions. Now, a comparatively regional power had established the ability to generate a currency that would retain its value over distance and time. Florence, located on major trade routes, was already an economic center. Royals there, like all monarchs, worked to ensure their stay in power—but they did so by broadening the social base of government. Instead of chartering corporations, Florentine nobles gave merchants a role in legislation, and supported the development of guilds.


The Rough Guide to Prague by Humphreys, Rob

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, centre right, clean water, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, Johannes Kepler, land reform, Live Aid, Mikhail Gorbachev, Peace of Westphalia, sexual politics, sustainable-tourism, trade route, upwardly mobile

STARÉ M Ě S TO Celetná, whose name comes from the bakers who used to bake a particular type of small loaf (calty) here in the Middle Ages, leads east from Staroměstské náměstí direct to the Prašná brána, one of the original gateways of the old town. It’s one of the oldest streets in Prague, lying along the former trade route from the old town market square, as well as on the králová cesta. Its buildings were smartly refaced in the Baroque period, and their pastel plasterwork is now crisply maintained. Dive down one of the covered passages to the left and into the backstreets, however, and you’ll soon lose the crowds. 93 Anežský klášter STARÉ M Ě S TO | Anežský klášter • Stavovské divadlo Further north from sv Jakub through the backstreets, the Anežský klášter (Convent of St Agnes), Prague’s oldest surviving Gothic building, stands within a stone’s throw of the river as it loops around to the east.

With Emperor Frederick II preoccupied with Mediterranean affairs and dynastic problems, and the Hungarians and Poles busy trying to repulse the Mongol invasions from 1220 onwards, the Přemyslids were able to assert their independence. In 1212, Otakar I (1192–1230) managed to extract a “Golden Bull” (formal edict) from the emperor, securing the royal title for himself and his descendants (who thereafter became kings of Bohemia). Prague prospered, too, benefiting from its position on the central European trade routes. Czechs, Germans, Jews and merchants from all over Europe settled there, and in 1234 the first of Prague’s historic five towns, Staré Město, was founded to accommodate them. As a rule, the Přemyslids welcomed German colonization, none more so than King Otakar II (1253–78), the most distinguished of the Přemyslid rulers, who systematically encouraged German craftsmen to settle in the kingdom.


pages: 409 words: 129,423

Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination and the Birth of a World by Oliver Morton

Apollo 11, Charles Babbage, classic study, Colonization of Mars, computer age, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Kim Stanley Robinson, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, planetary scale, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, sexual politics, the scientific method, trade route, undersea cable, V2 rocket, Works Progress Administration

At its foot sits the old naval college, where generations of Britannia’s officers, my late father included, learned to rule the waves. Through it all the Thames runs softly, looping around the Isle of Dogs, a local feature leading, as Conrad says in Heart of Darkness, “to the uttermost ends of the Earth.” Little sails down this umbilicus of empire now—but above it the new trade routes of the sky are sketched out by aircraft arriving and departing from London’s four airports, carving their way through the air we all breathe and the stratosphere we shelter under. To the west the Thames beneath them is still daytime blue; to the east it is already evening dark. Dawn may feel like an intervention by the sun, rising above a stationary Earth; sunset reveals the truth of the Earth’s turning, a slipping away into night.

The various threads that I see tying our world together when I look down the Thames from Greenwich Park were already being woven when Queen Elizabeth I looked out from the same heights: Ships sailed down the Thames and around the world (just), trade prospered across oceans, manufacturing was becoming newly dependent on capital, information was beginning to flow more freely thanks to the printing press. But no one then could have seen where those potentialities would lead: the squat bulk of Reuters, the towers of the banks, the trade routes revealed by the landing lights on aircraft. Though it flows from the present, the distant future is another world. We cannot know the future for what it is, because as yet it isn’t; we cannot know it for what it will be, because by the time it is, we won’t be. It is connected to us—its seeds are in us—but we are not connected to it.


Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All by Michael Shellenberger

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asperger Syndrome, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean tech, clean water, climate anxiety, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, gentleman farmer, global value chain, Google Earth, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, index fund, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, land tenure, Live Aid, LNG terminal, long peace, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microplastics / micro fibres, Murray Bookchin, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, renewable energy transition, Rupert Read, School Strike for Climate, Solyndra, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Plastics Production: Energy First, Feedstocks Later,” Environmental Research Letters 12, no. 3 (December 2017), https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aa60a7. 88. Christine Figgener (sea turtle biologist) in conversation with the author, November 6, 2019. 89. Marydele Donnelly, “Trade Routes for Tortoiseshell,” State of the World’s Sea Turtles (SWOT), Report Volume 3, February 1, 2008, https://www.seaturtlestatus.org/articles/2008/trade-routes-for-tortoiseshell. Associated Press, “Japan Agrees to End Endangered Hawksbill Turtle Imports After ’92,” Los Angeles Times, June 19, 1991, https://www.latimes.com. 90. Tina Deines, “Endangered hawksbill turtle shell trade is much bigger than scientists ever suspected,” National Geographic, March 27, 2019, https://www.nationalgeographic.com. 91.


pages: 476 words: 138,420

Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation by Serhii Plokhy

affirmative action, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, public intellectual, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, trade route, Transnistria, union organizing, work culture , zero-sum game, éminence grise

A small principality at the time of the Mongol invasion of northeastern Rus’ in 1238, Moscow did not have even a princely family of its own. It acquired one only under the Mongols. The princes of Moscow belonged to a junior line of the Rurikids, but thanks to the location of their principality at the crossroads of various trade routes and to their political skills, they became the most powerful princely house in northeastern Rus’. In 1317, the prince of Moscow married a sister of the khan of the Golden Horde, thereby gaining the title of grand prince of Vladimir and the power inherent in the post of the khan’s representative in Rus’.

In 1552, he defeated and annexed the Khanate of Kazan. The city’s inhabitants were resettled and replaced by subjects of the tsar—the policy applied earlier in Novgorod and Smolensk. In 1556, Ivan’s troops defeated another successor to the Horde, the Khanate of Astrakhan, and Muscovy took control of the all-important Volga trade route. In ideological terms, the tsar of Muscovy had defeated two Tatar rulers to whom the Muscovite chronicles referred consistently as “tsars.” Ivan’s authority was enhanced when he added their tsardoms to his. In his diplomatic correspondence, he would count separately the years of his rule over the Muscovite, Kazan, and Astrakhan tsardoms.


pages: 505 words: 138,917

Open: The Story of Human Progress by Johan Norberg

Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, carbon tax, citizen journalism, classic study, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, green new deal, humanitarian revolution, illegal immigration, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, negative emissions, Network effects, open borders, open economy, Pax Mongolica, place-making, profit motive, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, spice trade, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, ultimatum game, universal basic income, World Values Survey, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

‘Profit rather than plunder was their policy.’38 Around 1200 bc nearly all the major cities of the ancient world were sacked and destroyed by the ‘sea peoples’, a motley assortment of pirates who probably came from various places in the Mediterranean. There is a lack of consensus among academics, but these pirates probably wreaked so much havoc because of a combination of drought, earthquakes, the plague and new, deadlier swords and javelins. This so-called ‘Late Bronze-Age Collapse’ destroyed the old trade routes and took a horrible human toll. It resulted in a small dark age in Greece and many other places, but it also opened up opportunities for groups that would otherwise have been stifled by powerful emperors and temples. The Phoenicians would take advantage and end up ruling the waves for a thousand years.

Gutenberg’s printing press spread the word about new ideas and discoveries. In 1500, some ten million books were in circulation and a growing share of the population was literate. After 1500, the European mind was opened up even more because of the great voyages of discovery, prompted by attempts to find trade routes with Asia. ‘In that hemisphere I saw things incompatible with the opinions of philosophers,’ wrote Amerigo Vespucci about the continent that would be named after him. Europeans found new insights, strange plants and unknown creatures.34 After contact with India and China was established, startled sailors and traders brought home more advanced science, novel products and techniques.


pages: 485 words: 133,655

Water: A Biography by Giulio Boccaletti

active transport: walking or cycling, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, energy transition, financial engineering, Great Leap Forward, invisible hand, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, land reform, land tenure, linear programming, loose coupling, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megaproject, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peace of Westphalia, phenotype, scientific management, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, text mining, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, Washington Consensus, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

During the second millennium BCE, a vast commercial and diplomatic network developed between the territorial states of the eastern Mediterranean: Mitanni, Assyria, and Ebla in northern Mesopotamia; Babylonia in southern Mesopotamia; Elam in Iran; Ugarit on the Syrian coast; Mycenae around the Peloponnese and the Greek islands; the Hittites in Anatolia; Egypt. Tin and copper, the main ingredients of bronze metallurgy, pushed people to search for sources wherever deposits were and to trade over long distances. Reconstructing these trade routes is difficult. Mesopotamia may have sourced its tin from Anatolia, Afghanistan, or central Asia, supplied either by land, through the northern mountain ranges or Elam to the east, or by sea, from the Indus Valley and into the Gulf. This system of trade went well beyond metal. Written records from Ugarit, in modern-day Syria, describe vessels carrying four or five hundred tons of cargo.

The problem was that tsarist Russia had had relatively limited experience of infrastructure development. It oversaw a highly controlled, centralized, and inefficient agrarian economy. Towards the end of the nineteenth century it focused its modernization efforts on the Volga, which had been a critical northwest-to-southeast trade route since the eleventh century. But pursuing industrialization would have required unprecedented investments, far greater than what the tsarist regime had been able or willing to pursue. The relative stasis of the regime, surrounded by the economic and social ebullience of the second half of the nineteenth century, created the space for radical dreams.


Greece by Korina Miller

car-free, carbon footprint, credit crunch, flag carrier, Google Earth, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, informal economy, invention of the printing press, pension reform, period drama, restrictive zoning, sensible shoes, Suez canal 1869, too big to fail, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

The work is considered to be the first narrative of historical events ever written. * * * Return to beginning of chapter WAR & CONQUEST The Persian Wars Athens’ rapid growth as a major city-state also meant heavy reliance on food imports from the Black Sea; and Persia’s imperial expansion westward threatened strategic coastal trade routes across Asia Minor. Athens’ support for a rebellion in the Persian colonies of Asia Minor sparked the Persian drive to destroy the city. Persian emperor Darius spent five years suppressing the revolt and remained determined to succeed. A 25,000-strong Persian army reached Attica in 490 BC, but was defeated when an Athenian force of 10,000 outmanoeuvred it at the Battle of Marathon.

This was a prize coveted by the newly formed Balkan countries of Serbia and Bulgaria, as well as by Greece, and led to the outbreak of the Balkan Wars (1912 and 1913). The outcome was the Treaty of Bucharest (August 1913), which greatly expanded Greek territory (and with it its fertile agricultural resources). Its borders now took in the southern part of Macedonia (which included Thessaloniki, the vital cultural centre strategically positioned on the Balkan trade routes), part of Thrace, another chunk of Epiros, and the northeastern Aegean Islands, as well as recognising the union with Crete. WWI & Smyrna In March 1913 a lunatic assassinated King George, and his son Constantine became the monarch. King Constantine, who was married to the sister of the German emperor, insisted that Greece remain neutral when WWI broke out in August 1914.

Alexander and his generals spread the Greek culture and language widely, creating a Hellenistic society that would be absorbed by the Romans. Later, after the empire split into eastern and western halves in the 4th century AD, the society emerged as the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire. Thessaloniki became Byzantium’s second city, a vital commercial, cultural and strategic centre on the crossroads of Balkan trade routes. However, 6th- and 7th-century-AD Slavic migrations brought new populations, and challenges for the empire, which was frequently at war with the medieval Bulgarian kingdom from the 9th century to the 11th century. In 1018, Emperor Basil II finally defeated Bulgarian Tsar Samuel, who had ruled much of the southern Balkans from his capital on western Macedonia’s Mikri Prespa Lake.


pages: 200 words: 47,378

The Internet of Money by Andreas M. Antonopoulos

AltaVista, altcoin, bitcoin, blockchain, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, disruptive innovation, Dogecoin, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial exclusion, global reserve currency, information security, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, Marc Andreessen, Oculus Rift, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, QR code, ransomware, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, the medium is the message, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, underbanked, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

In that final stage, the only people who still believe it’s grand are grandparents. In the grand arc of technology, what started out as a masterpiece is now only consumed by those in the last stages of their lives. The first checks written out were used by royalty to fund great ventures like the East India Company to open the spice roads and trade routes to the East. In those days, only royals had checkbooks. Today, if you go into a supermarket and the grandmother, bless her heart, in front of you in the line opens up her purse and pulls out the checkbook, 15 people in line are going to groan audibly as they realize it’s going to take 15 minutes to write out that transaction.


Saveur New American Comfort Food by James Oseland

Kickstarter, spice trade, trade route

At SAVEUR, we’ve always been interested in where these foods come from, and we’ve trekked to the places where they’re produced. We’ve marveled at the producers’ ingenuity: the gristmills that grind wheat into flour, the aging rooms where cheeses develop their flavors. We’ve come to understand the historical and cultural contexts that shape a cuisine’s character: the trade routes, the agricultural traditions, the ways people obtain their food. We’ve learned to use cooking tools like seasoned woks for making Chinese stir-fries and clay tagines for Moroccan stews, and we’ve embraced techniques for everything from extracting the flavor from lemongrass to evenly slicing carrots.


pages: 162 words: 51,473

The Accidental Theorist: And Other Dispatches From the Dismal Science by Paul Krugman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate raider, declining real wages, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, life extension, new economy, Nick Leeson, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, rent control, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, trade route, very high income, working poor, zero-sum game

In particular, the most important discipline for understanding long swings in preindustrial population and real wages is not macroeconomics but microbe economics. Now and then devastating new diseases would appear (often, as McNeill showed in Plagues and Peoples, as a result either of conquests or of the opening of new trade routes, both of which tended to bring formerly separated populations, and the germs that they harbored, into contact). Initially the population would plunge and real wages would soar. As microbes and humans coevolved into a new equilibrium, population and pressure on resources would rise again, and the increasingly malnourished masses would become vulnerable to the next plague.


pages: 197 words: 49,296

The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis by Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac

3D printing, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Extinction Rebellion, F. W. de Klerk, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gail Bradbrook, General Motors Futurama, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mustafa Suleyman, Nelson Mandela, new economy, ocean acidification, plant based meat, post-truth, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, the scientific method, trade route, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

Still others are unstable because of the extreme heat, never mind flooding, wildfire, and tornadoes. This makes the food supply in general highly unpredictable. One thing hasn’t changed, though—if you have money, you have access. Global trade has slowed as countries such as China stop exporting and seek to hold on to their own resources. Disasters and wars rage, choking off trade routes. The tyranny of supply and demand is now unforgiving; because of its increasing scarcity, food can now be wildly expensive. Income inequality has always existed, but it has never been this stark or this dangerous. Entire regions suffer from epidemics of stunting and malnutrition. Reproduction has slowed overall, but most acutely in those countries where food scarcity is dire.


Around the World in 80 Trees by Jonathan Drori

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, European colonialism, TED Talk, trade route, women in the workforce

It was prescribed for serious conditions and was also a reassuringly expensive ingredient in love potions and breath-fresheners. Now we know that the resin contains antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory compounds, and it is still used locally as a mouthwash and to treat rashes and sores. Why dragon’s blood, though? Socotra was an important stop on trading routes between India, the Middle East and the Mediterranean, and the origin probably lies with Indian merchants who brought the resin to market along with their Hindu myths. One of these involved a legendary fight, on Socotran soil, between an elephant and a dragon, in which the dragon gulped the elephant’s blood before being squashed in the mêlée, spilling the blood of both animals.


pages: 762 words: 246,045

The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson

Admiral Zheng, fixed income, Khyber Pass, Kim Stanley Robinson, land tenure, Malacca Straits, post scarcity, South China Sea, trade route

Now it is clear that I was right to argue for your life, as word comes to us of your many activities, and wonderful investigations.' Khalid looked up at him to see if he were being mocked, and Nadir lifted a palm to show his sincerity. Khalid looked down again. 'But I came here to remind you that all these fascinating trials take place in a dangerous world. The khanate lies at the centre of all the trade routes in the world, with armies in all directions. The Khan is concerned to protect his subjects from attack, and yet we hear of cannon that would reduce our cities' walls in a week or less. The Khan wishes you to help him with this problem. He is sure you will be happy to bring him some small part of the fruits of your learning, to help him to defend the khanate.'

Very likely there were some underlying economic reasons for this phenomenon; Islam, perhaps by chance but perhaps not, appeared in the 'centre of the world', the area sometimes called the Isthmus Region, bounded by the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, the Mediterranean, the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. All the trade routes necessarily knotted here, like dragon arteries in a feng shui analysis. So it is not particularly surprising that for a time Islam provided the world with a general currency, the dinar, and a generally used language, Arabic. But it was also a religion, indeed it became almost the universal religion, and we must understand that its appeal as a religion arose partly from the fact that in a world of growing inequalities, Islam spoke of a realm in which all were equal – all equal before God no matter their age, gender, occupation, race or nationality.

So, added to the subjugation of farmers, women, and the family, was this fourth inequality, of race or group, leading to the subjugation of the most powerless peoples to slavery. And the unequal accumulation of wealth by the elites continued. The discovery of the New World has only accelerated these processes, providing both more wealth and more slaves. The trade routes themselves have moved substantially from land to sea, and Islam no longer controls the crossroads as it did for a thousand years. The main centre of accumulation has shifted to China; indeed, China may have been the centre all along. It has always had the most people; and from ancient times people everywhere else have traded for Chinese goods.


Lonely Planet Norway by Lonely Planet

carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, centre right, energy security, G4S, GPS: selective availability, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, low cost airline, mass immigration, North Sea oil, place-making, trade route, urban renewal, white picket fence

Hiking Routes The list of possibilities for hiking in Norway is almost endless, but if we had to list our top 10, it would be the following: AJotunheimen National Park The doyen of Norwegian hiking destinations, with countless routes and incomparable high country. ARondane National Park Less-crowded trails than those of Jotunheimen, but arguably as beautiful. AHardangervidda plateau Trails criss-cross this magnificent plateau, the home of reindeer. AAurlandsdalen Historic four-day hike following ancient trading routes from Geiteryggen to Aurland. ATrollstigen Some wonderful treks through the dramatic Trollstigen range. ADovrefjell-Sunndalsfjella National Park Wildlife- and bird-rich park with the Knutshøene massif as a centrepiece. AStabbursdalen National Park Roadless park with tracks through glacial canyons and the world's northernmost pine forest.

There's a comprehensive guide to the area at www.sognefjord.no. 1Sights oBorgund Stave ChurchCHURCH (www.stavechurch.com/en/borgund; Borgund; adult/child 90/70kr; h8am-8pm May-Sep, 10am-5pm Oct-Apr) Some 30km southeast of Lærdalsøyri along the E16, this 12th-century stave church was raised beside one of the major trade routes between eastern and western Norway. Dedicated to St Andrew, it's one of the best known, most photographed and certainly the best preserved of Norway's stave churches. It's simple, inky interior and sublimely rustic altar are deeply moving. Beside it is the only free-standing medieval wooden bell tower remaining in Norway. 8Getting There & Away Boat Norled (www.norled.no) operates a daily boat from Bergen to Flåm (adult/child 825/415kr, 5½ hours), stopping along the way at several small towns including Vik, Balestrand and Sogndal.

It can be reached via the footpath between Flåm and Aurland. 2Activities The Aurland and Lærdal tourist offices have produced six walker-friendly sheets of local walks, where the route is mapped upon an aerial photo. Geiteryggen to Aurland HikeHIKING The classic trek down Aurlandsdalen from Geiteryggen to Aurland follows a stream from source to sea as you tramp one of the oldest trading routes between eastern and western Norway. From mid-July, you can start this four-day walk in Finse, on the Oslo–Bergen rail line, with overnight stops at Geiterygghytta, Steinbergdalen and Østerbø. The final section from Østerbø (820m) to Vassbygdi (95m) is the most scenic and makes for a hugely enjoyable day hike (allow six to seven hours); it's usually open between early June and late September.


China: A History by John Keay

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, Deng Xiaoping, Great Leap Forward, imperial preference, invention of movable type, land tenure, mass immigration, means of production, Pax Mongolica, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , South China Sea, special economic zone, spice trade, trade route, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, éminence grise

But farther to the south-west their progress was halted in the vicinity of the Lancang (upper Mekong) River. The perpendicular terrain, as much as the population, would in fact keep the silk-and-cane trail shrouded in mystery for centuries. Only with the construction of the Burma Road in the run-up to the Second World War would a serviceable trade route finally link China and India over the dripping passes at this extremity of the eastern Himalaya. Meanwhile Han operations against the Xiongnu had continued. In 121 BC they had been rewarded with the surrender of one of the shanyu’s subordinate kings, who brought with him 40,000 men and control of the Gansu corridor.

At the time the Buddha seems to have been revered, along with Laozi, as a co-opted member of the Daoist pantheon rather than as the embodiment of an alternative doctrinal ‘Way’. There is no mention of the enormous body of literature – devotional, metaphysical and organisational – that 500 years of Buddhism in south Asia had generated. And Pengcheng being on a trade route that leads to Luoyang not from central Asia but from the China coast, it is possible that the cult had reached the Later Han empire by sea. Buddhist communities were already established in south-east Asia; and the Buddhist symbols (lotus flowers, elephants, etc.) found among the second-century relief carvings at Kongwangshan on the seaboard of Jiangsu appear to substantiate this routing.

The Russians may not have appreciated that Jurchen tribesmen encountered on the Amur were the ‘wild’ brethren of Beijing’s Manchu emperors; and the Manchus seem not at first to have realised that their adversaries in the far north-east were subjects of an empire from which several merchant-diplomats had reached China via more conventional trade routes. A Russian mission of 1618 to the Ming court had in fact pipped the Portuguese and the Dutch to become the first ever from a European power to reach Beijing and return safely. Unfortunately it took no Chinese interpreter back with it; a letter from the Wanli emperor inviting further ‘tribute’ missions thus languished unread for nearly sixty years.


pages: 1,535 words: 337,071

Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World by David Easley, Jon Kleinberg

Albert Einstein, AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Douglas Hofstadter, Dutch auction, Erdős number, experimental subject, first-price auction, fudge factor, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, Gerard Salton, Gerard Salton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, information retrieval, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, longitudinal study, market clearing, market microstructure, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, Pareto efficiency, Paul Erdős, planetary scale, power law, prediction markets, price anchoring, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, random walk, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, sealed-bid auction, search engine result page, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, seminal paper, Simon Singh, slashdot, social contagion, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, stochastic process, Ted Nelson, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two and twenty, ultimatum game, Vannevar Bush, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

We will find that auctions represent a basic kind of economic interaction that can be 1.2. CENTRAL THEMES AND TOPICS 19 Figure 1.9: In some settings, such as this map of Medieval trade routes, phys- ical networks constrain the patterns of interaction, giving certain participants an intrinsic economic advantage based on their network position. (Image from http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/Late Medieval Trade Routes.jpg.) directly generalized to more complex patterns of interactions on networks. As a general part of our investigation of game theory, we will abstract such situations with inter-dependent behavior into a common framework, where a collection of individuals must each commit to a strategy, thereby receiving a payoff that depends on the strategies chosen by everyone.

In other cases, they also reflect fundamental underlying constraints in the market that limit the access of certain participants to each other. In modern markets, these constraints could be institutional restrictions based on regulations; in other settings, they could be based on physical constraints like geography. For example, Figure 1.9 shows a map of trade routes in medieval Europe: when the physical movement of goods is costly and difficult, the economic outcome for different cities can depend significantly on where they are located in the underlying transportation network. In all these settings, then, the network structure encodes a lot about the pattern of trade, with the success levels of different participants affected by their positions in the network.

However, it turns out that traders can make zero profit for reasons based more on the global structure of the network, rather than on direct competition with any one trader. The network in Figure 11.9 illustrates how this can arise. In this trading network there is no direct competition for any one “trade route” from a seller to a buyer. However, in any equilibrium, all bid and ask prices take on some common value x between 0 and 1, and the goods flow from the sellers to the buyers. So all traders again make zero profit. It is easy to see that this is an equilibrium: we can simply check that each trader is using a best response to all the other traders’ strategies.


Southwest USA Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Burning Man, carbon footprint, Columbine, Day of the Dead, Donner party, El Camino Real, friendly fire, G4S, haute couture, haute cuisine, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), low earth orbit, machine readable, off grid, off-the-grid, place-making, SpaceShipOne, supervolcano, trade route, transcontinental railway, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, Works Progress Administration, X Prize

Call ahead or check the website for current accessibility. CROSSING THE BORDER For more information on crossing the Mexican border, check out Click here. South of Tucson From Tucson, the I-19 is a straight 60-mile shot south through the Santa Cruz River Valley to Nogales on the Mexican border. A historical trading route since pre-Hispanic times, the highway is unique in the US because distances are posted in kilometers – when it was built there was a strong push to go metric. Speed limits, however, are posted in miles! Though not terribly scenic, I-19 is a ribbon of superb cultural sights with a bit of shopping thrown in the mix.

You’ll need a couple of hours to drive the desert dirt road to get here and to hike around a bit, but it’s well worth it. Take I-25 exit 264; follow Hwy 16 west to Hwy 22, then right onto Tribal Rte 92. At the time of research, dogs were banned from Tent Rocks. Turquoise Trail The Turquoise Trail has been a major trade route since at least 2000 BC, when local artisans began trading Cerrillos turquoise with communities in present-dayMexico. Today it’s the scenic back road between Albuquerque and Santa Fe, lined with quirky communities and other diversions. For info, see www.turquoisetrail.org. CEDAR CREST Located northeast of Albuquerque, on the eastern side of the Sandia Mountains, and just a bit up Sandia Crest Rd (NM 165) from Cedar Crest, the Tinkertown Museum (www.tinkertown.com; 121 Sandia Crest Rd; adult/child $3/1; 9am-5:30pm Apr-Nov; ) is one of the weirdest museums in New Mexico.

An alternative to the bigger and more visited sites like Chaco Culture National Historical Park and Mesa Verde National Park, the 27-acre Aztec Ruins National Monument (www.nps.gov/azru; admission $5; 8am-5pm Sep-May, to 6pm Jun-Aug) features the largest reconstructed kiva in the country, with an internal diameter of almost 50ft, originally built around AD 1100. Let your imagination wander as you sit inside the Great Kiva. Rangers give early-afternoon talks about ancient architecture, trade routes and astronomy during the summer months. The small but excellent Aztec Museum & Pioneer Village (www.aztecmuseum.org; 125 N Main Ave; admission free; 10am-4pm Tue-Sat) features an eclectic collection of historical objects, including telephones, barbershop chairs and a great display of late-19th-century regional photographs.


pages: 196 words: 54,339

Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, clockwork universe, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, digital capitalism, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, gig economy, Google bus, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, invisible hand, iterative process, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mirror neurons, multilevel marketing, new economy, patient HM, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, theory of mind, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

If anything, capitalism as it’s currently being executed is the enemy of commerce, extracting value from marketplaces and delivering it to remote shareholders. The very purpose of the capitalist operating system is to prevent widespread prosperity. What we now think of as capitalism was born in the late Middle Ages, in the midst of a period of organic economic growth. Soldiers had just returned from the Crusades, having opened up new trade routes and bringing back innovations from foreign lands. One of them, from the Moorish bazaar, was the concept of “market money.” Until this point, European markets operated mostly through barter, the direct exchange of goods. Gold coins, like the florin, were just too scarce and valuable to be spent on bread.


pages: 225 words: 189

The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War by Robert D. Kaplan

Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, clean water, Deng Xiaoping, edge city, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Honoré de Balzac, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Peace of Westphalia, Ronald Reagan, Thomas Malthus, trade route, unemployed young men, Yom Kippur War

While Pakistan has grown weaker as a state, with near anarchy pre­ vailing in Karachi, its regional power has grown, thanks to the I SI. The Taliban religious movement in Afghanistan, for in- 110 / THE COMING ANARCHY stance, in its recent sudden rise received help from the IS I, which wanted to resurrect trade routes through Afghanistan to Iran. This kind of influence may sound frightening, but it is ef­ ficient compared with what we have now. Ever since the ancient soothsayers of the Delphic oracle there have been intelligence agencies of one sort or another. Spying is as old as war itself. Moses sent spies into Canaan.


pages: 479 words: 144,453

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari

23andMe, Aaron Swartz, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, call centre, Chekhov's gun, Chris Urmson, cognitive dissonance, Columbian Exchange, computer age, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, European colonialism, experimental subject, falling living standards, Flash crash, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, glass ceiling, global village, Great Leap Forward, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, lifelogging, low interest rates, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, peak-end rule, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, stem cell, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, ultimatum game, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

Instead of changing their stories to fit reality, they can change reality to fit their stories. In the end, external reality matches their bureaucratic fantasies, but only because they forced reality to do so. For example, the borders of many African countries disregard river lines, mountain ranges and trade routes, split historical and economic zones unnecessarily, and ignore local ethnic and religious identities. The same tribe may find itself riven between several countries, whereas one country may incorporate splinters of numerous rival clans. Such problems bedevil countries all over the world, but in Africa they are particularly acute because modern African borders don’t reflect the wishes and struggles of local nations.

Princes, priests and peasants assumed that human production was more or less stable, that one person could enrich himself only by pilfering somebody else and that their grandchildren were unlikely to enjoy a better standard of living. This stagnation resulted to a large extent from the difficulties involved in financing new projects. Without proper funding, it wasn’t easy to drain swamps, construct bridges and build ports – not to mention engineer new wheat strains, discover new energy sources or open new trade routes. Funds were scarce because there was little credit in those days; there was little credit because people had no belief in growth; and people didn’t believe in growth because the economy was stagnant. Stagnation thereby perpetuated itself. Suppose you live in a medieval town that suffers from annual outbreaks of dysentery.


Lonely Planet Cancun, Cozumel & the Yucatan (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, John Hecht, Sandra Bao

Bartolomé de las Casas, carbon footprint, colonial rule, Day of the Dead, illegal immigration, income inequality, low cost airline, mass immigration, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, traffic fines

Tulum Activities, Courses & Tours 1 Community Tours Sian Ka'an B4 2 I Bike Tulum C2 3 Xibalba Dive Center D3 Sleeping 4 Cabañas Playa Condesa F4 5 El Paraíso F3 6 Kin-Ha Suites C4 7 La Vita è Bella F4 8 L'Hotelito C3 9 Teetotum C2 10 Weary Traveler A4 11 Zazil-kin F3 Eating 12 Cetli C3 13 Charlie's B4 14 El Mariachi Loco C3 15 La Nave C3 16 Súper San Francisco de Asis C1 Drinking & Nightlife 17 Curandero B3 History Most archaeologists believe that Tulum was occupied during the late post-Classic period (AD 1200–1521) and that it was an important port town during its heyday. The Maya sailed up and down this coast, maintaining trading routes all the way down into Belize. When Juan de Grijalva sailed past in 1518, he was amazed by the sight of the walled city, its buildings painted a gleaming red, blue and yellow and a ceremonial fire flaming atop its seaside watchtower. The ramparts that surround three sides of Tulum (the fourth side being the sea) leave little question as to its strategic function as a fortress.

Community Tours Sian Ka’an (Click here) runs tours out of Tulum that include pick-up in the Zona Hotelera. Tours include a guided walk of the interpretive trail at the Muyil archaeological site south of Tulum, and a boat trip or float trip (M$1287) through Lagunas Muyil, Chunyaxché and Boca Paila via an ancient Maya trade route along a natural channel. On the way you can see abundant birdlife and visit little-known Maya temples. It also offers snorkeling (M$975), birding, and fly-fishing trips (M$7150) further into the reserve. If you’re with young ones, ask about discounts for children under 12. Community Tours Sian Ka’an is a sustainable tourism project run by locals from Maya communities.


pages: 523 words: 148,929

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 by Michio Kaku

agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Asilomar, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, blue-collar work, British Empire, Brownian motion, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, delayed gratification, digital divide, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, friendly AI, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hydrogen economy, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mass immigration, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Ray Kurzweil, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, social intelligence, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, telepresence, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Turing machine, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize

Science was not just an academic exercise but a way to create new weapons and new avenues of wealth. Soon, the rise of science and technology in Europe began to weaken the power of China and the Ottoman Empire. The Muslim civilization, which had prospered for centuries as a gateway for trade between the East and the West, faltered as European sailors forged trade routes to the New World and the East—especially around Africa, bypassing the Middle East. And China found itself being carved up by European gunboats that ironically exploited two pivotal Chinese inventions, gunpowder and the compass. The answer to the question “What happened?” is clear. Science and technology happened.

Exotic delicacies from around the world are now routinely sold in supermarkets. The falling of commodity prices is due to a variety of factors, such as better mass production, containerization, shipping, communication, and competition. (For example, today’s high school students have a hard time understanding why Columbus risked life and limb to find a shorter trade route to the spices of the East. Why couldn’t he simply go to the supermarket, they ask, and get some oregano? But in the days of Columbus, spices and herbs were extremely expensive. They were prized because they could mask the taste of rotting food, since there were no refrigerators in those days. At times, even kings and emperors had to eat rotten food at dinner.


pages: 522 words: 144,511

Sugar: A Bittersweet History by Elizabeth Abbott

addicted to oil, agricultural Revolution, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, company town, cotton gin, death from overwork, flex fuel, Ford Model T, land tenure, liberation theology, Mason jar, Ralph Waldo Emerson, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce, working poor

It is likely, on the other hand, that the more complex techniques required to crystallize sugar originated from a single source but, as historical geographer Jock Galloway notes in The Sugar Cane Industry, evidence that might trace its history is lacking. What we do know is that these techniques developed in northern India, from where they were introduced throughout the trade routes to the Far East and, through Persia, to the West and ultimately to the New World. Sugarcane spread steadily across continents and oceans and, over time, rivaled and often replaced honey as the sweetener of choice. Honey’s distinctive taste may be too strong for some food and drink, and until improved refining processes developed in the nineteenth century, it usually contained discernible, and perhaps disagreeable, amounts of beeswax.

American environmentalist Kirkpatrick Sale rightly sees the nature of Columbus’s encounters with the natives as instrumental in the development of “everything of importance in the succeeding 500 years”: “the triumph of capitalism, … the establishment of a global monoculture, the genocide of the indigenes, the slavery of people of color, the colonization of the world, the destruction of primal environments.”25 To this list should be added: the creation of major trade routes, notably the famous triangular trade between the sugar lands, Europe, Africa and North America; the creation of new Creole societies; the redefinition of taste standards and the addiction of millions of people to sweetness and to unhealthy, disease-causing diets; the development of the language of human rights; and fatal damage to the planet’s flora and fauna.


pages: 566 words: 144,072

In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan by Seth G. Jones

belling the cat, business climate, clean water, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, drone strike, failed state, friendly fire, invisible hand, Khyber Pass, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murray Gell-Mann, open borders, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, trade route, zero-sum game

“Ambushes, assassinations, attacks on supply convoys, bridges, pipelines, and airfields, with the avoidance of set piece battles; these are history’s proven techniques for the guerrilla,” wrote Mohammad Yousaf, who ran Pakistan’s ISI operations in Afghanistan during the Soviet War.32 Indeed, Afghanistan’s rich history serves as a springboard for understanding the American experience in a country that since antiquity has been called a graveyard of empires. IN THE GRAVEYARD OF EMPIRES FIGURE 1.1 Map of Afghanistan CHAPTER ONE Descent into Violence AFGHANISTAN’S STRATEGIC LOCATION, wedged between Persia, the weathered steppes of Central Asia, and the trade routes of the Indian Subcontinent, has long made it alluring to great powers. When Alexander the Great began his march into Afghanistan around 330 BC, locals witnessed a forbidding sight. Riding ahead of the invading force were scouts armed with sarisas—pikes up to twenty feet long, weighted at the base and projecting fifteen feet in front of the mounted cavalry.

Behind his thick, six-foot frame was a charming, almost unassuming, personality. But Khalilzad could also be an imposing figure. He exuded an extraordinary sense of confidence and authority when he walked into a room, but his true métier was the face-to-face meeting. Herat, in the fertile Hari River Valley, lies seventy miles from the Iranian border, along the ancient trade routes that linked Europe with the Middle East, India, and China. The city was later used by the British, Soviet, and Taliban armies, each of whom conquered the city and constructed key military installations. Ismail Khan had been a staple figure in Herat for several decades, participating in the Soviet War in the 1980s and the Afghan civil war in the early 1990s, until he was captured by the Taliban later in the decade.


pages: 641 words: 147,719

The Rough Guide to Cape Town, Winelands & Garden Route by Rough Guides, James Bembridge, Barbara McCrea

affirmative action, Airbnb, blood diamond, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, carbon footprint, colonial rule, F. W. de Klerk, gentrification, ghettoisation, haute cuisine, Maui Hawaii, Murano, Venice glass, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, out of africa, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, transfer pricing, young professional

European explorers called the headland the Cape of Storms for its treacherous weather; its ferocity also explains False Bay’s name, given by mariners who confused it with Table Bay and realised they still had to round the stormy peninsula. The altogether sunnier title, Cape of Good Hope, came after Vasco Da Gama made it past in 1497, opening up a new trade route from Europe to India and the Far East. If you don’t bring food, you can take in the view while you eat at Two Oceans. Flora, fauna and furry felons The majority of visitors to the Cape of Good Hope Nature Reserve make a beeline for Cape Point and take in the rest of the reserve through a vehicle window, but walking is the best way to appreciate indigenous Cape flora.

There is nothing pretty along the shoreline, the Castle is peculiar, the houses resemble prisons”, and “one sees here peculiar people who live in strange ways”. Dutch global influence began to wane in the 1700s, but at the same time the Cape settlement began to develop an independent identity and a little prosperity, based on its pivotal position on the European–Far East trade route. People began referring to it as “Kaapstad” (Cape Town) rather than “the Cape settlement”, and by 1750 it had a thousand buildings, with over three thousand diverse inhabitants. Some of these were indigenous Khoikhoi people, but the largest number were VOC employees, dominated by an elite of high-ranking Dutch-born officials.


pages: 524 words: 155,947

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

They encouraged arts and crafts in the cities they conquered, kept taxes low and were relaxed in matters of religion.33 They also had a highly efficient postal service, with messengers able to travel 250 to 300 miles a day with the help of fresh horses. Thanks to their fearsome reputation, banditry was much reduced; and a series of posting houses monitored the arrival and departure of trade caravans. A chronicler of the day boasted that “a maiden bearing a nugget of gold on her head could wander safely throughout the realm”.34 The trading routes of the era may have helped to spread the Black Death from Asia to Europe in remarkably quick time. The first signs of the disease are now thought to have occurred in Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea in 1346. By the following year, it had hit Constantinople, and the rest of Europe was ravaged in 1348 and 1349.35 The route of the disease may have been via a Mongol siege of Kaffa in the Crimea, a base for Italian merchants – the merchants fled back home, taking it with them.

The medieval spice trade was quite closely controlled by guilds in modern Sri Lanka, and the Malabar coast of India.45 From there the spices were shipped via the Middle East, where further costs were added and middlemen took another cut. The Turks captured Constantinople, ending the 1,000-year-old Byzantine empire in 1453, which seems to have cut off, for a while, one of those trading routes. So there was a big incentive for anyone who could find a sea passage to Asia. Bartolomeu Dias managed to round the southern tip of Africa in 1488, which he called the “Cape of Storms”, later renamed, in a classic example of the power of advertising, the “Cape of Good Hope”. Europe’s exploration drive was made possible by various improvements in shipping that occurred in the Middle Ages, including, as has already been noted, the lateen or triangular sail, taken from the Islamic world, and the sternpost rudder and the compass, which improved steering and navigation and were taken from the Chinese.


pages: 538 words: 153,734

Apollo 13 by Jim Lovell, Jeffrey Kluger

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, company town, cuban missile crisis, Gene Kranz, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, trade route, white flight

The business of exploring space may have appeared to have become dull and clumsy, stripped of the crapshoot exuberance that made it the grand adventure it once was, but it was still the business of exploring space. Put enough engineers at enough drafting tables in enough NASA facilities, and someone is almost certain to dream up something extraordinary. Quietly, in the late 1980s, extraordinary things indeed started happening. Even as the shuttles were plying their cautious trade routes from Canaveral to orbit and back to Earth again, other ships—unmanned ships—were accomplishing much more, much farther away. Within NASA, the manned and unmanned space programs had long operated side by side, but the unmanned program had always been thought of as sort of a poor institutional relation.

They were the ones who monitored the internal organs of the ship, who kept its juices and gases bubbling and flowing, and who, in the end, were responsible for keeping the mechanical organism alive in a place that it really had no business being. Over the first year and a half of the manned Apollo program, the people who worked the Mission Control consoles accomplished remarkable things, learning to ply the translunar highway like a familiar old trading route. Four times they had sent crews to the moon—twice, on Apollos 11 and 12, they had set them down on the moon—and four times they had brought them safely home. Liebergot, like most of the other people in the room, had worked all of those flights, and had begun to feel that there was little he and his colleagues couldn’t anticipate, from liftoff to moonwalk to splashdown, and little they couldn’t handle.


The Rough Guide to Wales by Rough Guides

back-to-the-land, country house hotel, land reform, mass immigration, oil shale / tar sands, price stability, trade route

PRIL 3AT 3UN AMnPM WWWLOGGERHEADS WALES COUK "US BETWEEN -OLD AND 2UTHIN COMES THIS WAY "EYOND ,OGGERHEADS THE " BRANCHES RIGHT OFF THE ! FOLLOWING AN OLD TURNPIKE ROUTE BETWEEN -OLD AND 2UTHIN )T CLIMBS UP TO "WLCH 0EN "ARRAS A SHALLOW PASS WHERE THE ROAD MEETS THE /FFAS $YKE LONG DISTANCE PATH THOUGH NOT THE $YKE ITSELF WHICH RUNS ALONG THESE BALD TOPS FOLLOWING THE LINE OF A "RONZE !GE TRADING ROUTE PAST THE REMAINS OF SIX )RON !GE HILLFORTS 4HE HIGHEST POINT IS THE FOOT h-OTHERS -OUNTAINv -OEL &AMAU MOEL AND ITS INITIAL MUTATION FOEL MEAN hBARE MOUNTAINv WHICH IS TOPPED BY THE TRUNCATED *UBILEE 4OWER 4HE SUBJECT OF MANY A DISPARAGING REMARK WHEN IT WAS BUILT IN TO CELEBRATE 'EORGE )))S lFTY YEAR REIGN THIS %GYPTIAN STYLE STRUCTURE WAS NEVER COMPLETED 4HE PLANNED PYRAMID WAS TO RISE TO FT BUT WAS DAMAGED IN A STORM IN AND ONLY PARTIALLY REPAIRED IN 4HE RUINS MAY NOT BE MUCH BUT ON A CLEAR DAY THE VIEWS OVER THE 6ALE OF #LWYD AS FAR AS 3NOWDON AND #ADAIR )DRIS MAKE A WALK OUT HERE WORTHWHILE SEE BOX ABOVE 0ROXIMITY TO ,IVERPOOL #HESTER AND 7REXHAM AND THE RELATIVELY GENTLE TERRAIN MAKE THIS A POPULAR SPOT AT WEEKENDS STICK TO WEEKDAYS IF POSSIBLE 5)& /035)8"- & 4 #03%& 3- "/% 4 /PUFUIF 04-BOESBOHFSNBQJTSFDPNNFOEFEGPSUIFTFXBMLT 'SPNUIFDBSQBSLBU#XMDI1FO#BSSBT bQBSLJOH ZPVDBONBLFUIFTUFFQDMJNC TPVUIXBSETUPUIFNPTUJNQSFTTJWFPGUIF$MXZEJBOIJMMGPSUTJUFTPOGPPU&OELª &ENLLI NJMFSFUVSONJOGUBTDFOU &YDBWBUJPOTIFSFVODPWFSFEIVUDJSDMFT XJUIJOFBSUIXPSLTUISFFRVBSUFSTPGBNJMFBDSPTT5IFIFJHIUGSPNEJUDICPUUPNUP CBOL UPQ SFBDIFT GU JO QMBDFT XJUI USJQMF EFGFODFT PO UIF MFTT FBTJMZ EFGFOEFE FBTUFSOnBOL"FSJBMTIPUTNBLFNVDINPSFPGUIJTUIBOJTWJTJCMFPOUIFHSPVOE CVU UIBUEPFTOUEFUSBDUGSPNUIFXBML 'SPNUIFTBNFDBSQBSL BCSPBEQBUIMFBETBNJMFBOEBIBMGOPSUIUP-OELª&AMAU NJMFTSFUVSOoISGUBTDFOU BOEUIF+VCJMFF5PXFS 'PSNPSFJOGPSNBUJPO QJDLVQUIF%JTDPWFS.PFM'BNBV$PVOUSZ1BSLMFBnFUGSPN UIF3VUIJOPS.PMEUPVSJTUPGmDF 3VUIJO 7ITH ITS ATTRACTIVE KNOT OF HALF TIMBERED BUILDINGS A HANDFUL OF SIGHTS AND SOME OF THE lNEST FOOD AND LODGINGS IN THE AREA 254(). 2HUTHUN TEN MILES WEST OF -OLD SHOULD NOT BE MISSED 4HE TOWN IS BUILT ON A COMMANDING RISE IN THE 6ALE OF #LWYD CLOSE TO LANDS HELD BY /WAIN 'LYND"R DURING HIS QUEST FOR DOMINION OVER ALL OF 7ALES IN )TS RED STONE CASTLE BUILT BY %DWARD ) WAS THEN OWNED BY ,ORD DE 'REY OF 2UTHIN A FAVOURITE OF (ENRY )6 WHO USED HIS INmUENCE TO HAVE 'LYND"R DECLARED A TRAITOR AND ACQUIRE HIS LAND )N RESPONSE 'LYND"R CROWNED HIMSELF 0RINCE OF 7ALES AND BESIEGED 2UTHIN RAZING THE TOWN ONCE HE HAD PLUNDERED THE GOODS BROUGHT TO ITS FAIR BY THE 5)& /035)8"- & 4 #03%& 3- "/% 4 ].PMEBOEUIF7BMFPG$MXZE ©5 4HE©%YES©OF©2UTHIN %NGLISH 4HE CASTLE WENT ON TO RESIST THE 0ARLIAMENTARIANS FOR ELEVEN WEEKS DURING THE #IVIL 7AR EVENTUALLY FALLING TO 'ENERAL -YTTON IN AFTER WHICH IT WAS DESTROYED )N IT WAS PARTIALLY RESTORED AS A HOTEL WITH )TALIAN AND ROSE GARDENS LANDSCAPED AROUND THE ANCIENT MOAT AND CRUMBLING RUINS 3TRICTLY SPEAKING THE GROUNDS ARE OPEN TO RESIDENTS AND PEACOCKS ONLY BUT YOU CAN WANDER THROUGH IF ATTENDING ONE OF THE TACKY MEDIEVAL BANQUETS OR DRINKING IN THE PANELLED LIBRARY BAR 4U1FUFST4RVBSF "EFORE MAKING TRACKS FOR 2UTHIN 'AOL ITS WORTH SPENDING A FEW MINUTES AROUND 3T 0ETERS 3QUARE THE HUB OF THE TOWNS MEDIEVAL STREET PLAN 3T 0ETERS #HURCH DAILY AMnPM OR THEREABOUTS IS APPROACHED VIA A LOVELY PAIR OF IRON GATES WROUGHT BY THE $AVIES "ROTHERS WHO ALSO MADE THE GATES OF 3T 'ILES CHURCH IN 7REXHAM AND THOSE AT #HIRK #ASTLE 4HE CEILING OF ITS NORTH AISLE CONSISTS OF CARVED BLACK OAK PANELS WITH 4UDOR 2OSE BOSSES REPUT EDLY DONATED BY (ENRY 6)) FROM "ASINGWERK !

GE AROUND "# 4HROUGH THEIR EXTENSIVE TRADE NETWORKS THE INHABITANTS OF 7ALES AND THE REST OF "RITAIN GRADUALLY ADOPTED NEW TECHNIQUES CHANGING TO MORE SOPHISTICATED USE OF METALS AND DEVELOPING A WELL ORGANIZED SOCIAL STRUCTURE4HE ESTABLISHED ARISTOCRACY ENGAGED IN MUCH TRIBAL WARFARE AS SUGGESTED BY LARGE NUMBERS OF EARTHWORK FORTS BUILT IN THIS AND THE IMMEDIATELY SUCCEEDING PERIOD n THE CHIEF EXAMPLES BEING AT (OLYHEAD -OUNTAIN ON !NGLESEY AND THE "ULWALKS AT #HEPSTOW 4HE #ELTS #ELTIC INVADERS SPREADING FROM THEIR CENTRAL %UROPEAN HOMELAND SETTLED IN 7ALES IN AROUND "# IMPARTING A GREAT CULTURAL INmUENCE &AMILIAR WITH -EDITERRANEAN CIVILIZATION THROUGH TRADING ROUTES THEY INTRODUCED SUPERIOR METHODS OF METALWORKING THAT FAVOURED IRON RATHER THAN BRONZE FROM WHICH THEY FORGED NOT JUST WEAPONS BUT ALSO COINS 'OLD WAS USED FOR ORNAMENTAL WORKS n THE lRST RECOGNIZABLE 7ELSH ART n HEAVILY INmUENCED BY THE SYMBOLIC PATTERNED ,A 4ÒNE STYLE STILL THOUGHT OF AS QUINTESSENTIALLY #ELTIC 4HE #ELTS ARE CREDITED WITH INTRODUCING THE BASIS OF MODERN 7ELSH4HE ORIGINAL #ELTIC TONGUE WAS SPOKEN OVER A WIDE AREA GRADUALLY DIVIDING INTO 'OIDELIC OR 1 #ELTIC NOW SPOKEN IN THE )SLE OF -AN )RELAND AND 3COTLAND AND "RYTHONIC 0 #ELTIC SPOKEN IN 7ALES AND #ORNWALL AND LATER EXPORTED TO "RITTANY IN &RANCE4HIS HIGHLY DEVELOPED LANGUAGE WAS EMBLEMATIC OF A SOPHISTICATED SOCIAL HIERARCHY HEADED BY DRUIDS A RITUAL PRIESTHOOD WITH ATTENDANT POETS SEERS AND WARRIORS4HROUGH A DEEP KNOWLEDGE OF RITUAL LEGEND AND THE MECHANICS OF THE HEAVENS THE DRUIDS MAINTAINED THEIR POSITION BETWEEN THE PEOPLE AND A PANTHEON OF OVER FOUR THOUSAND GODS -OST OF THESE WERE VARIATIONS OF A HANDFUL OF CHIEF GODS WORSHIPPED BY THE GREAT "RITISH TRIBES THE 3ILURES AND $EMETAE IN THE SOUTH OF 7ALES THE #ORNOVII IN MID 7ALES AND THE /RDOVICES AND $ECEANGLI IN THE NORTH 'REAT THOUGH THE #ELTIC TECHNOLOGICAL AND ARTISTIC ACHIEVEMENTS WERE THE PEOPLE AND THEIR PAN %UROPEAN COUSINS WERE UNABLE TO MAINTAIN AN ORGANIZED CIVIC SOCIETY TO MATCH THAT OF THEIR SUCCESSORS THE 2OMANS # /.4% 843 \ (ISTORY 4HE 2OMANS IN 7ALES ,IFE IN 7ALES UNLIKE THAT IN MOST OF %NGLAND WAS NEVER FULLY 2OMANIZED THE REGION REMAINING UNDER LEGIONARY CONTROL THROUGHOUT ITS THREE HUNDRED YEAR OCCUPATION *ULIUS #AESAR MADE SMALL CROSS #HANNEL INCURSIONS IN AND "# KICKING OFF A LENGTHY BUT LOW LEVEL INFUSION OF 2OMAN IDEAS WHICH lLTERED ACROSS TO 7ALES 4HIS mOW SWELLED A CENTURY LATER WHEN THE EMPEROR #LAU DIUS TOOK THE DEATH OF THE "RITISH KING #UNOBELIN #YNFELYN AS A SIGNAL TO LAUNCH A FULL SCALE INVASION IN !

$ -AXIMUS RULE WAS SHORT LIVED BUT 7ALES WAS EFFEC TIVELY FREE OF DIRECT 2OMAN CONTROL BY 4HE AGE OF THE SAINTS # /.4% 843 \ (ISTORY (ISTORICAL ORTHODOXY VIEWS THE DEPARTURE OF LITERATE ,ATIN HISTORIANS SKILLED STONEMASONS AND AN ALL POWERFUL ARMY AS HERALDING THE $ARK !GES )N FACT A CIVIC SOCIETY PROBABLY mOURISHED UNTIL A CENTURY LATER WHEN THE COLLAPSE OF TRADE ROUTES WAS HASTENED BY THE DRAMATIC SPREAD OF )SLAM AROUND THE -EDITER RANEAN AND 2OMANIZED SOCIETY GAVE WAY TO A NON CLASSICAL BUT NO LESS STRUC TURED FORM OF #ELTIC SOCIETY &OR THE NEXT FEW CENTURIES 4EUTONIC BARBARIAN TRIBES WERE STRUGGLING FOR SUPREMACY IN THE POST 2OMAN POWER VACUUM IN SOUTHERN AND EASTERN %NGLAND HAVING LITTLE INmUENCE IN 7ALES WHERE THE MAIN DYNASTIC KINGDOMS SET TO STEER 7ALES NEXT SEVEN HUNDRED YEARS WERE TAKING ROOT 4HE CONFUSION THAT SURROUNDS THE EARLY YEARS OF THESE DYNASTIES WAS FURTHER MUDDIED IN WHEN 'EOFFREY OF -ONMOUTH PUBLISHED HIS (ISTORY OF THE +INGS OF "RITAIN PORTRAYING +ING !


Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities by Vaclav Smil

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon tax, circular economy, colonial rule, complexity theory, coronavirus, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, endogenous growth, energy transition, epigenetics, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, Gregor Mendel, happiness index / gross national happiness, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, knowledge economy, Kondratiev cycle, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, meta-analysis, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, optical character recognition, out of africa, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Republic of Letters, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, South China Sea, synthetic biology, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, three-masted sailing ship, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, yield curve

A similarly virulent infestation returned to Europe eight centuries later as the Black Death, the description referring to dying black skin and flesh. In the spring of 1346, plague, endemic in the steppe region of southern Russia, reached the shores of the Black Sea, and then it was carried by maritime trade routes via Constantinople to Sicily by October 1346 and then to the western Mediterranean, reaching Marseilles and Genoa by the end of 1347 (Kelly 2006). Flea-infested rats on trade ships carried the plague to coastal cities, where it was transmitted to local rat populations but subsequent continental diffusion was mainly by direct pneumonic transmission.

Controls exercised at many imperial margins ranged from defended natural or man-made barriers (major rivers and mountain ranges, Chinese and Roman stone or earthen walls) to porous zones of uncertain dominance. And in many cases, imperial control was deliberately exercised only over towns and cities connected by major trade routes rather than over their trackless hinterlands, be they in the African or Central Asian interiors. Roman borders offer excellent illustrations of these uncertainties. Examples of ephemeral maximum conquests are common in both ancient and modern history. Perhaps the best known and much-admired ancient case was the lightning foray of Alexander’s armies all the way to Punjab followed by the retreat to Persia.

Even the straight-line distance is nearly 5,000 km from the Macedonian base of his Argead dynasty, more than twice as far as the direct line from Berlin to Stalingrad, where Hitler’s army met its defining defeat. The most obvious medieval example is the Mongol expansion: maps of its greatest extent in 1279 show contiguous area from the Pacific coast of Siberia to the Baltic Sea, but we can only guess what share of this vast territory beyond several core areas and main communication and trade routes was actually governed by Genghis Khan’s heirs. The best modern example is the ephemeral reach of the Japanese empire following its attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Japan occupied Manchuria between 1933 and 1945, large parts of eastern China between 1937 and 1945, and today’s Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, and nearly all Indonesia between different months of 1942 and September 1945, but its northeastern foray was particularly short-lived.


pages: 226 words: 59,080

Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science by Dani Rodrik

airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, butterfly effect, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, distributed generation, Donald Davies, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, fudge factor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, liquidity trap, loss aversion, low skilled workers, market design, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, oil shock, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, price elasticity of demand, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, risk/return, Robert Shiller, school vouchers, South Sea Bubble, spectrum auction, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, white flight

Moreover, the diseases that killed the Westerners were generally different from those that affected the native population. These assumptions allowed the authors to use settler mortality rates as an exogenous source of variation in the quality of institutions, independent of other determinants, such as proximity to trade routes, that may have affected long-term development paths. †† This is the “possibilism” that the great economist and social scientist Albert Hirschman advocated throughout his life. He rejected the deterministic approaches, common to social sciences, that view outcomes as being rigidly pinned down by “structural” conditions, and instead argued for the power of ideas and small actions to have decisive effects.


pages: 196 words: 57,974

Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

affirmative action, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, borderless world, business process, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, company town, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, double entry bookkeeping, Etonian, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, industrial cluster, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, new economy, North Sea oil, pneumatic tube, race to the bottom, railway mania, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Silicon Valley, six sigma, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, tulip mania, wage slave, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Two decades earlier, a group of London merchants had dispatched a fleet in a predictably disastrous attempt to find a northern passage to the East Indies; one boat got as far as Archangel—and attracted the notice of the czar, Ivan IV, who was keen to increase trade with England. Under the Muscovy charter, eventually won by a consortium including the famous navigator Sebastian Cabot (1483–1557), the Company was given a temporary monopoly over trade routes to the Russian port (and also encouraged to continue the search for a northeast passage). The company was able to raise enough money to finance the long journey to Russia by selling tradable shares. The Muscovy Company faded from view after about 1630, but it spawned a host of imitators seeking other monopolies.


Germany by Andrea Schulte-Peevers

Albert Einstein, bank run, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, capitalist realism, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, company town, computer age, credit crunch, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, haute couture, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, low cost airline, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Eisenman, place-making, post-work, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, sensible shoes, Skype, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, V2 rocket, white picket fence

* * * * * * THE HANSEATIC LEAGUE The origins of the Hanseatic League go back to various guilds and associations established from about the mid-12th century by out-of-town merchants to protect their interests. After Hamburg and Lübeck signed an agreement in 1241 to protect their ships and trading routes, they were joined in their league by Lüneburg, Kiel and a string of Baltic Sea cities east to Greifswald. By 1356 this had grown into the Hanseatic League, encompassing half a dozen other large alliances of cities, with Lübeck playing the lead role. At its zenith, the league had about 200 member cities.

In return he is crowned Kaiser by the pope and under him the Frankish Reich grows in power and extent. 911 Louis the Child dies heirless at the age of 18 and Frankish dukes in the eastern Reich by-pass Charles the Simple in favour of their own monarch, electing the first truly German ruler. 919–1125 Saxon and Salian emperors rule Germany, creating the Holy Roman Empire in 962 when Otto I is crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the pope, reaffirming the precedent established by Charlemagne. 1165 Friedrich I Barbarossa is crowned in Aachen; he canonises Charlemagne and later drowns while bathing in a river in present-day Turkey while co-leading the Third Crusade. 1241 Hamburg and Lübeck sign an agreement to protect their ships and trading routes, creating the basis for the powerful Hanseatic League, which dominates politics and trade across much of Europe. 1245–73 The chaotic period of the Great Interregnum begins when Pope Innocent IV deposes Friedrich II and a string of anti-kings are elected. Local bishops and dukes grab more power, weakening central rule. 1273 The Great Interregnum ends when the House of Habsburg takes over the reins of the Reich and begins its rise to become Europe’s most powerful dynasty. 1338 The Declaration of Rhense ends the need for the pope to confirm the Reich’s elected Kaiser, abolishing the dependence whereby the pope crowned the Kaiser in exchange for loyalty and protection. 1348–50 The plague wipes out 25% of Europe’s population.

There’s free parking at Unter den Hagen, a five-minute walk south of Stadtplatz. Return to beginning of chapter PASSAU 0851 / pop 51,000 Gathered around the confluence of three rivers, the Danube, Inn and Ilz, Passau was predestined to become a powerful trading post. The waterways and major trade routes that converged here brought wealth, especially from ‘white gold’ (salt), and Christianity brought prestige as the city evolved into the largest bishopric in the Holy Roman Empire. The handsome old centre has a distinctly Italian look, with a maze of winding medieval cobbled lanes, underpasses and archways away from the main thoroughfares.


The Rough Guide to England by Rough Guides

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, bike sharing, Bletchley Park, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, car-free, Columbine, company town, congestion charging, Corn Laws, country house hotel, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Downton Abbey, Edmond Halley, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, housing crisis, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Neil Kinnock, offshore financial centre, period drama, plutocrats, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl

Large numbers of earthwork forts were also built in this period, suggesting endemic tribal warfare, a situation further complicated by the appearance of bands of Celts, who arrived in numbers from central Europe around 600 BC, though some historians have disputed the whole notion of a Celtic migration, preferring instead the idea of cultural diffusion along well-established trade routes. The Iron Age By 500 BC, the Britons – with or without a significant Celtic infusion – had established a sophisticated farming economy and a social hierarchy that was dominated by a druidic priesthood. Familiar with Mediterranean artefacts through their far-flung trade routes, they developed better methods of metalworking, ones that favoured iron rather than bronze, from which they forged not just weapons but also coins and ornamental works, thus creating the first recognizable English art.

< Back to Oxfordshire, the Cotswolds and around Gloucester and around For centuries life was good for GLOUCESTER, ten miles west of Cheltenham. The Romans chose this spot for a garrison to guard the River Severn, while in Saxon and Norman times the Severn developed into one of Europe’s busiest trade routes. The city became a major religious centre too, but from the fifteenth century onwards a combination of fire, plague, civil war and increasing competition from rival towns sent Gloucester into a decline from which it never recovered – even the opening of a new canal in 1827 between Gloucester and Sharpness failed to revive the town’s dwindling fortunes.

The Bronze Age The transition from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age began around 2500 BC with the importation from northern Europe of artefacts attributed to the Beaker Culture – named for the distinctive cups found at many burial sites. In England as elsewhere, the spread of the Beaker Culture along European trade routes helped stimulate the development of a comparatively well-organized social structure with an established aristocracy. Many of England’s stone circles were completed at this time, including Avebury and Stonehenge in Wiltshire, while many others belong entirely to the Bronze Age – for example, the Hurlers and the Nine Maidens on Cornwall’s Bodmin Moor.


Lonely Planet Chile & Easter Island (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Carolyn McCarthy, Kevin Raub

California gold rush, call centre, carbon footprint, centre right, Colonization of Mars, company town, East Village, Easter island, gentrification, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, land reform, low cost airline, mass immigration, New Urbanism, off grid, off-the-grid, place-making, QR code, rewilding, satellite internet, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, white picket fence

Top this off with some kick-ass surf breaks and a cool cliff-top War of the Pacific battlefield at El Morro, and you may just stay another day or two before you head up to nearby Parque Nacional Lauca or take an afternoon off from ‘beach duty’ to visit the Azapa Valley, home to some of the world’s oldest known mummies. History Pre-Hispanic peoples have roamed this area for millennia. Arica itself was the terminus of an important trade route where coastal peoples exchanged fish, cotton and maize for the potatoes, wool and charqui (jerky) from the people of the precordillera and altiplano. With the arrival of the Spanish in the early 16th century Arica became the port for the bonanza silver mine at Potosí, located in present-day Bolivia.

Geometrical designs include intriguing ladders, circles and arrows, and depictions of humans include vivid scenes of hunting in canoes and women giving birth. Animal and alienlike figures also roam the hillsides, which have a 2km trail skirting their base; walk or drive it to scan the figures. These enigmatic geoglyphs are thought to have served as signposts to nomadic peoples: marking trade routes and meeting points, indicating the presence of water, identifying ethnic groups and expressing religious meaning. Most date from between AD 500 and AD 1450. A derelict nitrate rail yard of ruined buildings and rusting rolling stock, Pintados lies 4.5km west of the Panamericana via a gravel road, nearly opposite the eastward turnoff to Pica.

However, the town has an addictively relaxed atmosphere and an enormous array of tours that can hook travelers for weeks. And at the end of every trip, there’s the comfort of a creamy cappuccino, a posh meal and a soft bed waiting in San Pedro. History San Pedro was once a pre-Columbian pit stop on the trading route from the highlands to the coast. It was visited by Pedro de Valdivia in 1540, and the town later became a major stop on early-20th-century cattle drives from Argentina to the nitrate oficinas of the desert. Locals, the Atacameño people, still practice irrigated farming in the ayllus (a- ee -oos; small indigenous communities).


Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy

disinformation, fear of failure, low earth orbit, nuclear winter, South China Sea, Strategic Defense Initiative, trade route

"On the other hand, if you persuade STAVKA to give us the resources to execute Operation Polar Glory, we can seize the combat initiative and dictate the nature of operations in the North Atlantic on our chosen terms." He held up a closed fist."By doing this we can, first"--he raised a finger--"prevent an American naval attack against the Rodina; second"--another finger--" use the majority of our submarine forces in the North Atlantic basin where the trade routes are, instead of keeping them on passive defense; and, third"--a final finger--"make maximum use of our naval aviation assets. At one stroke this operation makes our fleet an offensive rather than a defensive weapon." "And to accomplish this you need only one of our Guards Air Rifle divisions?

The pilot didn't know much about the SIGINT activities, but SOSUS, the oceanic Sonar Surveillance System, was the principal means of detecting targets for the P-3C Orion crews to pounce on. This station covered the gaps from Greenland to Iceland, and from Iceland to the Faroe Islands. The main picketline needed to keep Russian subs out of the trade routes was about to go permanently off the air. Great. They were over Keflavik a minute after that. Seven or eight aircraft had not gotten off the ground. All were burning. The pilot examined the runways through binoculars and was horrified to see that it was uncratered. "Tacco, you got a Sentry on the line?"

He held a dispatch saying that Orions out of Lajes had prosecuted and probably killed an Echo-class missile submarine in their path. Some good news, but intelligence reported indications of two more. The loss of Iceland was a disaster whose dimensions were only now becoming apparent. The Soviet bombers had a clear lane to reach into the trade route. Their submarines were racing through the Denmark Strait even as the NATO navies were trying to position their submarines to re-form the barrier they had lost--the barrier upon which the convoys depended. The Air Force and Navy would soon try to rearrange fighter coverage to harass the Backfires, but those measures were all stopgaps.


Western USA by Lonely Planet

airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Biosphere 2, Burning Man, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cotton gin, Donner party, East Village, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Frank Gehry, global village, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, intermodal, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mars Rover, Maui Hawaii, off grid, off-the-grid, retail therapy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supervolcano, trade route, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

For oohs and ahhs, don’t miss Multnomah Falls, Oregon’s tallest waterfall at 642ft. MORE SCENIC DRIVES Hungry for more road trips? Check the destination chapters and the list below for a few more good ones. Turquoise Trail, NM This back route between Tijeras, near Albuquerque and Santa Fe, was a major trade route for several thousand years. Today it rolls past art galleries, shops (with turquoise jewelry), and a mining museum. From I-40, follow Hwy 14 north to I-25. Also see www.turquoisetrail.org, Apache Trail, AZ This isn’t your grandmother’s Sunday afternoon drive - unless your grandmother likes 45 miles of rabid road.

It’s a vivid contrast to the valley, with wildflower fields, azure lakes, ragged granite peaks and domes, and cooler temperatures. Hikers and climbers will find a paradise of options; swimming and picnicking by lakes are also popular. Access is via scenic Tioga Rd (Hwy 120), which follows a 19th-century wagon road and older Native American trading route. West of the meadows and Tenaya Lake, stop at Olmsted Point for epic vistas of Half Dome. IMPASSABLE TIOGA PASS Hwy 120 is the only road connecting Yosemite National Park with the Eastern Sierra, climbing through Tioga Pass (9945ft). Most California maps mark this road ‘closed in winter,’ which, while literally true, is also misleading.

Fourteen miles northeast of Farmington, the 27-acre Aztec Ruins National Monument (www.nps.gov/azru; adult/under 16yr $5/free; 8am-5pm Sep-May, 8am-6pm Jun-Aug) features the largest reconstructed kiva in the country, with an internal diameter of almost 50ft. A few steps away, let your imagination wander as you stoop through low doorways and dark rooms inside the West Ruin. In summer, rangers give early-afternoon talks at the c-1100 site about ancient architecture, trade routes and astronomy. About 35 miles south of Farmington along Hwy 371, the undeveloped Bisti Badlands & De-Na-Zin Wilderness is a trippy, surreal landscape of strange, colorful rock formations, especially spectacular in the hours before sunset; desert enthusiasts shouldn’t miss it. The Farmington BLM office ( 505-599-8900; www.nm.blm.gov; 1235 La Plata Hwy; 8am-4:30pm Mon-Fri) has information.


pages: 251 words: 63,630

The End of Cheap China: Economic and Cultural Trends That Will Disrupt the World by Shaun Rein

business climate, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, glass ceiling, high net worth, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income per capita, indoor plumbing, job-hopping, Maui Hawaii, middle-income trap, price stability, quantitative easing, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, trade route, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, women in the workforce, young professional, zero-sum game

As a result, they often overestimate China’s military capabilities. One retired senior politician from America told me, “If China is increasing its trade volumes around the world, shouldn’t it be securing its own shipping lanes?” He was irritated because he felt China was freeloading on the U.S. Navy’s protection of maritime trade routes, but was taking an increasingly muscular stand in the South China Sea, causing anger in Vietnam and the Philippines. AMERICA On a trip to the United States in early 2011 to give a speech at the Wharton School of Business, I took my three-year-old son, Tom, to New York to see Times Square.


pages: 215 words: 64,460

Shadows of Empire: The Anglosphere in British Politics by Michael Kenny, Nick Pearce

battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, colonial rule, corporate governance, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, global reserve currency, imperial preference, informal economy, invention of the telegraph, Khartoum Gordon, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Nixon shock, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Steve Bannon, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, Washington Consensus

Nearly 200,000 Britons migrated to New Zealand in the 1950s, most of them English and Scottish by birth. ‘Right up to the 1960s’, writes Belich, ‘Britain was still the major source of imports, export receipts, investment, technology, culture and immigrants. The cars in the street were British, as were the postage stamps and the governor-general.’14 Defence of the Suez imperial trade route was critical for New Zealand, and, when it came to the ceasefire resolution on the crisis at the United Nations General Assembly in 1956, Australia and New Zealand alone voted with Britain, France and Israel. The position was different in Canada. Its economic and geo-political coordinates had shifted during the war as a result of its dependency on the USA for bilateral aid.


pages: 217 words: 63,287

The Participation Revolution: How to Ride the Waves of Change in a Terrifyingly Turbulent World by Neil Gibb

Abraham Maslow, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, gentrification, gig economy, iterative process, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kodak vs Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, Network effects, new economy, performance metric, ride hailing / ride sharing, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route, urban renewal, WeWork

Together “To be isolated from your band, and, especially when young, to be isolated from your particular caretaker is fraught with the greatest danger. Can we wonder then that each animal is equipped with an instinctive disposition to avoid isolation and to maintain proximity?” John Bowlby, developmental psychologist Kunming in southwest China is a thriving city of three million people. It sits at the nexus of the trade routes to Vietnam, Myanmar and Laos, so it is an important regional commercial hub. It also has a strong manufacturing sector and is working hard to turn itself into a tourist destination. It’s a city that very much represents 21st-century China – energetic, ambitious, and modernising fast. Young people in skinny jeans and big sunglasses browse the stores, seemingly constantly in touch with someone on their smartphones.


pages: 220 words: 64,234

Fewer, Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects by Glenn Adamson

big-box store, Biosphere 2, blood diamond, blue-collar work, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, dumpster diving, fake news, Ford Model T, haute couture, informal economy, Jacquard loom, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kintsugi, Mason jar, post-truth, race to the bottom, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, trade route, VTOL, white flight

One reason this is such a promising direction is that objects—being visual and material rather than linguistic in nature—can cross cultural barriers. They may require interpretation, but not translation. Interestingly, this is only the latest spin on a millennia-old dynamic. From the days of the Silk Road, the overland trading route by which textiles and other goods traveled between the Mediterranean and the Far East, to the glory days of the China trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when porcelains from Asia flooded into Europe, to today’s online web browsers, objects are ideal global emissaries. Needless to say, there is a big difference between handling an object and seeing a picture of it on-screen.


Phil Thornton by The Great Economists Ten Economists whose thinking changed the way we live-FT Publishing International (2014)

Alan Greenspan, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, double helix, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, hindsight bias, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, loss aversion, mass immigration, means of production, mental accounting, Myron Scholes, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Toyota Production System, trade route, transaction costs, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce

Businesses, as we saw earlier, can source raw materials and parts from countries that can produce them more cheaply than they could at home and sell to consumers across the world. Pharmaceuticals, software, aerospace parts and luxury goods made in the UK are bought across the world. The expansion of free trade has undoubtedly exceeded Adam Smith’s wildest dreams. Decades of negotiation between countries to open up trade routes and establish systems to ensure free trade that led to the creation of the World Trade Organization can be traced back to Smith. But it was in the 1930s that the original battle Chapter 1 • Adam Smith23 between mercantilism and free-market trade, which inspired The Wealth of Nations, was put to the test.


pages: 531 words: 161,785

Alcohol: A History by Rod Phillips

clean water, conceptual framework, European colonialism, financial independence, GPS: selective availability, invention of the printing press, Kickstarter, large denomination, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, New Urbanism, profit motive, restrictive zoning, trade route, women in the workforce, working poor

Similarly, the Etruscans of northern Italy seem to have received winemaking knowledge from the Phoenicians, and Etruscan amphoras, the large ceramic jars used for shipping wine, were modeled on the Phoenician form.3 At the time Greeks were introducing vineyards to southern Italy, Etruscans were making wine and exporting it across the Alps as far as Burgundy, in France. Even so, it was the Greeks who established the first major long-distance wine trade routes in the ancient world, and thousands of Greek amphoras—the clay jars used for transporting wine and other products until the first century of the Christian era—can be found throughout Europe. Ungainly looking objects, amphoras came in a variety of shapes and sizes, each typical of a producer or region of production, so that the origins of most can be fairly easily identified.

Exports declined dramatically when France and England went to war in 1324 and again from the 1330s when the Hundred Years War broke out. Wine from Bordeaux was also exported to other important urban markets in northern Europe and to towns on the Baltic Sea. These population centers were also supplied by a wine trade route than ran down the Rhine to the North Sea and served northern Germany, the Low Countries, England, Scandinavia, and the Baltic Sea area. In eastern Europe, Cracow, a Polish city home to a royal court and a wealthy merchant elite, became not only a good market for wine but also an ideal transshipment point.


pages: 581 words: 162,518

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights by Adam Winkler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, desegregation, Donald Trump, financial innovation, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, income inequality, invisible hand, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, obamacare, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, the scientific method, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, yellow journalism

The same concern was raised about the very first English stock corporation, the Muscovy Company of 1555. The company’s innovative approach to raising money through the sale of stock was the brainchild of Sebastian Cabot, who was not a financier but, rather, an explorer. He sought to raise funds to finance an expedition to establish a trade route from England to Russia through the icy northern seas. Unlike Christopher Columbus, who relied upon an “elaborate array of sponsors and patrons” to finance his voyages, Cabot adapted a practice he had witnessed in Italy, where groups of people bought little pieces, or shares, of a business and would divide the profits.

Nonetheless, with few other investment options, English merchants and notables bought up the full issue of shares. Cabot still faced hardships, such as when one of his first ships was shipwrecked in Lapland, only to be found a year later with the crewmen’s bodies frozen in place. Yet he established the trade route, and the Muscovy Company gained a monopoly on Russian furs, tallow, and other commodities. The investors who took a chance on Cabot were richly rewarded; the first English stock corporation remained in operation for nearly four hundred years, felled finally by the Russian Revolution of 1917.46 Concern about corporate leaders misusing other people’s money reached a new level of urgency in the years surrounding the Great Wall Street Scandal.


pages: 638 words: 156,653

Berlin by Andrea Schulte-Peevers

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, indoor plumbing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Skype, starchitect, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal

Return to beginning of chapter BACKGROUND * * * HISTORY MEDIEVAL BERLIN REFORMATION & THE THIRTY YEARS’ WAR ROAD TO A KINGDOM THE AGE OF PRUSSIA NAPOLEON & REFORMS REVOLUTION(S) BISMARCK & THE BIRTH OF AN EMPIRE WWI & REVOLUTION (AGAIN) THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC THE ‘GOLDEN’ TWENTIES HITLER’S RISE TO POWER NAZI BERLIN JEWISH PERSECUTION THE FINAL SOLUTION RESISTANCE THE BATTLE OF BERLIN DEFEAT & AFTERMATH OCCUPATION THE BIG CHILL THE TWO GERMAN STATES THE WALL – WHAT GOES UP… STUDENT UNREST & TERRORISM RAPPROCHEMENT REUNIFICATION THE POST-UNIFICATION YEARS BERLIN TODAY ARTS LITERATURE PAINTING & SCULPTURE MUSIC CINEMA THEATRE DANCE ARCHITECTURE MODEST BEGINNINGS GOING FOR BAROQUE THE SCHINKEL TOUCH THE HOBRECHT PLAN THE GRÜNDERZEIT THE BIRTH OF MODERNISM THE WEIMAR YEARS NAZI MONUMENTALISM THE DIVIDED CITY CRITICAL RECONSTRUCTION THE NEW BERLIN THE FUTURE ENVIRONMENT THE LAND GREEN BERLIN GOVERNMENT & POLITICS MEDIA PRINT TELEVISION RADIO WEB LANGUAGE * * * Return to beginning of chapter HISTORY MEDIEVAL BERLIN Berlin is very much an accidental capital, whose birth was a mere blip on the map of history. Some time in the 13th century, itinerant merchants founded a pair of trading posts called Berlin and Cölln on the banks of the Spree River just southwest of today’s Alexanderplatz. It was a profitable spot along a natural east–west trade route, about halfway between the fortified towns of Köpenick to the southeast and Spandau to the northwest, the origins of which date back to the 8th century. The tiny settlements grew in leaps and bounds and, in 1307, merged into a single town for reasons of power and security. As the centre of the March (duchy) of Brandenburg, the twin town continued to assert its political and economic independence and even became a player in the Hanseatic League in 1360.

See the Language chapter Click here for useful phrases in German, and check out the dialect guide of Deutsche Welle (www.dw-world.de/dialektatlas, in German) for a few localised pointers. Return to beginning of chapter TIMELINE * * * 1244 Berlin appears for the first time in recorded history, but the city’s birthday is pegged to the first mention of its sister settlement Cölln seven years earlier in 1237. 1348 The Black Plague is brought to Europe via the major trading routes, resulting in the death of about a third of Berlin’s population and unleashing anti-Semitic pogroms. 1360 The twin town of Berlin-Cölln joins the Hanseatic League but never plays a major role in the alliance and quits its membership in 1518. 1415 Friedrich von Hohenzollern’s grip on power solidifies when German King Sigismund promotes him to elector and margrave of Brandenburg at the Council of Constance. 1443 Construction of the Berlin Stadtschloss (City Palace) on the Spree island begins and becomes the electors’ permanent residence in 1486.


pages: 594 words: 165,413

The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy

Ada Lovelace, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, financial independence, impulse control, LNG terminal, operational security, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, trade route, Upton Sinclair

This agreement has been kept—until now. "Now, my military advisers tell me that what is going on looks very much like a war exercise, indeed, could be the precursor to a war. How are we to tell the difference? Your ships are now passing east of Iceland, and will soon be in a position from which they can threaten our trade routes to Europe. This situation is at the least unsettling, and at the most a grave and wholly unwarranted provocation. The scope of this action has not yet been made public. That will change, and when it does, Alex, the American people will demand action on my part." The president paused, expecting a response but getting only a nod.

"We're not sure. Looks like they might have a major search and rescue operation. The question is, after what? They have four Alfas doing a max speed run for our coast right now, with a gaggle of Victors and Charlies charging in behind them. At first we were worried that they wanted to block the trade routes, but they blitzed right past those. They're definitely heading for our coast, and whatever they're up to, we're getting tons of information." "What do they have moving?" Tyler asked. "Fifty-eight nuclear subs, and thirty or so surface ships." "Gawd! CINCLANT must be going ape!" "You know it, Skip.


pages: 568 words: 162,366

The Oil and the Glory: The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea by Steve Levine

Berlin Wall, California gold rush, classic study, computerized trading, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, fixed income, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, John Deuss, Khyber Pass, megastructure, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, oil rush, Potemkin village, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, telemarketer, trade route, vertical integration

The stories became early cause for suspicion that Pakistani security forces had entered into more than a casual relationship with the Taliban. Each side had something to gain from such an alliance. Pakistan would benefit if the Taliban army were deployed against unruly former mujahideen who were running amok along Bhutto’s hoped-for trade route into Central Asia, and generally flouted Pakistan’s opinion on the conduct of Afghan matters. The Taliban stood to profit if Pakistan’s generals were to provide badly needed supplies, such as fuel and communications equipment. Tribal allegiances that spilled across both sides of the Pakistan-Afghan border also encouraged cooperation.

The pipeline could be routed so as to skirt not only Russia but also Iran, whose policies the American government abhorred. America and its allies could collect a huge energy dividend, assuming that most or all of the pipeline’s oil were funneled to the West. Finally, the Clinton administration thought that the pipeline could be the catalyst to reorder historic north-south trade routes in the region—an outcome that would favor the West and disfavor Russia. Central Asia and the Caucasus traditionally shipped raw material like oil, natural gas, and cotton north to Russia, which sent back finished products in return. Washington imagined that the pipeline and its related network of barges, highways, and railroads could redirect trade along east-west routes, with Turkey playing the role that had once belonged to Russia.


Lonely Planet Sri Lanka by Lonely Planet

British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, digital map, European colonialism, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, megaproject, off grid, off-the-grid, period drama, place-making, ride hailing / ride sharing, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, special economic zone, spice trade, trade route, urban sprawl

Sigiriya MuseumMUSEUM ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; h8.30am-5.30pm) This decent museum has a fine diorama of the site, providing an excellent overview and explaining Sigiriya's cultural importance beyond the obvious natural beauty. The theory that Sigiriya was a Buddhist monastery is given here, although the established position that it was a palace or fortress prevails. Trade routes are explained, showing Sigiriya's connections with the Gulf, China, India and the Roman Empire. DON'T MISS EXPLORING AROUND SIGIRIYA With a bike or scooter you can explore several spots around Sigiriya. One place not to miss is Pidurangula rock, the temples of which actually predate Sigiriya.

For many involved in tourism, the new terminal at Bandaranaike International Airport – slated for completion in 2020 – can’t come soon enough. Population 22.3 million Area 65,610 sq km GDP US$80.6 billion Annual Inflation 6.9% Unemployment 4.6% History Sri Lanka's location – near India and along hundreds of ancient trade routes – has for ages made it attractive to immigrants, invaders, missionaries, traders and travellers from India, East Asia and the Middle East. Many stayed on, and over generations they assimilated and intermarried, converted and converted back. Although debates still rage over who was here first and who can claim Sri Lanka as their homeland, the island’s history, like that of its ethnicities, is one of shifting dominance and constant flux.


Foundation by Isaac Asimov

new economy, the scientific method, trade route

The Royal Governor of the Prefect of Anacreon has assumed the title of king.” “Well? What of it?” “It means,” responded Hardin, “that we’re cut off from the inner regions of the Empire. We’ve been expecting it but that doesn’t make it any more comfortable. Anacreon stands square across what was our last remaining trade route to Santanni and to Trantor and to Vega itself. Where is our metal to come from? We haven’t managed to get a steel or aluminum shipment through in six months and now we won’t be able to get any at all, except by grace of the King of Anacreon.” Pirenne tch-tched impatiently. “Get them through him, then.”


pages: 206 words: 67,030

Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture by Marvin Harris

colonial exploitation, land tenure, Louis Pasteur, military-industrial complex, stakhanovite, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, zero-sum game

Primitive War WARS WAGED by scattered primitive tribes like the Maring raise doubts about the basic sanity of human lifestyles. When modern nation-states go to war we often puzzle over the precise cause, but seldom lack plausible alternative explanations from which to choose. History books brim with details of wars in which the combatants struggled for mastery over trade routes, natural resources, cheap labor, or mass markets. The wars of modern empires may be lamentable, but they are not inscrutable. This distinction is basic to the present-day nuclear détente, which rests on the assumption that wars involve some sort of rational balance of gains and losses. If the United States and the Soviet Union clearly stand to lose more than they can possibly gain by nuclear attack, neither is likely to initiate a war as the solution to its problems.


pages: 222 words: 70,132

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

Jefferson also observed that the monopoly rents (the extraction of extra profit from a monopoly) the officers of the company enjoyed allowed them to come home to England and establish sprawling estates and businesses and to obtain political power. The company developed a lobby in Parliament that was so powerful that they could write legislation pledging British military might to protect their private trade routes. Jefferson had also read of the Great Bengal Famine of 1770, which resulted in the deaths of ten million people. The British East India Company forced Bengal farmers to grow opium—which the company intended to export to China—instead of food crops, resulting in a shortage of grain for the local inhabitants.


pages: 208 words: 64,113

Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell

California gold rush, Easter island, index card, Maui Hawaii, polynesian navigation, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Steve Jobs, trade route

Poking around spiky lava fields that had dribbled down from the last eruption of the Haleakala volcano, I asked a park ranger who happened by if he could tell me anything about Admiral La Pérouse. “Yes,” he said. “He was French.” Wanting a pinch more detail, I went home and started reading up on the expedition, how Louis XVI had commissioned La Pérouse to sail to the Pacific, fine-tune Captain Cook’s maps, scope out new trade routes, and bring along an astronomer, a geologist, a botanist, and illustrators to collect specimens and record scientific data. I was especially entranced by the name of one of the frigates under the admiral’s command, the Astrolabe. Its namesake is a scientific instrument used to calculate the position of stars—very early Captain Cook.


pages: 281 words: 72,885

Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World by Mark Miodownik

3D printing, active measures, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, California gold rush, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, liquidity trap, New Urbanism, stem cell, trade route

Bronze is an alloy of copper, containing small amounts of tin or sometimes arsenic, and is much stronger than copper. So, if you had copper and you knew what you were doing, for very little extra effort you could create weapons and razors ten times stronger and harder than copper. The only problem is that tin and arsenic are extremely rare. Elaborate trade routes evolved in the Bronze Age to bring tin from places such as Cornwall and Afghanistan to the centers of civilization in the Middle East for precisely this reason. Gold alloyed with silver at the atomic scale, showing how the silver atoms replace some of the gold atoms in the crystal. Modern razors are also made from an alloy but, as I explained to Brian, it is a very special sort of alloy, the existence of which puzzled our ancestors for thousands of years.


pages: 233 words: 64,702

China's Disruptors: How Alibaba, Xiaomi, Tencent, and Other Companies Are Changing the Rules of Business by Edward Tse

3D printing, Airbnb, Airbus A320, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, bilateral investment treaty, business process, capital controls, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Graeber, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, experimental economics, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, industrial robot, Joseph Schumpeter, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, middle-income trap, money market fund, offshore financial centre, Pearl River Delta, reshoring, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, trade route, wealth creators, working-age population

From the start, she was determined that her business would take a global view—a mission reflected in its name, which derives its first two initials from Dunhuang, a city in northwest China that was once an important crossroads on the Silk Road. “The Chinese are very proud of the Silk Road and its role as a global trade route when China was at its most powerful. Today, thanks in part to the Internet era, we think China again has a chance of regaining a similar glory,” she says. Closely related to this pride is the second strand in China’s entrepreneurial spirit, ambition, and an increasing desire to aim for the highest goals.


Smart Cities, Digital Nations by Caspar Herzberg

Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, business climate, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, Dean Kamen, demographic dividend, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Hacker News, high-speed rail, hive mind, Internet of things, knowledge economy, Masdar, megacity, New Urbanism, operational security, packet switching, QR code, remote working, RFID, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart meter, social software, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, telepresence, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor, X Prize

But Dubai continues to grow in importance as a transportation node and as a destination. It’s easy to conclude that oil—and oil alone—fueled this unprecedented growth in the desert. But Dubai’s role as a trading hub likely predates recorded history, and transport is key to its present success. Of course, evidence of those ancient trade routes is barely perceptible. This is a twenty-first-century city that is the preeminent example of the symbiosis between city function and its transportation network. Dubai is what author and air commerce expert John Kasarda calls an aerotropolis: a city defined by the functionality and attractiveness of its airport and surrounding neighborhoods.


pages: 215 words: 71,155

Celebrating the Third Place: Inspiring Stories About the Great Good Places at the Heart of Our Communities by Ray Oldenburg

Celebration, Florida, gentrification, Jane Jacobs, land bank, market design, New Urbanism, place-making, Ray Oldenburg, Seaside, Florida, the built environment, The Great Good Place, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city

Plutarch, for example, writes about how Antony and Cleopatra disguised themselves as “commoners” and snuck into the market in Alexandria so they could interact with normal people. There have been many legendary markets throughout history. The famous ones, like Timbuktu and Samarkand, were always located at the hub of trade routes. Although it may be hard to believe for the average American today, there have been many famous open-air markets in the United States as well. Here is the story of one of the largest of these markets, Maxwell Street, which sat in Chicago, the air, trucking, and train hub of the United States. It was a market that regularly attracted crowds of 20,000 until the mayor, a group of real estate developers, and arrogant university bureaucrats decided to use public funds to build a suburban-style subdivision and some parking lots.


Amazing Train Journeys by Lonely Planet

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, British Empire, car-free, colonial rule, country house hotel, Donner party, high-speed rail, megacity, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, trade route, urban sprawl

Compare and contrast the awe-inspiring architectural splendour of Moscow’s Red Square with Bĕijīng’s Tiān’ānmèn Square, the silver birch forests of Siberia with the arid Gobi Desert where dinosaurs once roamed. A weekly direct service rolls out of Moscow and Bĕijīng, but to fully experience the three countries on the route you’ll need to hop on and off a variety of trains. ❶ RIDING THE RAILS For centuries before the railway was completed in 1956 there was a well-trodden trade route connecting China, Mongolia and Russia, along which tea flowed west, and furs and other commodities flowed east. Commerce remains a prime concern between these nations, so it’s highly likely you’ll encounter native businessmen and women on the train as it veers off the main Russian line at Ulan-Ude and continues to Bĕijīng via Mongolia and its capital Ulaanbaatar.


Southeast Asia on a Shoestring Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, airport security, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, clockwatching, colonial rule, flag carrier, gentrification, Global Witness, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, large denomination, low cost airline, Mason jar, megacity, period drama, restrictive zoning, retail therapy, Skype, South China Sea, spice trade, superstar cities, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, trade route, urban sprawl, white picket fence, women in the workforce

* * * GETTING TO THAILAND: VANG TAO TO CHONG MEK Getting to the border Heading to the busy border (open 5am to 6pm) of Vang Tao (Laos) and Chong Mek (Thailand) is straightforward if catching a sŏrngtăaou from Pakse (10,000Kper person, 75 minutes, 37km), or taxi (per person 20,000K, 45 minutes). At the border This is a busy, well-organised trade route. There are ATMs on the Thai side, a market and restaurants. You have to walk a bit between the two posts but in general it’s hassle free. Thirty-day visas for Laos are granted on arrival for between US$30 and US$40 depending on nationality. Free 15-day visas are granted on arrival in Thailand. Moving on Easier than taking a taxi to the border is the Thai-Lao International bus that leaves from Pakse’s VIP bus station headed to Ubon Ratchathani at 7am, 8.30am, 2.30pm and 3.30pm.

By the 13th and 14th centuries, what is considered to be the first Thai kingdom – Sukhothai (meaning ‘Rising Happiness’) – emerged and began to chip away at the crumbling Khmer empire. The Sukhothai kingdom is regarded as the cultural and artistic kernel of the modern state. Sukhothai was soon eclipsed by another Thai power, Ayuthaya, established by Prince U Thong in 1350. This new centre developed into a cosmopolitan port on the Asian trade route, courted by various European nations. The small nation managed to thwart foreign takeovers, including one orchestrated by a Thai court official, a Greek man named Constantine Phaulkon, to advance French interests. For 400 years and 34 successive reigns, Ayuthaya dominated Thailand until the Burmese led a successful invasion in 1765, ousting the monarch and destroying the capital.

Regional kingdoms created distinctive works of art and literature, and joined the international sphere as important ports. The Thais expanded into the dying Khmer empire and exerted control over parts of Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar. Starting around 1331, the Hindu kingdom of Majapahit united the Indonesian archipelago from Sumatra to New Guinea and dominated the trade routes between India and China. The kingdom’s reign continued until the advent of Islamic kingdoms and the emergence of the port town of Melaka on the Malay peninsula in 1402. Melaka’s prosperity soon attracted European interest, and it fell first to the Portuguese in 1511, then the Dutch and finally the English.


pages: 709 words: 191,147

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg

A. Roger Ekirch, back-to-the-land, British Empire, California gold rush, colonial rule, Copley Medal, desegregation, Donald Trump, feminist movement, full employment, gentleman farmer, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, joint-stock company, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, mass immigration, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Only New Englanders, in their low-bottomed boats, could navigate the shallow, shoal-filled inlets of the Outer Banks. Without a major harbor, and facing burdensome taxes if they shipped their goods through Virginia, many Carolinians turned to smuggling. Hidden inlets made North Carolina attractive to pirates. Along trade routes from the West Indies to the North American continent, piracy flourished in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Several of Albermarle’s governors were accused of sheltering these high-seas thieves and personally profiting from the illicit trade. The notorious Blackbeard (a.k.a.

He set up shop there in 1750, the very year slavery was made legal, and his numerous slaves entitled him to large tracts of lands. But to build his empire he had to pull the strings of Georgia’s Executive Council, whose chief duty was distributing land. A long tenure on the council ensured that he acquired the most fertile land, conveniently situated along major trade routes. By 1760, only 5 percent of white Georgians owned even a single slave, while a handful of families possessed them in the hundreds. Jonathan Bryan was the perfect embodiment of the “Slave Merchants” who Oglethorpe had warned would dominate the colony.59 Oglethorpe’s ideas did not entirely disappear.


pages: 1,048 words: 187,324

Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, Ella Morton

anti-communist, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, centre right, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, cosmic microwave background, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Day of the Dead, double helix, East Village, Easter island, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, horn antenna, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index card, intentional community, Jacques de Vaucanson, Kowloon Walled City, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mutually assured destruction, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, phenotype, Pluto: dwarf planet, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Tunguska event, urban sprawl, Vesna Vulović, white picket fence, wikimedia commons, working poor

Basilica Cisterns of Istanbul Beneath Istanbul are hundreds of Byzantine cisterns—underground reservoirs built during the 5th and 6th centuries to store rainwater. The cathedral-like structures have an elegance that belies their utilitarian nature, and contain decorated arches, marble columns, and carvings of Medusa’s head. Antwerp Ruien Antwerp’s many natural ditches served as fortifications, trade routes, and open sewers from the 11th to 16th centuries. When the smell became too much to bear, the city asked each citizen to take responsibility for covering the ditches, or ruien, on their land. It took citizens 300 years to cover the ditches in a diverse range of materials that reflected their wealth, taste, and competence as builders.

Tash Rabat AT-BASHI, NARYN During the 15th century, the stone structure of Tash Rabat was a caravansary—a travelers’ inn providing refuge for those journeying along the Silk Road. Protected by the high walls of the rectangular courtyard, human and animal travelers took shelter in its stalls to wash, rest, and prepare for the next leg of a long trip. This desolate part of the trading route was particularly treacherous. Snow covers the ground for eight months of the year, and the area is subject to landslides, flooding, and earthquakes. The difficult conditions persist, which is why, for maximum safety and comfort, you should visit in summer and hire a local guide to drive you. For a fleeting insight into the Silk Road experience, camp in a yurt overnight at Tash Rabat.


pages: 580 words: 194,144

The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia by Peter Hopkirk

British Empire, classic study, disinformation, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, kremlinology, Suez canal 1869, trade route

In his military report Gordon urged that immediate action be taken to strengthen Britain’s position in the southern approaches to the Baroghil and Ishkaman passes. This could be achieved by building a road northwards from Kashmir to the latter, which would also ensure control of the Baroghil. Officially its purpose would be to serve as a trade route between India and the extreme north. ‘It would attract not only the Eastern Turkistan traders who at present toil over the Karakoram,’ Gordon declared, ‘but also the Badakhshan merchants who trade with Peshawar through Kabul.’ However, its real purpose would be to enable the British to move troops northwards ‘at the shortest notice’ in the event of a Russian incursion across the Oxus towards the Baroghil and Ishkaman passes.

The only flaw in this argument, Younghusband observed, was that Safdar Ali took most of the proceeds of the raids for himself– just as he would do with any subsidy. Younghusband told the ruler that the British government would never agree to subsidise him for ceasing to rob its caravans. ‘I said that the Queen was not in the habit of paying blackmail,’ Younghusband wrote, ‘that I had left soldiers for the protection of the trade route, and that he might see for himself how much revenue he would get now from a raid.’ To Younghusband’s surprise, Safdar Ali shook with laughter at this, congratulating his visitor on his candour. With the aim of impressing on his Hunza host just how useless his own matchlock-wielding soldiers would be against modern, European-trained infantry, Younghusband decided to lay on a demonstration of his Gurkhas’ fire-power.


The Rough Guide to Jamaica by Thomas, Polly,Henzell, Laura.,Coates, Rob.,Vaitilingam, Adam.

buttonwood tree, call centre, Caribbean Basin Initiative, centre right, colonial rule, computer age, ghettoisation, jitney, John Gilmore, Kickstarter, post-work, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sustainable-tourism, trade route

You can see it all on the Panorama Walk (preferably accompanied by one of the gardeners – leave a tip), which takes you through a tunnel-like thicket of Holland bamboo and eventually back to the main house, an ancient oblong of stone that still contains most of its original fittings. Other guided trails are also available, among the most rewarding the sweaty six-mile hike down to Mavis Bank, the four-mile hike to Catherine’s Peak, and the historic, ten-mile Vinegar Hill Trail to Buff Bay, an old Maroon trading route that the British used to transport supplies from Kingston to the north coast. Though now largely impenetrable, it is still possible to navigate with a good guide. Mavis Bank Heading east from Guava Ridge, the next settlement along is MAVIS BANK, picturesquely nestled in the Yallahs River valley.

Bear in mind that outside the hotel you may well be accosted by a group of aggressive hustlers offering to take you to the open-air spring at the hotel’s rear; while this hot and cold “Sulphur River” is a pleasant spot (water from the two springs is diverted to the spa inside and mixed to provide a bath of a more even temperature), the unofficial “guides” most certainly are not, and their amateur massages are inevitably exorbitantly priced. Hiking trails lead from the hotel for miles across the Blue Mountains; the best is a recently reopened Maroon trading route through the John Crow range to Bowden Pen (see p.129) – for a guide contact the Jamaica Conservation and Development Trust or Sun Venture Tours (see p.98). The far southeastern corner of the island, beyond Bath and Port Morant, is a seamless feast of banana, sugar and coconut plantations, the least developed yet one of the most picturesque corners of Jamaica.


pages: 573 words: 180,065

On the Trail of Genghis Khan: An Epic Journey Through the Land of the Nomads by Tim Cope

feminist movement, global pandemic, illegal immigration, Iridium satellite, mass immigration, trade route

Many contemporary historians point out how taxes levied by the Mongols during their reign were by and large used to serve the diverse people they ruled. They implemented legal codes, funded public works projects, patronized the arts and religion, and promoted international trade and commerce. Under their stewardship, trade routes and communication lines across Eurasia were perhaps safer and more efficient than they had ever been, enabling the first direct relations between China and Europe. It is remarkable to think that at the zenith of Mongol power nomad herders of the little-known steppes of East Asia ruled an empire that included some of the most populous cities on earth and stretched from Korea in the east to Hungary in the west, the tropics of South East Asia in the south—the Mongols even campaigned in Java, Indonesia—and the sub-Arctic in the north.

When the moon rose, and my caravan cast dim shadows across the frosted grass, my transition to an older world felt complete. I slowed to a walk, snuggled deep into my winter coat, and opened the bell on Taskonir’s neck—something I always did at night in case the horses broke free (so I would be able to hear where they had gone) and in this case, also because it as was an old steppe tradition along courier and trading routes to have a horsebell to warn rest stations of the approach of a horseman. After traveling nearly 25 miles into the cold of evening, I was beginning to worry I had missed the hut, but around 11:00 P.M. three dark shapes emerged from the moonlit steppe. From one came the faint flicker of an oil lamp.


pages: 666 words: 189,883

1491 by Charles C. Mann

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Atahualpa, Bartolomé de las Casas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, clean water, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, Gary Taubes, Hernando de Soto, invention of agriculture, land tenure, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, phenotype, plutocrats, Silicon Valley, stem cell, technological determinism, trade route, zoonotic diseases

The new rulers of Mutal had aggressively thrown their weight around and by Sky Witness’s time controlled as much as eight thousand square miles. (Mutal city itself had an estimated population of sixty thousand, plus many more in its hinterland.) Particularly important, the Teotihuacan-backed dynasty took over several outposts on the Usumacinta River system, Yucatán’s most important trade route. Shipments of luxury goods from faraway regions usually had to travel up or down the Usumacinta; Mutal’s ability to tax and supervise the trade must have been terribly vexing, even if it had little practical import. Sky Witness may have thought that Mutal was becoming a dangerous neighbor and decided to take preemptive action.

Martin’s comparison of the Maya to the Greeks comes from interviews and email. Sky Witness: Martin and Grube 2000:90–92, 102–04. Mutal size and population: Adams and Jones 1981:318–19; Culbert et al. 1990 (arguing for 425,000 as total size). Possible motives for Kaan-Mutal war: Fahsen 2003 (trade routes); Harrison 1999:121 (commerce, dynasty); Grube, pers. comm. (ideology). Landscape alteration: The literature is vast. Examples include Darch 1988; Dunning et al. 2002; Fedick and Ford 1990; Gunn et al. 2002 (“geochemically hostile,” 313); Scarborough and Gallopin 1991; Sluyter 1994. See also, Scarborough 2003.


pages: 608 words: 184,703

Moon Oregon Trail Road Trip: Historic Sites, Small Towns, and Scenic Landscapes Along the Legendary Westward Route by Katrina Emery, Moon Travel Guides

Airbnb, bike sharing, California gold rush, car-free, crowdsourcing, desegregation, Donner party, glass ceiling, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mason jar, mass immigration, pez dispenser, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, trade route, transcontinental railway, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Works Progress Administration

Or you can more easily get to the next stop by heading south 0.6 mile (1 km) on Lone Elm Road and turning right onto West 175th Street, which becomes U.S. 56. Follow it for 7 miles (11.3 km) through Gardner, then turn right onto West 183rd Street. The drive takes 10 minutes. The Santa Fe Trail The Santa Fe Trail was a 900-mile (1,450 km) major trade route that predated the Oregon Trail; it was in use 1821-1880. It had several jumping-off points in Missouri, including Independence. The outfitters and general stores that sprang up in the town to serve the Santa Fe-bound wagons were a major reason that Oregon Trail pioneers also set off from Independence.

Guided tours are available daily in summer. Festivals and Events The tradition of the Mountain Man Rendezvous goes back to 1825, when a fur-trading company left a cache of supplies near the Green River in southern Wyoming and declared they’d meet there in July the next year. Word traveled along the trade routes, and the event became a huge gathering of trappers and traders, a time to share tall tales, show off skills, trade goods, and shore up trading relationships. It was a brilliant move—instead of hauling furs all the way back to St. Louis to sell, they could trade and restock their supplies right there.


Sweden Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, G4S, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, low cost airline, mass immigration, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, urban planning, walkable city, white picket fence, WikiLeaks

Best Places to Eat A Kryp In A Rosendals Trädgårdskafe A Hermans Trädgårdscafé A Grands Verandan A Woodstockholm Best Places to Stay A Rival Hotel A Vandrarhem af Chapman & Skeppsholmen A Långholmen Hotell & Vandrarhem A Hobo Hotel A Grand Hôtel Stockholm Stockholm & Around Highlights 1 Vasamuseet Studying a shipwreck and Swedish history. 2 Gamla Stan Wandering around the atmospheric old town. 3 Skansen Visiting Sweden in miniature at this open-air museum. 4 Nordiska Museet Exploring Swedish culture, art and daily life. 5 Moderna Museet Admiring cutting-edge international artwork. 6 Biblioteksgatan Shopping at big name boutiques. 7 Södermalm Bar-hopping with lively locals and wayfarers. 8 Utö Taking a boat to sample the Stockholm archipelago. History Rising land drove Stockholm’s early destiny, forcing the centre of Swedish Viking political power to move from northern lake Mälaren to the lake’s outlet for better trade routes. The town charter dates from 1250. Stockholm’s official founder, Birger Jarl, commissioned the original royal castle, Tre Kronor, in 1252. The Black Death of 1350 wiped out around a third of Sweden’s population; then Danish Queen Margrethe Valdemarsdotter added insult to injury by besieging the city from 1391 to 1395, amalgamating the crowns of Sweden, Norway and Denmark under the unpopular Union of Kalmar in 1397.

It is used to carve inscriptions onto monumental rune stones (there are around 3000 in Sweden) well into medieval times. 98 The Svea tribe that effectively rules what is now Sweden is first mentioned by Tacitus; they are referred to as Suinoes. c 800 Birka, founded on Björkö (an island in Mälaren lake), becomes a powerful Svea trading centre. Byzantine and Arab coins have been found here, confirming the existence of trade routes. 1008 Sweden’s first Christian king, Olof Skötkonung, is baptised at St Sigfrid’s Well in Husaby, but worship continues in Uppsala’s pagan temple until at least 1090. 1160 King Erik Jedvarsson destroys the last remnants of paganism in Sweden. The pagan temple at Uppsala is replaced with a Christian church. 1252 The city of Stockholm is founded by king’s statesman Birger Jarl, who has been running the country since 1229. 1350s Following the Black Death scourge, St Birgitta (1303–73) founds a nunnery and cathedral in Vadstena, which becomes Sweden’s most important pilgrimage site. 1434 High taxation imposed by the Kalmar Union to fund wars against the Hanseatic League make Erik of Pomerania deeply unpopular; the peasantry rise in the Engelbrekt revolt. 1439–70 Following the short-lived replacement of Erik of Pomerania, succession struggles begin again: two powerful Swedish families, the unionist Oxenstiernas and the nationalist Stures, fight for supremacy. 1520 After granting a full amnesty to Sture followers, Christian II goes back on his word: more than 80 nobles and clergy are arrested, tried and butchered in the ‘Stockholm Bloodbath’. 1523 The Kalmar Union, which united Denmark, Sweden and Norway for more than 130 years, is finally broken up. 1523 Gustav Vasa becomes the first Vasa king after the Kalmar Union between Denmark, Sweden and Norway breaks up; he marches into Stockholm and is crowned on 6 June, now the country’s national day. 1527 Reformation parliament passes a law that transfers the property of the Church to the state and places the Church under the state’s direct control (repealed in 2000). 1563–70 During the Vasa brothers’ reigns, there are wars against Lübeck and Poland, and the Danes try and fail to reassert sovereignty over Sweden in the Northern Seven Years War. 1618–48 Devout Lutheran Gustav II Adolf intervenes in the Thirty Years War between Protestants and Catholics, invading Poland and defeating his cousin King Sigismund III, but dying in battle in 1632. 1628 After a send-off full of pomp and circumstance, the royal warship Vasa sinks on its maiden voyage, having barely made it out of Stockholm’s harbour. 1658 The last remaining parts of southern Sweden still in Danish hands are handed over at the Peace of Roskilde after Swedish troops successfully invade Denmark across the frozen Kattegatt. 1697–1718 Karl XII holds the throne.


Lonely Planet Kenya by Lonely Planet

affirmative action, Airbnb, Beryl Markham, British Empire, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, David Attenborough, DIY culture, Kibera, land reform, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, out of africa, place-making, spice trade, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

Modern Mombasa traces its heritage back to the Thenashara Taifa (Twelve Nations), a Swahili clan that maintains an unbroken chain of traditions and customs stretching from the city’s founding to this day. The date when those customs began – ie when Mombasa was born – is a little muddy, although it was already a thriving port by the 12th century. Early in its life, Mombasa became a key link on Indian Ocean trade routes. In 1498 Vasco da Gama became Mombasa's first Portuguese visitor. Two years later his countrymen returned and sacked the town, a habit they repeated in 1505 and 1528, when Nuno da Cunha captured Mombasa using what would become a time-honoured tactic: slick ‘em up with diplomacy (offering to act as an ally in disputes with Malindi, Pemba and Zanzibar) then slap ‘em down by force.

Coastal Kenya Swahili Although the people of the coast do not have a common heritage, they do have a linguistic link: Kiswahili (commonly referred to as Swahili), a Bantu-based language that evolved as a means of communication between Africans and the Arabs, Persians and Portuguese who colonised the East African coast; the word swahili is a derivative of the Arabic word for coast – sawahil. The cultural origins of the Swahili, who make up 0.6% of the population, come from intermarriage between the Arabs and Persians with African slaves from the 7th century onwards. In fact, many anthropologists consider the Swahili a cultural tribe brought together by trade routes rather than a tribe of distinct biological lineage. A largely urban tribe, they occupy coastal cities like Mombasa, Malindi, Lamu and Stone Town (Zanzibar); and given the historical Arab influence, the Swahili largely practise Islam. Daily Life It can be hard work being Kenyan. While most are proud to be Kenyan, national identity is only one way among many in which Kenyans understand their world.


Lonely Planet Greek Islands by Lonely Planet, Alexis Averbuck, Michael S Clark, Des Hannigan, Victoria Kyriakopoulos, Korina Miller

car-free, carbon footprint, credit crunch, Easter island, eurozone crisis, G4S, haute couture, haute cuisine, low cost airline, Norman Mailer, pension reform, period drama, restrictive zoning, sensible shoes, sustainable-tourism, trade route, transfer pricing, urban sprawl

They built temples to their homeland gods, but Apollo remained the principal deity. The Romans made Delos a free port in 167 BC. This brought even greater prosperity, due largely to a lucrative slave market that sold up to 10,000 people a day. During the following century, as ancient religions lost relevance and trade routes shifted, Delos began a long, painful decline. By the 3rd century AD there was only a small Christian settlement on the island, and in the following centuries the ancient site was looted of many of its antiquities. It was not until the Renaissance that its antiquarian value was recognised. Getting There & Away Boats for Delos (return €17, 30 minutes) leave Hora (Mykonos) around six times a day from about 9am in high season with the last outward boat about 12.50pm.

CLASSICAL AGE Greece’s Golden Age, from the 6th to 4th centuries BC, saw a renaissance in cultural creativity. As many city-states enjoyed increased economic reform and political prosperity, literature and drama blossomed. Athens’ rapid growth meant heavy reliance on food imports from the Black Sea; and Persia’s imperial expansions threatened coastal trade routes across Asia Minor. Athens’ support for a rebellion in the Persian colonies of Asia Minor sparked the Persian Wars. In 477 BC Athens founded the Delian League, the naval alliance that was based on Delos and was formed to liberate the city-states still occupied by Persia, and to defend against further Persian attack.

The Balkan Wars The declining Ottomans still retained Macedonia, prompting the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913. The outcome was the Treaty of Bucharest (August 1913), which greatly expanded Greek territory to take in the southern part of Macedonia (which included Thessaloniki, the vital cultural centre strategically positioned on the Balkan trade routes), part of Thrace, another chunk of Epiros and the northeastern Aegean Islands; the treaty also recognised the union with Crete. WWI & Smyrna As the Great War dragged on, the Allies (Britain, France and Russia) put increasing pressure on neutral Greece to join forces with them against Germany and Turkey, promising concessions in Asia Minor in return.


pages: 1,088 words: 297,362

The London Compendium by Ed Glinert

1960s counterculture, anti-communist, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Geldof, British Empire, Brixton riot, Charles Babbage, Corn Laws, Dava Sobel, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Jenner, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Exxon Valdez, gentrification, hiring and firing, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, John Snow's cholera map, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Nick Leeson, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, price stability, Ronald Reagan, Sloane Ranger, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, trade route, union organizing, V2 rocket

south side: Fenchurch Street to Gracechurch Street East India House, junction with Lime Street The East India Company, which became the City’s most powerful company, was established here in 1600 to challenge the Dutch–Portuguese monopoly of the spice trade in the Orient, and gained its first foothold in the East some ten years later when it seized control of the nutmeg-producing island of Puloroon, a feat that so impressed James I that, on hearing the news, he styled himself ‘King of England, Scotland, Ireland, France… and Puloroon’. After tussling with the Dutch, Portuguese and French for control of trade routes in the area over the next 100 years, the company began to establish itself as a major force, opening up Hong Kong and Singapore to the West, introducing tea to Britain, spices to the West Indies, opium to China, porcelain to Russia and coffee to Arabia and establishing trading posts in Madras and Calcutta.

One of the busiest parts of the river during its trading heyday, filled with lighters and barges carrying coal from collier ships, it was rebuilt in the 1980s with a large block of ziggurat-shaped flats. LIMEHOUSE, E14 Limehouse, named after the long-vanished local lime industry, was where Englishmen set off on ocean-going trips to open up new trade routes in the sixteenth century and was home of London’s Chinatown between 1850 and 1950. Ratcliffe Cross Stairs, south of Butcher Row. The point where the Thames met the red cliff (‘ratcliffe’) and the Pool of London became Limehouse Reach was used as a boarding point for those crossing the oceans in late medieval times.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s 19,000-ton ship Leviathan - at least four times bigger than any other ship in the world and able to hold 4,000 passengers – was built here between 1853 and 1857 and unsuccessfully launched in November 1857, when the crush caused by the excessive number of people who gathered to watch resulted in one man being killed and the ship getting stuck on its rollers. Another three aborted launches took place and the vessel was not waterborne until the end of January 1858, by which time the owners had gone bankrupt. The ship, which was later renamed The Great Eastern, plied the trade routes between India and Australia and laid telegraphic cables in the Atlantic until 1886, when it came to be used as a showboat for the Lewis’s store of Liverpool, being broken up two years later. Some remains of the timber slipway are still in place. Island Gardens The gardens, laid out by the Commissioners of the Royal Naval Hospital in Greenwich in the nineteenth century, mark the south-east point of the Isle of Dogs, and it was here that pirates were hanged in chains, often watched by the pensioners of Greenwich Hospital through their spyglasses.


Italy by Damien Simonis

active transport: walking or cycling, airport security, bike sharing, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, company town, congestion charging, dark pattern, discovery of the americas, Frank Gehry, haute couture, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, large denomination, low cost airline, Murano, Venice glass, pension reform, period drama, Peter Eisenman, Pier Paolo Pasolini, retail therapy, Skype, spice trade, starchitect, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

The fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the Venetian territory of Morea (in Greece) in 1499 gave the Turks control over Adriatic Sea access. The Genovese gained the upper hand with Columbus’ discovery of the Americas in 1492, calling dibs on New World trade routes. Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama rounded Africa’s Cape of Good Hope in 1498, opening up new trade routes that bypassed the Mediterranean – and Venetian taxes and duties. As it lost its dominion over the seas, Venice changed tack and began conquering Europe by charm. Venetian art was incredibly daring, bringing sensuous colour and sly social commentary even to religious subjects.

Gelaterie Alaska (Map; 041 71 52 11; Calle Larga dei Bari, Santa Croce 1159; gelato €1-1.60; 9am-1pm & 3-8pm) Day-trippers in San Marco may settle for vanilla ice milk, but Venetians head to Alaska for outlandish organic gelato: one glorious scoop of Venetian roasted pistachio, or two of vaguely minty carciofi (artichoke) with tangy lemon. Gelateria San Stae (Map; 041 71 06 89; Salizada San Stae, Santa Croce 1910; gelato €1-2; 11am-9pm Tue-Sun) Simple flavours are anything but at San Stae, where signature ingredients cover Venetian trade routes from Piedmont hazelnut to Madagascar vanilla. Da Nico (Map; 041 522 52 93; Zattere, Dorsoduro 922; gelato €2.50-8; 7am-10pm Fri-Wed) Gelato to go is half-price at the bar, but sunny days are meant for lazing away dockside with Da Nico’s gianduiotto, a slab of hazelnut gelato submerged under panna (whipped cream), or panna in ghiaccio, frozen whipped cream sandwiched between cookies.

Most visitors stay on the touristy north coast, but go inland and you’ll find a rural landscape of chestnut forests, dusty farms and earthy hillside towns. On the tranquil south coast, Sant’Angelo is a blissful blend of twisting laneways, cosy harbour and bubbling beaches. History Ischia was one of the first Greek colonies in the 8th century BC, named Pithekoussai after the pithos (pottery clay) found there. An important stop on the trade route from Greece to northern Italy, it was renamed Aenaria by the Romans. In 1301 an eruption of the now-extinct Monte Arso forced the inhabitants to flee to the mainland, where many stayed permanently. The Spanish took the island in 1495 and ruled until a brief French occupation in the early 19th century.


Blindside: How to Anticipate Forcing Events and Wild Cards in Global Politics by Francis Fukuyama

Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, cognitive bias, contact tracing, cuban missile crisis, currency risk, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, flex fuel, global pandemic, Herman Kahn, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John von Neumann, low interest rates, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Norbert Wiener, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, packet switching, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Yom Kippur War

Although the Islamist element in Indonesia is currently small, it is also worth remembering that small but determined minorities can achieve great success in unstable conditions—the Bolshevik Party in Russia had a membership of only 23,000 at the beginning of 1917. Either of these outcomes would be enormously destabilizing, both to the immediate region and more widely. If one were to superimpose Indonesia on a map of Europe, it would reach from Ireland to Turkey. There are some 13,000 islands. Vital trade routes move through the region. Most of the oil that goes to China and Japan moves through the region, so any disintegration or instability in this area would be a vital concern to both of those countries. Terrorism almost certainly would increase, and the prospect of mass migration would be a serious one for Australians to worry about.


Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages by Carlota Pérez

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, commoditize, Corn Laws, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, distributed generation, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, full employment, Hyman Minsky, informal economy, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, late capitalism, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, new economy, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, post-industrial society, profit motive, railway mania, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, satellite internet, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, Suez canal 1869, technological determinism, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, Washington Consensus

The 30 years from the end of the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War to the belle époque synergy, around 1900, constitute a very special type of installation period, with an undeclared triple battle for the core. Britain, whose immense imperial power was underpinned by its control of the Gold Standard, of world finance and of transcontinental trade routes, did not consider investment in the new steel, electrical and chemical technologies a priority for wealth generation. She was the queen of the seas and the City was the financial center to the empire and to most other countries. So British financial capital installed the transcontinental infrastructures – rails, ships and telegraph – and supported the development of mining and agriculture across the world, while neglecting her own build-up of the key industries of the technological revolution.


pages: 265 words: 74,807

Our Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy by David A. Mindell

Air France Flight 447, air gap, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, autonomous vehicles, Beryl Markham, Boeing 747, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Lindbergh, Chris Urmson, digital map, disruptive innovation, driverless car, drone strike, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fudge factor, Gene Kranz, human-factors engineering, index card, John Markoff, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, telepresence, telerobotics, trade route, US Airways Flight 1549, William Langewiesche, zero-sum game

We had learned how to digitize the seafloor with ultra-high precision. That would change both what was possible in archaeology and in how we explore human history in the deep sea. We would now learn how to “excavate” an archaeological site without ever touching it. We would now learn how to do a new kind of archaeology focused on the deep water and ancient trade routes that connected civilizations. It would let us ask new questions. But not everyone would welcome the new methods. Robotic exploration would prove troubling to some and exciting to others. Seeking to understand this resistance led me on a journey of research and discovery spanning twenty years.


pages: 246 words: 116

Tyler Cowen-Discover Your Inner Economist Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist-Plume (2008) by Unknown

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, Andrei Shleifer, big-box store, British Empire, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, cross-subsidies, fundamental attribution error, gentrification, George Santayana, haute cuisine, low interest rates, market clearing, microcredit, money market fund, pattern recognition, Ralph Nader, retail therapy, Stephen Hawking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

Markets also supported Shakespeare, Haydn, and the modern book superstore. The rise of oil painting, classical music, and print culture were all part of the same broad social and economic developments, namely the rise of capitalism, modern technology, rule of law, arid consumer society. The Renaissance occurred when growing cities and reopened trade routes created enough wealth to stimulate demand for beautiful art. Beethoven gave music lessons and concerts to a rising middle class and later sold them sheet music; his rise required the printing press, the affordable piano, and ready travel around Europe. Markets, of course, also have their uglier side.


pages: 252 words: 73,131

The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us by Tim Sullivan

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, airport security, Al Roth, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, attribution theory, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, centralized clearinghouse, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, constrained optimization, continuous double auction, creative destruction, data science, deferred acceptance, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, Edward Glaeser, experimental subject, first-price auction, framing effect, frictionless, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, helicopter parent, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, late fees, linear programming, Lyft, market clearing, market design, market friction, medical residency, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, proxy bid, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The Market for Lemons, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, winner-take-all economy

In 1297, France’s war with Flanders (the territory of one important group of fair participants) made the trip too dangerous for most merchants. The war also allowed others to take advantage of the Flemish cloth traders without risking repercussion. The series of wars that followed (including the 100 Years War, starting in 1337) only made things worse and helped shift trade routes, making it nearly impossible for the fairs to recover. There’s a lesson there for modern platforms: greed can plant the seeds of your own undoing. There are plenty of modern-day equivalents to the French king’s shortsighted exploitation of the fair’s merchants. Once you hold a critical position between buyer and seller, market makers suffer from an almost inevitable temptation to profit from it.


pages: 233 words: 75,712

In Defense of Global Capitalism by Johan Norberg

anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, capital controls, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Glaeser, export processing zone, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Naomi Klein, new economy, open economy, prediction markets, profit motive, race to the bottom, rising living standards, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, zero-sum game

Tremendous growth ensued, with real earnings more than doubling by 1995, at the same time as infant mortality fell from 6 percent to just over 1 percent, and average life expectancy rose from 64 to 73 years. Chileans today have almost a southern European standard of living, in stark contrast to their neighbors. Most important of all, the bloodstained dictatorship has been peacefully superseded by a stable democratic regime—just as the liberal advisers advocated and prophesied.11 On the trade route The possibility of breaking free of dependence on raw materials lies in free trade rather than protectionism. Instead of a shield behind which industry could grow strong, the tariff walls became a shield from competition that made them less efficient and innovative. The developing countries that have switched fastest from exporting raw materials to exporting upgraded products are those that have themselves had the most open economies, above all the Asian countries.


pages: 266 words: 77,045

The Bend of the World: A Novel by Jacob Bacharach

Burning Man, disinformation, haute couture, helicopter parent, Isaac Newton, medical residency, messenger bag, phenotype, quantitative easing, too big to fail, trade route, young professional

I realized after he’d dropped me off at home that Johnny and Billy hadn’t spoken, hadn’t even looked at each other, for that entire day. 3 Another Monday. As had been promised, I’d received a call from Karla and gone off to Human Resources, a Strasbourg in Global Solutions’ medieval landscape, a free city at the crossroads of all the trade routes, with its own weird culture and amalgam language. I hadn’t been in HR since I’d first been hired. My colleagues, those who used their health plans and considered their retirements, were up here all the time filling out mysterious forms and pestering about reimbursements or withholdings or the rising cost of a monthly parking pass in the basement garage, but I thought the place was a bit spooky, full of hushed, confidential voices and bowls of candy and women who came and left the office in white tennis shoes.


Wonders of the Universe by Brian Cox, Andrew Cohen

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, California gold rush, Cepheid variable, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eddington experiment, Eyjafjallajökull, Ford Model T, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, Karl Jansky, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, time dilation, trade route

It also teaches us that the path to enlightenment is not in understanding our own lives and deaths, but in understanding the lives and deaths of the stars The Dunhuang star chart dates back to AD 700 and is the oldest existing star chart. It was named after the place where it was found along the Silk Road trade route in northern China (in the twentieth century) and is now owned by the British Library. It depicts the stars in the sky according to the Chinese constellation tradition. MAPPING THE NIGHT SKY The moment you leave a city and experience a truly dark night sky, it becomes obvious why our ancestors spent a great deal of time looking up at the stars.


pages: 236 words: 77,735

Rigged Money: Beating Wall Street at Its Own Game by Lee Munson

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, backtesting, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, call centre, Credit Default Swap, diversification, diversified portfolio, estate planning, fear index, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, follow your passion, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, High speed trading, housing crisis, index fund, joint-stock company, junk bonds, managed futures, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, National best bid and offer, off-the-grid, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, power law, price discovery process, proprietary trading, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Savings and loan crisis, short squeeze, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, too big to fail, trade route, Vanguard fund, walking around money

It was this ability to make contracts with laws and enforce them that allowed corporations to open up to the general population of wealthy merchants. In the end it was the rule of law that gave rise to what we think of as economic freedom. It helped that the Dutch had one of the strongest navies in Europe at the time. When the Dutch East India Company started to take control of East Asian trading routes, it was met with strong opposition from Portugal and England. While this is all very interesting, how did the stock do? Investors received an average 25 percent return on their money during the first 15 years.2 Eventually creating monopolies, the company dominated trade with Asia and at one point paid out a 40 percent dividend to shareholders.3 Does this sound like a stock you would like to own?


pages: 265 words: 77,084

Alone on the Wall: Alex Honnold and the Ultimate Limits of Adventure by Alex Honnold, David Roberts

carbon footprint, do what you love, Elon Musk, fixed-gear, income inequality, risk tolerance, short squeeze, side project, trade route

Then we headed to our friend Ken Yager’s house in El Portal, just outside the national park, where we took showers, ate dinner, and crashed for the short night. Lurking Fear and Zodiac were our next two objectives. They seemed pleasant and even easy compared to what we’d already done, and we dispatched them both in exactly five hours and five minutes. As Dave later told Climbing magazine, “It was just grinding out trade routes as fast as we could, getting down to the river to ice our hands and legs, eating and sleeping. Then getting up way too early to do it all again.” On July 8, we faced the last of our seven routes, the Triple Direct. It’s rated 5.9 A1, not too severe, but it’s a long route—3,200 feet of climbing over thirty-five pitches if you tackled it in conventional style.


pages: 361 words: 76,849

The Year Without Pants: Wordpress.com and the Future of Work by Scott Berkun

barriers to entry, Big Tech, blue-collar work, Broken windows theory, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, future of work, Google Hangouts, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Kanban, Lean Startup, lolcat, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, post-work, remote working, Results Only Work Environment, Richard Stallman, Seaside, Florida, side project, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the map is not the territory, The Soul of a New Machine, Tony Hsieh, trade route, work culture , zero-sum game

We did various A/B test experiments, looking for ways to simplify the design, but we learned that the most important factor in encouraging comments was the blogger's post. There was only so much the user interface itself could do. But even on the first day, 300,000 new comments were published through Highlander, and more every day since. Notes 1 For an understanding of how emergent systems, like colonies or trade routes, work, read Steven Johnson, Emergence (New York: Scribner, 2002). 2 For an overview of Parkinson's law of triviality see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law_of_triviality. 3 It is possible to build a skyscraper one brick at a time, but there has to be a goal, plan, vision, or leader driving those incremental changes toward a big vision. 4 “The Final Countdown” would become our deploy song—the music we played when about to launch a new feature.


Raw Data Is an Oxymoron by Lisa Gitelman

23andMe, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fixed income, folksonomy, Google Earth, Howard Rheingold, index card, informal economy, information security, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Louis Daguerre, Menlo Park, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peer-to-peer, RFID, Richard Thaler, Silicon Valley, social graph, software studies, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, text mining, time value of money, trade route, Turing machine, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks

Corn, like more and more species then, has thrown its lot in with humans, adapting to the contemporary social world—and especially to industrial agribusiness— with such success that it has pushed nearly all other staple competitors out of business Data Bite Man as a cornerstone of our food supply. Like Britain in its heyday, the sun never sets on the empire of corn. Pollan offers a compelling picture of the trade routes of the corn empire, documenting the production of a raw ear of corn from a farm in Iowa, and then tracing all the steps it takes as it travels to the typical American consumer. We often think of this end product as the “raw” ears of corn that we purchase at the grocery store and imagine that it is shipped to our stores more or less directly from the farmer.


pages: 261 words: 79,883

Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Black Swan, business cycle, commoditize, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, hiring and firing, John Markoff, low cost airline, Neil Armstrong, Nick Leeson, Pepsi Challenge, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route

People feared that if they traveled too far they might fall off the edge of the earth. So for the most part they stayed put. It wasn’t until that minor detail was revealed—the world is round—that behaviors changed on a massive scale. Upon this discovery, societies began to traverse the planet. Trade routes were established; spices were traded. New ideas, like mathematics, were shared between societies which unleashed all kinds of innovations and advancements. The correction of a simple false assumption moved the human race forward. Now consider how organizations are formed and how decisions are made.


pages: 269 words: 79,285

Silk Road by Eileen Ormsby

4chan, bitcoin, blockchain, Brian Krebs, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, disinformation, drug harm reduction, Edward Snowden, fiat currency, Firefox, incognito mode, Julian Assange, litecoin, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, off-the-grid, operational security, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, power law, profit motive, Right to Buy, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, stealth mode startup, Ted Nelson, trade route, Turing test, web application, WikiLeaks

Three key emerging technologies could make this possible: Tor, a program that enabled anonymous web hosting and browsing; PGP encryption, which could scramble communications between users; and bitcoin, a borderless digital currency that existed only in cyberspace, which could be used to transfer funds with no identification of the parties required. After considering and discarding other names, the budding drug czar settled on calling the website ‘Silk Road’ – a nod to the ancient Asian trade route that promoted cultural interaction between the East and the West by linking traders and merchants to buyers. The site’s symbol would be a green camel, camel trains being the common method of transport in trans-Asian trade. The difference between Silk Road and previous online black markets was a system of consumer protection.


Great Continental Railway Journeys by Michael Portillo

Albert Einstein, bank run, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Louis Blériot, railway mania, Suez canal 1869, trade route

Rolling stock had to be imported to Italy when the first rail networks got started THE STEPHENSONS’ LEGACY PERHAPS CURIOUSLY, TURIN’S PORTA NUOVA STATION – originally known as Central Station – bears a plaque honouring George and Robert Stephenson, the British father and son who brought the dream of steam railways to fruition. It’s a measure of how much store Italians set by the power of the railway the two men created, credited in part with unifying Italy. According to the plaque, the Stephensons ‘perfected the locomotive, opening new trade routes to the advantage of the brotherhood of peoples’. That British engineering had substantial influence in Italy is beyond doubt. Robert Stephenson (1803–1859) travelled there in 1839, eventually becoming the supervisor for a new railway between Florence and Pisa. His company also provided locomotives for Italy.


pages: 299 words: 79,739

Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt by Steven Johnson

British Empire, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, cotton gin, Great Leap Forward, Jeff Bezos, moral panic, Stewart Brand, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, wikimedia commons

In part, their conquest was limited by the natural barrier of the Thar Desert, which today defines the border between Pakistan and India. Trade, however, did manage to establish a constant web of interdependence between the two cultures. Islam created the first truly global integrated trading network in world history, reaching from western Africa all the way to Indonesia, but in that vast network, few trade routes were as lucrative as the one that brought Arabian horses to India in return for spices and cotton. Global trade ultimately made India too wealthy for Islam’s imperial ambitions to resist. From 1 CE to 1500 CE, no region in the world—including China—had a larger share of global GDP. Its copious supply of pearls, diamonds, ivory, ebony, and spices ensured that India ran what amounted to a thousand-year trade surplus.


Where Does Money Come From?: A Guide to the UK Monetary & Banking System by Josh Ryan-Collins, Tony Greenham, Richard Werner, Andrew Jackson

bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, credit crunch, currency risk, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, global reserve currency, Goodhart's law, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, low skilled workers, market clearing, market design, market friction, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, special drawing rights, the payments system, trade route, transaction costs

Child & Co is still operating as a private bank today and is owned by the Royal Bank of Scotland. † In sixteenth century Latin Christian Europe, Central Europe and Italy in particular, early forms of privately issued credit money called ‘Bills of Exchange’ or ‘Bills of Trade’ came in to being. Networks of traders, integrated through regular interactions on established trade routes and cities, began to accept these Bills in lieu of payment in the coinage of the period, determined by city-states of the time. In the German lands, these Bills were traded and settled in regular intervals at the major trade fairs (Messe). If one merchant owed another a sum of money which could not be paid in cash until the conclusion of a transaction some months hence, the creditor could draw a bill on the debtor and either use the bill as a means of payment in its own right or obtain cash for it at a discount from a banker willing to act as a broker.64 ‡ Accounts of fractional reserve type activities outside the UK go back much earlier than the goldsmiths however.


pages: 272 words: 76,154

How Boards Work: And How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World by Dambisa Moyo

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, deglobalization, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, financial engineering, gender pay gap, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, long term incentive plan, low interest rates, Lyft, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, multilevel marketing, Network effects, new economy, old-boy network, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Pershing Square Capital Management, proprietary trading, remote working, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, Washington Consensus, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture

This effort has included the creation of development institutions such as the New Development Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. China is also seeking to gain a greater global foothold in trade, capital flows, and investments through the multi-continent Belt and Road Initiative, which includes infrastructure investment across sixty-eight countries in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East to develop improved trade routes by land and sea. As a result, a growing proportion of the global economy will be guided by China. The 2020 global COVID-19 pandemic initially showcased the power authoritarian governments have over governments that rest on democratic freedom. An authoritarian government could quickly apply the levers it had—such as the ability to restrict freedom of movement and quarantine its population by decree—to control the spread of the disease, while governments in the United States and Europe hesitated before imposing similar restrictions in the hope of preserving individual freedoms, a bedrock principle of democratic capitalism.


pages: 236 words: 77,546

The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice by Fredrik Deboer

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, collective bargaining, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, fiat currency, Flynn Effect, full employment, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, helicopter parent, income inequality, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Own Your Own Home, phenotype, positional goods, profit motive, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Florida, school choice, Scientific racism, selection bias, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, trade route, twin studies, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero-sum game

A moral case for human equality is about the least likely explanation. Rather, historical events conspired to loosen the grasp of the nobility on power. The Crusades had expanded the horizons of European societies, making travel to the Near East more common, and in doing so spurred commerce. New trade routes emerged, and over time money began to replace land as the fundamental unit of value. Meanwhile the Black Death dramatically reduced Europe’s population, decreasing the supply of available workers and thus increasing the bargaining position of those that remained, strengthening serfs to the detriment of their lords.


pages: 256 words: 73,068

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

This isn’t like predestination or karma – and indeed some of the so-what-let’s-have-a-party-style Hylics might be really enjoying life on earth (think Matrix again) and be happy to continue the illusion forever. Gnosticism isn’t judgemental. If you want to be Forever Oaf, that’s your business. * * * It’s helpful to recall that this period of human history is one where Greek thought and Hebrew thought – plus influences from the East (in particular trade routes to India) were fermenting together to create the new religion that would become Christianity. The Gnostics followed the practical Jewish tradition of the importance of living a responsible and charitable life here on earth – and they welded on Greek ideas of the importance of the self-aware, fully conscious life.


pages: 686 words: 201,972

Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol by Iain Gately

barriers to entry, British Empire, California gold rush, corporate raider, Day of the Dead, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Fellow of the Royal Society, gentleman farmer, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, imperial preference, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Louis Pasteur, megacity, music of the spheres, Norman Mailer, Peace of Westphalia, post-work, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, strikebreaker, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, vertical integration, working poor

The Africans had ivory, gold, slaves, and palm oil to offer, and by a process of trial and error the Portuguese discovered which goods of their own were appealing to their counterparts. In the case of the Wolofs, who occupied what is now Senegal, the best articles of trade were wine, weapons, and horses. The Wolofs were a sophisticated culture, nominally Muslim, who maintained links with other members of their faith through a trans-Saharan land trade route, but who had chosen to disregard the Koranic ban on drinking. They had a number of native beverages, including palm wine and millet beer, and these two drinks were found to be common throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Indeed, at every point of the continent where the Portuguese landed, they found alcohol to be present and to have been integrated into the customs and rituals of the peoples with whom they made contact.

Although the Spanish government latterly attempted to restrict the trade in South American wine, so as to protect the market for its own exports, by the 1570s Peru was sending its vintages to Chile (which was also a producer), Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, and to the Philippines, to which a transpacific trade route had been opened in 1565. While the Spanish were building an empire in Central and South America, the Portuguese had concentrated on trading with the Far East. In 1494, after mediation from Pope Alexander VI, the two maritime powers had divided the globe between them along a north-south meridian, with the Spanish allotted all “new” lands west of longitude 39’ 53‘ and the Portuguese the other half of the world.


Frommer's Egypt by Matthew Carrington

airport security, bread and circuses, centre right, colonial rule, Easter island, Internet Archive, land tenure, low cost airline, Maui Hawaii, open economy, rent control, rolodex, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, walkable city, Yom Kippur War

The enormous courtyard is a reminder that there was once a time when you could build a mosque big enough to hold every man in the surrounding area. See p. 98. 4 The Best Shopping Experiences • Aswan Souk: Even though it’s rapidly becoming more touristy, this rambling, sprawled-out souk retains all the vibrancy you would expect of a millennia-old crossroads on the trading routes between Africa and the Mediterranean world. See p. 253. • Egypt Craft Center (8–27 Yehia Ibrahim St., Zamalek, Cairo; & 02/ 27365123): Here you have low-hassle access to a range of folk crafts from around Egypt. This is a particularly good place to pick up pottery from the Fayum or handmade scarves from Upper Egypt.

The Fun Fact Traffic Stopper The fountain in the middle of the Nasser Square traffic circle was completed in 3 days by local sculptor Mahmoud Mabrouk. The buxom woman represents Egypt, dragging her reluctant people into the modern world. 13_259290-ch10.qxp 288 7/22/08 12:40 AM Page 288 CHAPTER 10 . THE WESTERN DESERT Darb al Arbein Kharga was once a major stop on one of the most important major trade routes between Sudan and Egypt. Today, the highway south of the city follows almost exactly the route of what was known as Darb al Arbein, or the “Forty-Day Road.” For more than 700 years, this was the conduit of the untold wealth in ostrich feathers, gold, ivory, and slaves that Sudan sent to Egypt in return for weapons, cloth, and metal goods.


pages: 653 words: 205,718

The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman, Robert K. Massie

British Empire, George Santayana, trade route

Holding the fleet together was not enough; it must be got, as Churchill expressed it in capitals, to its “War Station.” The primary duty of a fleet, as Admiral Mahan, the Clausewitz of naval warfare, had decreed, was to remain “a fleet in being.” In the event of war the British fleet, upon which an island nation depended for its life, had to establish and maintain mastery of the ocean trade routes; it had to protect the British Isles from invasion; it had to protect the Channel and the French coasts in fulfillment of the pact with France; it had to keep concentrated in sufficient strength to win any engagement if the German fleet sought battle; and above all it had to guard itself against that new and menacing weapon of unknown potential, the torpedo.

He said it would be his “feeling” that “if the German fleet came down the Channel and bombarded and battered the undefended coasts of France, we could not stand aside and see this going on practically within sight of our eyes, with our arms folded, looking on dispassionately, doing nothing!” Cheers burst from the Opposition benches, while the Liberals listened, “somberly acquiescent.” To explain his having already committed Britain to defend France’s Channel coasts, Grey entered into an involved argument about “British interests” and British trade routes in the Mediterranean. It was a tangled skein, and he hurried on to the “more serious consideration, becoming more serious every hour,” of Belgian neutrality. To give the subject all its due, Grey, wisely not relying on his own oratory, borrowed Gladstone’s thunder of 1870, “Could this country stand by and witness the direst crime that ever stained the pages of history and thus become participators in the sin?”


pages: 845 words: 197,050

The Gun by C. J. Chivers

air freight, Berlin Wall, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, G4S, illegal immigration, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, RAND corporation, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, trade route, Transnistria

“The Duke of Cambridge said in my presence ‘It was a most powerful and wonderful gun.’”21 And then the Gatling made its British field debut. Troubles broke out on the Gold Coast of West Africa in the 1870s, when the Ashanti, a tribe with ambitions of restoring control of a seaport to keep open trade routes, besieged a British garrison at Elmina, a slave port established by the Portuguese in what is now Ghana. The British had only recently purchased the territory from the Dutch. The fort at Elmina held. But the region remained restive and the English forces present were too thin to do more than defend what they held.

It fell a few months later to Russia, which had pushed the guns ordered by Colonel Gorloff out into soldiers’ hands, to show what could happen when machine guns were fired at men. In 1873, Czar Alexander II was expanding his empire’s authority over the khanates of Central Asia, trying to bring the defiant hinterlands and overland trade routes under Russian control. His soldiers faced a holdout at the city of Khiva on the banks of the Amu Darya, where the ruling khan, Muhammed Rahim, refused to recognize Russian rule. The khan held a small collection of Russian slaves, which provided the court in Saint Petersburg with all the public-relations material it needed to portray its campaign as a civilizing mission.


Switzerland by Damien Simonis, Sarah Johnstone, Nicola Williams

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, bank run, car-free, clean water, financial engineering, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, the market place, trade route, young professional

On the 1st floor of the train station is the tourist office (%027 921 60 30; www.brig.ch; h8.30am-6pm Mon-Fri, 9am-1pm Sat Oct-Jun, 8.30am-6pm Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm Sat, 9am-1pm Sun Jul-Sep). Postal buses leave from outside the train station. Directly ahead is Bahnhofstrasse, leading to the centre of town. Sights STOCKALPERSCHLOSS Kaspar Jodok von Stockalper (1609–91), a man with an eye for business who dominated the Simplon Pass trade routes, did so well that he built this castle caprice in the middle of Brig. He even dubbed himself the ‘Great Stockalper’. Locals didn’t agree and obliged him to hightail it to Italy. However, the castle (%027 921 60 30; Alte Simplonstrasse 28; adult/child/7-16yr Sfr7/free/3; hhourly 50-min guided visit 9.30-11.30am & 1.30-4.30pm Tue-Sun May-Oct), with it’s Eastern-style onion domes, is a suitably three-dimensional memorial to one man’s self-worth.

Lapped by a scenic lake, surrounded by mountains of myth – a picture of this once small fishing village and its wooden Kapellbrücke (Chapel Bridge) is enough to connote the very essence of Switzerland. Between the 13th and 19th centuries, Lucerne (Luzern in German, or ‘the city of lights’) made its fortune as an essential stop on the trade route over the Alps. Then its charming medieval centre and its fabulous position began attracting tourists. It’s never looked back. 100 m Mariahilfgasse C To Rotsee (1.5km); SYHA Hostel (1.5km); Sedel (1.5km); Zug (29km) 35 Grend elstr Falkenplatz Sternenplatz Lö pop 57,817 / elevation 435m MONEY 0 36 Reussbrücke LUCERNE ment, Hauptbahnhof; h24hr) Ὀ Ὀ ὈὈ ὈὈὈὈ Ὀ ὈὈ ὈὈ ὈὈ ὈὈὈὈ B u Permanence Medical Center (%041 211 14 44; Base- 1 A 200 m 0.1 miles Ka p MEDICAL SERVICES 0 0 rüc ke 12.30pm & 2.30-6.30pm Mon-Thu, 8.30am-12.30pm Fri, 9am-2pm Sat) LUCERNE llb Jet Wash (%041 240 01 51; Bruchstrasse 28; h8.30am- LU C E R N E 215 pe LAUNDRY www.lonelyplanet.com r alst km Den tr ichs Zür region, is worth having; you should ask for it if your accommodation doesn’t offer it.


Four Battlegrounds by Paul Scharre

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, active measures, activist lawyer, AI winter, AlphaGo, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, artificial general intelligence, ASML, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business continuity plan, business process, carbon footprint, chief data officer, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, DALL-E, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of journalism, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, global supply chain, GPT-3, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, hustle culture, ImageNet competition, immigration reform, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, large language model, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, Open Library, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, phenotype, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social software, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tech worker, techlash, telemarketer, The Brussels Effect, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, TikTok, trade route, TSMC

A cornerstone of China’s international engagement is the Belt and Road Initiative, launched in 2013, which consists of investments in building ports, railways, highways, energy pipelines, and digital infrastructure projects across Asia, Africa, and Europe. The effort harkens back to the original Silk Road, the Eurasian trade routes that connected China to the rest of the world from 130 BCE to the fifteenth century. Today’s Belt and Road is similarly aimed at deepening China’s linkages with other economies, as well as extending Beijing’s political influence. Spending estimates vary, but China has likely spent hundreds of billions of dollars in overseas construction and investment.

Reg. 51596 (August 17, 2020), https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/08/20/2020-18213/addition-of-huawei-non-us-affiliates-to-the-entity-list-the-removal-of-temporary-general-license-and; Jeanne Whalen and Ellen Nakashima, “U.S. Tightens Restrictions on Huawei Yet Again, Underscoring the Difficulty of Closing Trade Routes,” Washington Post, August 17, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/08/17/us-cracks-down-huawei-again/. 184U.S. industry protested the expansive ban: “SIA Statement on Export Control Rule Changes,” Semiconductor Industry Association, August 17, 2020, https://www.semiconductors.org/sia-statement-on-export-control-rule-changes-2/. 184TSMC stated they would no longer ship chips to Huawei: David Shepardson, “U.S.


pages: 270 words: 79,180

The Middleman Economy: How Brokers, Agents, Dealers, and Everyday Matchmakers Create Value and Profit by Marina Krakovsky

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Al Roth, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Black Swan, buy low sell high, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, deal flow, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, experimental economics, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, Joan Didion, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kenneth Arrow, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market microstructure, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Network effects, patent troll, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, power law, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, search costs, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social graph, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Y Combinator

Think of the way cut flowers move across the world through the Dutch flower market, such that it makes sense for daffodils grown in the United Kingdom to go through a series of middlemen in the Netherlands before returning to retailers and consumers in the United Kingdom. Economies of scale make this roundabout but well-trod trading route more efficient than selling direct. And if each middleman is playing a distinct role, instead of duplicating the effort of other middlemen, then all the links become indispensable. In Euclidean geometry the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but when it comes to time and money, sometimes the shortest path goes through one or more middlemen.19 Yet that’s only true if the middlemen’s value exceeds their cost.


CultureShock! Egypt: A Survival Guide to Customs and Etiquette (4th Edition) by Susan L. Wilson

air freight, anti-communist, call centre, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, land reform, RAND corporation, Suez canal 1869, telemarketer, trade route

Howard Carter’s 1922 discovery of King Tutankhamun’s (King Tut’s) tomb filled with treasures still remains one of the most internationally celebrated sites to visit. For Tutankhamun Enthusiasts If Tut is your interest, National Geographic has a fully interactive site featuring the original February 1923 volume at: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/egypt. Aswan Gateway to Africa, frontier city and prosperous market at the crossroads of the ancient caravan trade route, Aswan is undoubtedly one of my favourite places in Egypt. It has a sleepy, almost tranquil atmosphere, in contrast to the rest of Egypt. It is here that the Nile is the most enchanting and magical as it weaves through the mass of boulders and small islands, glistening sparkles dancing off its surface.


pages: 287 words: 87,204

Erwin Schrodinger and the Quantum Revolution by John Gribbin

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Arthur Eddington, British Empire, Brownian motion, double helix, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, lateral thinking, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, trade route, upwardly mobile

It would be five years before he made the breakthrough that sealed the success of the second quantum revolution—years in which he gave no hint of what was to come. Zürich was not quite a backwater of science in the 1920s, but it certainly was not a centre of excellence in research, in spite of having two respectable institutes of higher learning. The town’s location on a lake and a river, where north–south and east–west trade routes crossed, meant that there had been a settlement there since pre-Roman times, and by the end of the first millennium A.D. it had become an important centre of trade, politics, and religion. In 1218 Zürich acquired the status of a free city, and in 1351 it joined the Swiss Confederation and was involved in the wars and tribulations that eventually (in 1648) led to Swiss independence from the Habsburg Empire.


pages: 283 words: 85,824

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age by Astra Taylor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Brewster Kahle, business logic, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital Maoism, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Gilder, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Laura Poitras, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Naomi Klein, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, oil rush, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, post-work, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, slashdot, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Works Progress Administration, Yochai Benkler, young professional

Cultural equity, for Lomax, was not an isolationist creed or a philosophy aiming to freeze cultures like museum exhibits so the rest of the world can gawk. On the contrary, he recognized that cross-pollination makes culture richer and more robust. The most generative and vibrant creative centers in human history have typically occupied migration crossroads and trade routes, where different types of people intersect and infect each other with new ideas and approaches to life. Exchange is essential—the only reason modern communication systems have posed a threat to local cultures is because they have been too one-sided. Lomax hoped multi-channeled electronic communication would remedy this imbalance.


pages: 263 words: 84,410

Tulipomania: The Story of the World's Most Coveted Flower & the Extraordinary Passions It Aroused by Mike Dash

fixed income, Ponzi scheme, random walk, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, trade route, tulip mania

From these bases and maybe others, the flower spread quickly from country to country. Its novelty, delicacy, and beauty made it welcome everywhere, and its wide distribution was assisted by the easy portability of its bulbs. The time was now right for the tulip. With the discovery of silver mines in the Americas and trade routes to the Indies, there was more money about in Europe than ever before, and the rich were looking for interesting new ways to spend it. The Renaissance had reawakened interest in science, and printing had made both new discoveries and hoarded stores of older knowledge widely available. One consequence of these developments was that botany and gardening were greatly in fashion among the elite.


Culture Shock! Costa Rica 30th Anniversary Edition by Claire Wallerstein

anti-communist, bilateral investment treaty, call centre, card file, Day of the Dead, Easter island, fixed income, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, out of africa, Silicon Valley, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban sprawl

Costa Rica Perhaps the Indian population was almost totally annihilated as a result of warfare, European diseases such as smallpox and flu (to which they had no resistance) and the mass transportation of slaves to other parts of the Empire— such as the notorious gold mines of Peru, from which few emerged alive. The country’s total population would not recover to its pre-Conquest levels until 1930. Prior to the arrival of the Spaniards, the country seems to have acted as both a bridge and a filter for cultures from north and south, as well as an important trade route. Linguistic research has bolstered the theory that the Chorotegas who settled in the north of the country had moved down from Mesoamerica (today Mexico), while other groups migrated up from South America. The Chorotegas (the word comes from Choltec which means ‘people who fled’) are thought to have arrived around 800 CE to escape civil strife in their northern homeland.


pages: 250 words: 83,367

Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town by Nick Reding

Alfred Russel Wallace, call centre, crack epidemic, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Multics, trade route, union organizing

If Oelwein was shaping up to be the face of meth in modern America, and an indicator of life in modern, rural America in general, then in Ottumwa there was a picture of Oelwein’s skeletal forebears. And eventually a picture of Oelwein’s future, though that part of the story was yet to evolve. Like Oelwein, Ottumwa had for most of its history been a very prosperous place. Also like Oelwein, Ottumwa was a kind of economic outpost, a wealthy waypoint on the trade routes running between St. Louis, Chicago, and Omaha. Thanks to the Des Moines River, which runs right through the middle of Ottumwa, industry and transportation came quickly to the area once it was settled by a land rush in 1843. In 1850, John Morrell and Co. opened a flag-ship, state-of-the-art meat-processing plant in the center of town.


pages: 272 words: 83,798

A Little History of Economics by Niall Kishtainy

Alvin Roth, behavioural economics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dr. Strangelove, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, first-price auction, floating exchange rates, follow your passion, full employment, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, market design, means of production, Minsky moment, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, prisoner's dilemma, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent

The mercantilists were in favour of them. They believed that large populations helped nations to win out over foreign rivals because a large labour force working for low wages allowed manufacturers to make cheap goods to sell abroad, and a large army and navy made possible the defence of the nations’ trade routes. After the mercantilists, the utopian thinkers – Charles Fourier, Robert Owen and Henri de Saint-Simon – said that people weren’t doomed to poverty. They believed above all in progress. If people helped each other, poverty and squalor could be abolished, they said. Malthus’s father, Daniel, admired the utopians, believing their ideas to be the keys to a better society.


pages: 351 words: 94,104

White City, Black City: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa by Sharon Rotbard

British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, continuation of politics by other means, European colonialism, gentrification, global village, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, illegal immigration, megastructure, New Urbanism, Pearl River Delta, Peter Eisenman, The future is already here, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal

Similar patterns of expansion had been repeated across other parts of the country on countless occasions, but this was the first time that Jewish settlement had succeeded in smothering a whole region so effectively. Jaffa was doomed. For the first time in its history, it was cut off from its rural hinterland, from its trade routes and from the rest of the country as a whole. The surrounding Hebrew neighbourhoods transformed it into an enclave. This solitary status would be recognized and reinforced in the United Nations Division Plan of 1947 (which designated it as an Arab enclave within the future Jewish state) but even this judgement was rendered irrelevant after the city’s bloody defeat and surrender in 1948.


pages: 352 words: 87,930

Space 2.0 by Rod Pyle

additive manufacturing, air freight, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Boeing 747, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, crewed spaceflight, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, experimental subject, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mouse model, Neil Armstrong, overview effect, Planet Labs, private spaceflight, risk-adjusted returns, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SpaceShipOne, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jurvetson, systems thinking, telerobotics, trade route, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, X Prize, Y Combinator

Some of these depots will be in Earth orbit, others out by the moon, and some eventually near and on Mars. “There are [about] ten billion metric tons of water on lunar poles. We can start with refueling services,” Sowers said. Water from lunar sources would be made into fuel, then stored. “This fuel availability provides for trade routes using ACES and XEUS.” XEUS is a robotic lunar lander that will be able to transport useful supplies from the lunar surface to the storage depots. While space entrepreneurs study ways to extract, transport, and store these resources, this may ultimately prove to be too risky for even the billionaires without government partnerships.


pages: 304 words: 85,291

Cities: The First 6,000 Years by Monica L. Smith

Anthropocene, bread and circuses, classic study, clean water, diversified portfolio, failed state, financial innovation, gentrification, hiring and firing, invention of writing, Jane Jacobs, New Urbanism, payday loans, place-making, Ponzi scheme, SimCity, South China Sea, telemarketer, the built environment, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, wikimedia commons

But deep in our ancestral past, there were places that brought people into groups much larger than the population of any village and that served as the blueprints for the eventual development of urban spaces. Sometimes it was a summer-bright mountain pass that provided seasonal opportunities for people to meet and marry. Sometimes it was a place where rivers met, blending the convenience of trade routes with the potential for bumper crops. And sometimes it was a forbidding cave or sacred forest that drew people together for a journey of shared purpose. Pilgrimages of both secular and sacred forms took place during the nicer seasons of the year, when people could camp out with light clothing and just a few belongings.


pages: 241 words: 83,523

A Swamp Full of Dollars: Pipelines and Paramilitaries at Nigeria's Oil Frontier by Michael Peel

banking crisis, blood diamond, British Empire, colonial rule, energy security, Golden arches theory, informal economy, Kickstarter, megacity, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Scramble for Africa, trade route, UNCLOS, wage slave

As Britain grappled for political control, its companies fought for commercial victory. Their main rivals were the French, who were eventually to take charge of many countries across the West Africa region, from Senegal to Cameroon. All the businesses wanted power over the River Niger, an invaluable trading route that rises in Guinea and snakes through the region before emptying into the sea off the southern coast of the Niger Delta. In 1886, the United Africa Company – by now a behemothic agglomeration of British manufacturing and trading interests – found a novel way of gaining extra competitive leverage.


pages: 250 words: 87,722

Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis

automated trading system, bash_history, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, collateralized debt obligation, computerized markets, drone strike, Dutch auction, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial intermediation, Flash crash, High speed trading, information security, latency arbitrage, National best bid and offer, pattern recognition, payment for order flow, Pershing Square Capital Management, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Sergey Aleynikov, Small Order Execution System, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, the new new thing, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Vanguard fund

Because the value of the space around the black box was so great, the exchanges expanded to enclose greater amounts of that space so that they might sell it. IEX could function happily inside a space roughly the size of a playhouse. ¶ In 2008, Citadel bought a stake in the online broker E*Trade, which was floundering in the credit crisis. The deal stipulated that E*Trade route some percentage of its customers’ orders to Citadel. At the same time, E*Trade created its own high-frequency trading division, eventually called G1 Execution Services, to exploit the value of those orders for itself. Citadel’s founder and CEO, Kenneth Griffin, pitched a fit, and called out E*Trade publicly for failing to execute its customers’ orders properly. ** Arnuk and Saluzzi, the principals of Themis Trading, have done more than anyone to explain and publicize the predation in the new stock market.


pages: 432 words: 85,707

QI: The Third Book of General Ignorance (Qi: Book of General Ignorance) by John Lloyd, John Mitchinson

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Boris Johnson, British Empire, California gold rush, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, double helix, epigenetics, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, music of the spheres, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, Ronald Reagan, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route

As Scandinavia adopted Christianity and settled into the kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, raiding tailed off. The lucrative trade with the Islamic world had fallen sharply as a result of the rise of the Khazar Empire, which occupied the land between the Black and Caspian seas, cutting off Viking trade routes to Byzantium and Baghdad. But Viking culture didn’t disappear overnight. The Normans were a Viking colony in northern France (the Bayeux tapestry clearly shows they invaded Britain in ‘Viking’ ships). And the king of Norway colonised Scotland until the mid-thirteenth century – and the Western Isles until 1469.


pages: 263 words: 81,542

Drinking in America: Our Secret History by Susan Cheever

British Empire, classic study, George Santayana, Howard Zinn, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Suez canal 1869, trade route, white picket fence

Shrewd Yankee sailors soon saw that they could earn more substantial profits if they stopped in two ports of call rather than one—something that created what came to be known as the infamous triangle trade. The ease of sailing with different winds and currents had already established many thriving trade routes. The voyages took about a year of sailing back and forth across the Atlantic from England and Africa to New England and the Caribbean. For instance on one route, sailors ferried New England rum from England to Africa, where it was traded for slaves captured from villages in West Africa. The slaves were taken to the West Indies over the often-fatal “middle passage” and sold or traded for a cargo of molasses.


pages: 270 words: 81,311

In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food by Stewart Lee Allen

anti-communist, British Empire, clean water, Day of the Dead, East Village, European colonialism, Filipino sailors, Golden Gate Park, haute cuisine, trade route

That’s pretty damn hard to prove, but a good indication of the extreme early importance of these senses is that our body has only four genes to govern the sense of sight, but over a thousand devoted to smell/taste. Smelling good has always been particularly important when dealing with the gods. The world’s earliest international trade routes developed to transport perfumes. Egyptians were so concerned about afterlife B.O. that they drowned their mummies in myrrh and frankincense. The first Christmas presents were perfumes, and any number of Catholic saints owe their beatitude to their corpses’ propensity to smell like roses. These are all what Toorn would call “soothing odors,” pleasing to the gods.


pages: 296 words: 87,567

A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush by Eric Newby

haute couture, trade route

He himself says that the chief reasons that caused him to invade Kafiristan were the aggravation caused by having a semi-hostile country at his back and also the fear that the Russians might annex it. Besides these statesmanlike considerations there were others. He longed to convert the Kafirs and win an apostle’s reward and also to keep open the Kunar Valley trade route between Jalalabad and Badakshan, which their really intolerable behaviour made extremely difficult. The campaign opened in the winter of 1895, the idea being to avoid the Kafirs escaping to Russian territory and also to keep casualties as low as possible. Whilst irritated by the Kafirs, the Amir seems to have recognized that they would be more use to him alive.


pages: 309 words: 84,539

The Burning Shore: How Hitler's U-Boats Brought World War II to America by Ed Offley

Bletchley Park, British Empire, en.wikipedia.org, escalation ladder, operational security, trade route

Construction was barely underway on the first three pens—which would comprise the center of the finished bunker—when U-552 tied up to the quay on March 16, 1941.9 The armored bunkers at Saint-Nazaire and the other French ports were an integral part of newly promoted four-star admiral Dönitz’s ongoing plan for a major expansion of the U-boat Force. The forty-nine-year-old admiral was adamant that Germany could only defeat Great Britain by severing the maritime trade routes that brought food, fuel, and other critical supplies to the island nation from overseas. Thus far, however, recurring delays in new construction, bureaucratic struggles with the army and Luftwaffe for steel and aluminum, and occasional personnel shortages in the German shipbuilding industry had hamstrung Dönitz’s efforts to knock Britain out of the fight.


pages: 561 words: 87,892

Losing Control: The Emerging Threats to Western Prosperity by Stephen D. King

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Naomi Klein, new economy, old age dependency ratio, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, statistical model, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

The Roman Empire had plenty of winners, but the vast number of slaves brought in to build cities and power ships would not count themselves among that happy throng. The Silk Road, sustained by China’s Tang dynasty and then by the Mongols under Genghis Khan and Kublai Khan, proved to be a most effective trading route for silk, spices, Arabic horses and religion (Buddhism found its way from India to China along the Silk Road). It was also a murderous road, with the ruling Mongols and a growing numbers of opportunistic bandits happy to indulge in death and destruction in pursuit of material gains (if the Mongols didn’t kill you off, the bubonic plague served the same purpose).


Dark Summit: The True Story of Everest's Most Controversial Season by Nick Heil

Abraham Maslow, airport security, British Empire, invisible hand, rent control, trade route

His fixation on one day climbing Everest began brewing. In 2002, Sharp climbed Cho Oyu, his first 8,000-meter peak. Cho is a rite of passage for many climbers. At 26,906 feet, it is the sixth-highest mountain in the world, but it is widely considered one of the easiest of the fourteen 8,000-meter giants. The trade route, a low-angle slog up the mountain’s northwest ridge, presents few technical challenges beyond one steep ice wall and a few rock bands, generally draped with fixed ropes to help climbers cheat past the hardest parts. Sharp had signed up to climb Cho with Jamie McGuinness’s Project Himalaya. McGuinness ran a low-key outfit for budget-minded clients looking for a Western operator with a positive attitude.


pages: 327 words: 84,627

The Green New Deal: Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth by Jeremy Rifkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, book value, borderless world, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, decarbonisation, digital rights, do well by doing good, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, failed state, general purpose technology, ghettoisation, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, impact investing, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Joseph Schumpeter, means of production, megacity, megaproject, military-industrial complex, Network effects, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planetary scale, prudent man rule, remunicipalization, renewable energy credits, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, union organizing, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Fourth, both the EU and China are reaching out beyond their borders to assist other regions in making the transition to a postcarbon civilization. On this last point, China has taken a commanding lead with its Belt and Road Initiative. The initiative was announced by President Xi Jinping in 2013 and takes its inspiration from the ancient Silk Road, the trade route that connected China, Asia, and the West.11 The vision is to build out a twenty-first-century smart digital infrastructure that can connect all of Eurasia, creating the largest integrated commercial space in history. The Belt and Road Initiative is more than just a new global trade initiative combined with conventional infrastructure investment to ensure adequate transport and logistics corridors and speed commerce across Eurasian supply chains and markets.


pages: 304 words: 80,143

The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines by William Davidow, Michael Malone

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, holacracy, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, license plate recognition, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, QWERTY keyboard, ransomware, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, Snapchat, speech recognition, streetcar suburb, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, trade route, Turing test, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, zero day, zero-sum game, Zipcar

The Epic of Gilgamesh, the first record of a real-life individual and, as it is often called, “the world’s oldest story,” was inscribed on clay tablets around 2000 BCE, some seven hundred years after its eponymous hero had reigned over Uruk.10 Those cities were dependent for food and fuel on the farmers and woodcutters who lived in their surrounding regions, and so they both protected and controlled them. City-states emerged, which eventually grew into vast empires, such as those of Greece, Rome, and Persia, which built huge militaries and expanded by conquest. Trade routes crossed whole continents. By 900 BCE, the Phoenicians had established themselves as a great trading power throughout the whole Mediterranean region and as far afield as Britain in the north and India in the southeast.11 A continual stream of inventions powered the ongoing revolution. Though the medieval era witnessed much technological backsliding, the principles of crop rotation were discovered during this time.


pages: 239 words: 80,319

Lurking: How a Person Became a User by Joanne McNeil

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Rubin, benefit corporation, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Chris Wanstrath, citation needed, cloud computing, context collapse, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, decentralized internet, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, eternal september, fake news, feminist movement, Firefox, gentrification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, green new deal, helicopter parent, holacracy, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julie Ann Horvath, Kim Stanley Robinson, l'esprit de l'escalier, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Mondo 2000, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, packet switching, PageRank, pre–internet, profit motive, Project Xanadu, QAnon, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing complete, Wayback Machine, We are the 99%, web application, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, you are the product

A famous and innocuous example of context collapse at scale happened when a woman texting photos of a dress to her daughter initiated a global debate over whether it was white and gold or black and blue. But other examples are less whimsical. Someone tweeting an inside joke, thrust before a wider audience—even the world stage—that doesn’t get it, could be subject to harassment, or, at the very least, an unpleasant measure of attention. If the iPhone was a sharing trade route, Twitter was a shipping container: a transportive enclosure for those barreling thoughts, to disperse and release them. While Twitter predates the iPhone by a year—it had a 140-character constraint because that was just shy of the limit imposed by SMS—the product found its purpose at their conjuncture.


pages: 256 words: 84,034

The Stonemason: A History of Building Britain by Andrew Ziminski

James Watt: steam engine, trade route

This is the greatest concentration of round barrows in Britain, the final stop for dynasties of chieftains and the grander Beaker people of the later Bronze Age: the archers, chieftains and wise women who had been buried with plenty of gold to see them on their way. Two-thirds of all gold found in Britain from the Bronze Age has come from here, a return of the tariffs-in-kind they could have levied on the minerals brought along the trade routes such as the ridgeways and River Avon, where they controlled supply. As with Avebury, archaeologists are still not sure if it was Beaker settlers who put up the arrangement that we can see today, but they certainly had a hand in the Stonehenge monument’s final phase between 2300 and 1900 BCE, moving and re-erecting the blue stones a few more times.


pages: 289 words: 86,165

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria

"there is no alternative" (TINA), 15-minute city, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, Day of the Dead, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, imperial preference, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Monroe Doctrine, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, social distancing, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, UNCLOS, universal basic income, urban planning, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

If we think of globalization as the increasing movement of people, goods, and capital, it has been at work ever since the first humans began migrating out of Africa sometime between 60,000 and 90,000 years ago—most likely as increasing droughts and famines (and perhaps disease) forced them to search for new pastures. In the intervening millennia, the long process of globalization has continued apace, through wars and plagues. As empires rose—Persian, Roman, Incan, Mali, Mongol, and Ottoman—they all expanded trade routes, discovered new frontiers, and caused the intermingling of peoples. The point at which modern globalization was born can be dated more precisely. No less a luminary than Adam Smith suggested two years—1492 and 1498. In the former, Columbus “discovered” the Americas; in the latter, Vasco da Gama found a new route to Asia by going around Africa.


pages: 290 words: 85,847

A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next by Tom Standage

accelerated depreciation, active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-city movement, bike sharing, car-free, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Chris Urmson, City Beautiful movement, Clapham omnibus, congestion charging, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, Ida Tarbell, Induced demand, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Joan Didion, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, minimum wage unemployment, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, prompt engineering, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, safety bicycle, self-driving car, social distancing, Steve Jobs, streetcar suburb, tech bro, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbiased observer, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, W. E. B. Du Bois, walkable city, white flight, wikimedia commons, Yom Kippur War, Zipcar

The wagon drawn on the Bronocice pot shows the pole and yoke that would have allowed it to be pulled by two oxen. These were the first vehicles capable of carrying heavy loads, or people. Whether the first wheels and wagons originated in Europe, in Mesopotamia, or in the area in between—the Pontic steppe around the north of the Black Sea—the notion of the four-wheeled wagon quickly spread along the trade routes that connected them. By 3000 B.C.E. such wagons could be found in all three regions, though they were being put to rather different uses. REINVENTING THE WHEEL In Europe wagons seem to have been used primarily for agriculture. It seems unlikely that they were used to transport loads over long distances—something that requires relatively flat, open country or well-maintained trackways.


pages: 335 words: 86,900

Empire of Ants: The Hidden Worlds and Extraordinary Lives of Earth's Tiny Conquerors by Susanne Foitzik, Olaf Fritsche

deep learning, epigenetics, megacity, microbiome, phenotype, random walk, trade route

Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 285. chapter 12: the path to world domination the tropical fire ant solenopsis geminata was spread across the world in the sixteenth century by spanish sailors Gotzek, D. et al. (2015). Global invasion history of the tropical fire ant: A stowaway on the first global trade routes. Molecular Ecology, 24, 374–88. McGlynn, T. P. (1999). The worldwide transfer of ants: geographical distribution and ecological invasions. Journal of Biogeography, 26, 535–48. the argentine ant linepithema humile reigns over the mediterranean coast of western europe with two supercolonies Blight, O. et al. (2010).


Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks by Keith Houston

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, classic study, computer age, cuban missile crisis, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, means of production, Multics, packet switching, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, trade route, wikimedia commons

Geoffrey Ashall Glaister’s comprehensive Encyclopedia of the Book describes the symbol as the “digit,” and alleges that it was “found in early twelfth century (Spanish) manuscripts.”22 As with Johnson’s dismissal of the Domesday Book’s “self-explanatory” reference marks, Glaister’s factoid is dashed off with no corroboration (this author has come across at least one twelfth-century English book displaying a manicule, as seen in Figure 9.2), and detailed information about this early chapter of the manicule’s life remains tantalizingly out of reach.23 Figure 9.2 A twelfth-century English text, Leges angliae (Laws of England), decorated with a manicule. Also noteworthy here are two cross-shaped asterisks linking a marginal note with the main text, and the numerous Tironian ets scattered throughout. Starting in the fourteenth century, life in Europe began to shift away from medieval norms. New trade routes to the Orient and the assimilation of Arabian trading practices broadened Western horizons, while the fusty ranks of monks and theologians who had dominated academic study for centuries gave way to a new breed of “humanists” emanating from Florence, Naples, and other wealthy Italian city-states, and who concerned themselves with matters of earthly rather than divine import.24 In 1453, this flowering of intellectual life intersected with two seismic political events felt across the Continent: Constantinople fell to the ascendant Ottoman Turks, sending a stream of Greek scholars and ancient texts to the West, and the cessation of the Anglo-French Hundred Years’ War brought peace—if only a temporary one—to northern Europe.


pages: 317 words: 87,048

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Abraham Wald, algorithmic bias, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, Gabriella Coleman, global pandemic, green transition, housing justice, informal economy, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julian Assange, lab leak, lockdown, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Minecraft, nuclear winter, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Piers Corbyn, post-truth, pre–internet, QAnon, real-name policy, Russell Brand, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Snapchat, social contagion, Steve Bannon, survivorship bias, TikTok, trade route, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks

Counter-terror and extremism assessments had warned well in advance that the convoy was tied to extreme and conspiratorial movements, such as Didulo, who visited and addressed the Ottowa crowds,34 QAnon and the Canadian far right.35 Prime minister Justin Trudeau was forced to get approval to employ never-before-used emergency powers to deal with the persistent blockades, which imperilled vital trade routes between the USA and Canada.36 The actual demands of those in the convoy protest in Ottowa were unclear and inconsistent, at best. Though ostensibly about ending the country’s remaining Covid-19 restrictions, some signs urged passers-by (in the largely liberal city) to ‘take the red pill’, while other convoy protesters expressed support for controversial Canadian academic Jordan Peterson.37 Didulo used her time at the protest to burn a Canadian flag outside parliament.


pages: 976 words: 329,519

The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914 by Richard J. Evans

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anton Chekhov, British Empire, clean water, company town, Corn Laws, demographic transition, Edward Jenner, Ernest Rutherford, Etonian, European colonialism, feminist movement, Ford Model T, full employment, gentleman farmer, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Honoré de Balzac, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial cluster, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jacquard loom, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, land bank, land reform, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pneumatic tube, profit motive, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, safety bicycle, Scaled Composites, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, source of truth, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, trade route, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration

This encouraged foreign businesses to get involved, and the French in particular took advantage of this provision. By 1858 nearly 3,000 miles of track had been built in Spain, but the foreign companies who ran the system paid no attention to Spanish economic needs, so that the lines simply radiated out from Madrid or Barcelona instead of following traditional trade routes. Thus there was for a long time no cheap and reliable means of getting coal from the mines of Asturias in the north to the foundries of Vizcaya 200 miles to the east, which were obliged to rely on imports of Welsh coal instead. The railway boom reached Russia in the 1860s, driven by private firms operating under government guarantee.

Nicolle was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for his discovery. Alongside the decline of typhus and smallpox and the virtual disappearance of the bubonic plague, nineteenth-century Europeans also had to contend with an entirely new threat to their life and health: Asiatic cholera. The disease spread to Europe as a result of the opening up of new trade routes through Afghanistan and Persia following the British conquest of northern India, escaping from its reservoir in Bengal in 1817 and making its way westwards initially with troop movements and then with trade. Cholera spread to Europe because Europe’s strategic power was spreading across Asia. Soon christened ‘Asiatic cholera’, the disease was widely understood as Asia’s revenge: a deadly invasion from the supposedly backward and uncivilized East, launched just as Western civilization, in the eyes of many Europeans, was reaching the height of its progress and achievements.

Things might have been very different had the European nations carried on fighting each other and exporting their conflicts to other parts of the globe, as they had done before 1815. Peace, underpinned by British naval hegemony, allowed the spread of communications networks, telegraph cables, sea lanes and trade routes, and intercontinental railways, leading to further economic development and a dense network of rapid imperial communications. Global trade expanded almost exponentially under these conditions, in a way that would have been impossible had the major industrializing states been fighting one another.


Colorado by Lonely Planet

big-box store, bike sharing, California gold rush, carbon footprint, Columbine, company town, East Village, fixed-gear, gentrification, haute couture, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, megaproject, off-the-grid, payday loans, restrictive zoning, Steve Wozniak, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, transcontinental railway, young professional

Once a pioneer homestead belonging to an impressive woman widowed in her youth, it’s now a small and dramatically beautiful wildlife sanctuary. Trail Ridge Rd The signature drive in Rocky Mountain National Park, Trail Ridge Rd (US 34) over the Continental Divide was once a highway of a different sort – a trade route used by generations of Ute, Arapaho and Apache people to traverse Milner Pass. Of course, even the 19th century seems modern when you consider that archaeological evidence collected here suggests that humans have been traversing this pass for 6000 years. Which begs the questions, how old is this Milner guy and how many languages does he speak?

The rangers are happy to suggest hikes and outings. There’s also a small on-site bookstore. Grand Junction POP 35,000 / ELEV 4586FT In truth, Grand Junction has long been about as utilitarian as its name might suggest. The town lies near two major rivers, and the intersection of highways today are built over trading routes centuries old. It ain’t much to see on its own, if you’re headed anywhere in the western part of this state, you’re bound to pass through. Amid one of Colorado’s most fertile agricultural zones, Grand Junction is a cow town at heart – despite being western Colorado’s main urban hub. Planners have partially turned downtown Main St into a pleasant pedestrian mall by reducing roads, planting trees, providing benches and littering it with sculptures.


The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist

banks create money, barriers to entry, book value, British Empire, California gold rush, Cass Sunstein, colonial rule, cotton gin, creative destruction, desegregation, double helix, financial innovation, Joseph Schumpeter, manufacturing employment, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, vertical integration, Works Progress Administration

Many in Congress feared that the western settlements might secede or, worse yet, fall into the arms of European empires. As Britain’s Indian allies raided south from their base at Detroit, Spain claimed the English-speaking settlements around Natchez. In 1784, Spain also closed the mouth of the Mississippi at New Orleans, the main trading route for western US territories. Eastern states also disagreed vehemently over how to sort out their overlapping claims to blocks of western land, which legislators hoped to sell in order to pay bonds issued during the Revolution. In the area that became Kentucky, still technically part of Virginia, the confusion generated by the uncertain government made it hard for small farmers like the Lincolns to make hard-won homesteads good.

“It is better to buy none in families, but to select only choice, first rate, young hands from 16 to 25 years of age (buying no children or aged negroes),” those same old Natchez planters quoted above told John Knight. Before American acquisition, Louisiana enslavers had bought children, adults, and older adults in percentages proportionate to their presence in the population. But after the purchase and the establishment of new trade routes and robust systems of credit, entrepreneurs bidding at Maspero’s began to demand that eastern sellers send them young adults ready to start work right away, and able to produce profits for years to come. By the five-year period starting in 1815, almost 45 percent of the enslaved people bought from other states were between the ages of fourteen and twenty-five: more than twice as many as the number between twenty-six and forty-four, and significantly more than the children aged thirteen and under (see Tables 3.2 and 3.3).52 Enslavers wanted to buy people who had no claim to a special status—who were as unformed as Henry Watson had been in the eyes of Natchez buyer Alexander McNeill.


pages: 420 words: 219,075

Frommer's New Mexico by Lesley S. King

Albert Einstein, clean water, company town, Day of the Dead, El Camino Real, machine readable, off-the-grid, place-making, post-work, quantum cryptography, Ronald Reagan, SpaceShipOne, sustainable-tourism, trade route, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

The most recent flows are only 1,000 years old; Native American legends tell of rivers of “fire rock.” Seventeen miles south of I-40 is La Ventana Natural Arch, the largest accessible natural arch in New Mexico. From NM 53, which exits I-40 just west of Grants, visitors have access to the Zuni-Acoma Trail, an ancient Pueblo trade route that crosses four major lava flows in a 71⁄2-mile (one-way) hike. A printed trail guide is available. El Calderon, a forested area 20 miles south of I-40, is a trail head for exploring a cinder cone, lava tubes, and a bat cave. (Warning: Hikers should not enter the bat cave or otherwise disturb the bats.)

To find out more about this route, visit the El Camino Real International Heritage Center. See below for details. 309 SOUTHWESTERN NEW MEXICO Socorro & the VLA 11 Other Attractions El Camino Real International Heritage Center This museum, opened in 2005, tells the story of El Camino Real, the 1,500-mile international trade route from Mexico to San Juan Pueblo, near Santa Fe. The impressive $5-million, 20,000-square-foot structure, set in the middle of the desert, is an award-winning building perched like a ship above Sheep Canyon between Socorro and Truth or Consequences. In fact, the center is designed with ship elements, including a bowsprit on the helm.


pages: 740 words: 217,139

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution by Francis Fukuyama

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, California gold rush, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Day of the Dead, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, endogenous growth, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Garrett Hardin, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, John Perry Barlow, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, means of production, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, Scramble for Africa, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), spice trade, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

There were many causes contributing to the political decay of the Mamluk regime and its destruction at the hands of the Ottomans in 1517. Egypt endured twenty-six years of plagues between 1388 and 1514. One of the immediate consequences of the rise of the Ottomans was that it became harder and harder for the Mamluks to recruit young slave-soldiers since the Ottomans sat directly astride the trade routes to Central Asia. And finally, the Mamluk system proved too inflexible to adopt new military technologies, particularly the use of firearms by infantry forces. The Ottomans, facing a European enemy, began to use firearms in 1425, perhaps a century after the innovation was first explored in Europe.25 They quickly mastered these weapons, and cannons played a key role in the fall of Constantinople in 1453.

An enormous complacency pervaded Ming China in all walks of life. It was not just emperors who didn’t feel it necessary to extract as much as they could in taxes; other forms of innovation and change simply didn’t seem to be worth the effort. The eunuch admiral Zheng He sailed across the Indian Ocean and discovered new trade routes and civilizations. This didn’t provoke curiosity, however, and the voyages were never followed up. The next emperor cut the navy’s budget as an economizing move, and the Chinese Age of Discovery was over almost before it had begun. Similarly, during the Song Dynasty, an inventor named Su Sung invented the world’s first mechanical clock, a huge, multistory mechanism powered by a waterwheel, but it was abandoned when the Rurzhen conquered the Song capital of Kaifeng.


pages: 1,520 words: 221,543

Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War: 1938-1941 by Alan Allport

Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, British Empire, centre right, clean water, COVID-19, disinformation, Downton Abbey, hydroponic farming, imperial preference, lone genius, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, new economy, plutocrats, trade route, éminence grise

In March 1938, under pressure to reduce the naval estimates, the government deferred the building of two new flotillas of destroyers, two escort vessels, three patrol vessels and four minesweepers.21 It was only a few days before the outbreak of war that the Admiralty finally placed orders for fifty-six new anti-submarine escort sloops equipped with ASDIC, depth charges and four-inch guns. These were the first of the so-called ‘Flower’ class corvettes which would be vital to the defence of the North Atlantic trade route over the next six years. But most of the Flower class corvettes would not be ready for commissioning until 1941. Only about 100 vessels suitable for anti-submarine escort were available to the Royal Navy in September 1939, a very modest force to defend up to 3,000 ocean-going merchant ships.22 As a result, only an average of two escorts could be provided for each transatlantic convoy at the start of the war.

I have already given you the political data upon which the military arrangements for the defence of Singapore should be based, namely, that should Japan enter the war the United States will in all probability come in on our side; and in any case Japan would not be likely to besiege Singapore at the outset, as this would be an operation far more dangerous to her and less harmful to us than spreading her cruisers and battle-cruisers on the Eastern trade routes.56 Dill responded on 15 May, a fact omitted from Churchill’s account in The Grand Alliance. He pointed out that his argument that the defence of Singapore had a greater strategic priority than the defence of Egypt was simply a repetition of Churchill’s own statements on the matter. In addition, I agree with you that the defence of Singapore requires only a fraction of the troops required for the defence of Egypt.


pages: 796 words: 223,275

The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henrich

agricultural Revolution, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, British Empire, charter city, cognitive dissonance, Columbian Exchange, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, delayed gratification, discovery of the americas, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, epigenetics, European colonialism, experimental economics, financial innovation, Flynn Effect, fundamental attribution error, glass ceiling, income inequality, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, land reform, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, New Urbanism, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, profit maximization, randomized controlled trial, Republic of Letters, rolodex, social contagion, social web, sparse data, spinning jenny, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Stanford marshmallow experiment, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, wikimedia commons, working-age population, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

This has operated differently in diverse regions, with exchange-oriented social norms sometimes evolving to foster more smoothly flowing trade between occupational castes or ethno-religious groups. In South Asia, for example, some medieval ports established enduring exchange relationships between local Hindus and Muslim traders on the Indian Ocean. Centuries later, long after the disruption of Islamic trade routes by European powers, trading ports experience less interethnic violence between Hindus and Muslims than nontrading cities. It seems that trade between these groups forged enduring informal institutions, the psychological effects of which persisted long after trade ceased.63 These kinds of prosocial effects can be observed today all over the world by examining the relationship between a community’s proximity to large rivers or oceans and the attitudes of its inhabitants toward foreigners and immigrants.

Beyond their original use in grinding grain, European communities gradually deployed windmills for a growing list of jobs, including throwing silk, extracting oil, and manufacturing gunpowder. Later, Europeans dumped their awkward roman numerals (I, II, III, etc.) for more user-friendly arabic numerals (1, 2, 3, etc.), including a symbol for zero that had originated in India. After 1500, when Europeans opened global trade routes and subjugated vast overseas empires, the products, technologies, and practices from other distant societies flooded in, further energizing science, innovation, and production: latex, quinine, fertilizer (guano), potatoes, sugar, coffee, and the cotton gin (inspired by the Indian charka), just to highlight a few.


pages: 745 words: 207,187

Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military by Neil Degrasse Tyson, Avis Lang

active measures, Admiral Zheng, airport security, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Carrington event, Charles Lindbergh, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, corporate governance, cosmic microwave background, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dava Sobel, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, dual-use technology, Eddington experiment, Edward Snowden, energy security, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, global value chain, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Karl Jansky, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Late Heavy Bombardment, Laura Poitras, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, low earth orbit, mandelbrot fractal, Maui Hawaii, Mercator projection, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, operation paperclip, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precision agriculture, prediction markets, profit motive, Project Plowshare, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, skunkworks, South China Sea, space junk, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, the long tail, time dilation, trade route, War on Poverty, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game

Nevertheless, little more than a century after Herodotus wrote those words, a daring Greek from Massalia named Pytheas may well have made his way to the Atlantic Ocean, the tin works of Cornwall, and much else besides.16 Massalia (Marseille) was the colony of a colony, one of many Greek and Phoenician maritime cities that sprouted across and beyond the full breadth of the Mediterranean from the early to the middle of the first millennium BC. During those centuries, the founding of colonies and the forging of trade routes proceeded hand in hand with the development of warships and the establishment of navies.17 Alongside all that commerce and conflict, inquiry and learning flourished as well. Interchange took place on every coast; information poured in from every direction. Anaximander, a resident of the thriving Greek city of Miletus, drew the first map of the inhabited regions of Earth.

And the Chinese state, which grew plenty of sugar and other tropical delights within its own borders, had little cause to put money, personnel, and effort into creating colonies overseas.37 The Portuguese, on the other hand, representing king, country, and God, sought both control and colonies. Good ships and newfangled guns gave them the advantage as they revived the practices of building forts, blocking trade routes, claiming trade monopolies, boarding foreign ships, and generally seeking to rule the waves and harbors. A key part of their program was to find routes free of Ottoman control and thus free of Ottoman tax collectors.38 Venturing far across the Atlantic and Indian oceans in the fifteenth century, the Portuguese had need of knowledge and instruments more elaborate than those used by the average captain crisscrossing the Mediterranean or exploring the east coast of Africa or taking soundings for depth, sampling bottom silt, and monitoring the tides in the fogbound English Channel or the Baltic.


pages: 366 words: 94,209

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity by Douglas Rushkoff

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business process, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, centralized clearinghouse, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, corporate raider, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Firefox, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, gamification, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, Google bus, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, loss aversion, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, medical bankruptcy, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, power law, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, software patent, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Future of Employment, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transportation-network company, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

We must reckon with how and why we did this. MASS MASS MASS For a happy couple of centuries before industrialism and the modern era, the business landscape looked something like Burning Man, the famous desert festival for digital artisans. The military campaigns of the Crusades had opened new trade routes throughout Europe and beyond. Soldiers were returning from faraway places after having been exposed to all sorts of new crafts and techniques for building and farming. They even copied a market they had observed in the Middle East—the bazaar—where people could exchange not only their goods but also their ideas, leading to innovations in milling, fabrication, and finance.


pages: 606 words: 87,358

The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization by Richard Baldwin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Branko Milanovic, buy low sell high, call centre, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, commodity super cycle, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, domestication of the camel, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, financial intermediation, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Henri Poincaré, imperial preference, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invention of the telegraph, investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Dyson, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, low skilled workers, market fragmentation, mass immigration, Metcalfe’s law, New Economic Geography, out of africa, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, profit motive, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, Simon Kuznets, Skype, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telerobotics, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus

Spain had colonies throughout Central America and the west coast of South America—most notably in Peru and Bolivia. From the start of the sixteenth century, Europeans dominated Europe-to-Asia trade, playing “king of the hill” among themselves. The Dutch knocked off the Portuguese, and were in turned knocked off by the British. In addition to altering Asian–European trade routes, this so-called Age of Discovery is associated with Europeans’ colonization of North and South America—an event that would help reverse ten millennia of economic dominance by Eurasian civilizations. The Columbian Exchange: Food Crops for Epidemics The shift of the planet’s economic center of gravity to the North Atlantic was based in part on the so-called Columbian Exchange.


pages: 352 words: 90,622

Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security by Sarah Chayes

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Celtic Tiger, colonial rule, crony capitalism, drone strike, failed state, high-speed rail, income inequality, microcredit, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, structural adjustment programs, trade route, ultimatum game, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, young professional

CHAPTER TEN Variation 4: The Resource Kleptocracy Nigeria, ca. 2014 In Africa’s populous giant, Nigeria, conservative Muslims are found not in the lush southern valleys but in the dry and gradually desertifying north. Among the oldest cities in West Africa is Kano, on the fringes of this zone. Its dense, vibrant core once cinched together trade routes crossing the habitable lands on the southern edge of the Sahara with those leading north to the centers of thought and industry on the Mediterranean. Today, in that compact old-city hub, stalls at ground level and suspended overhead on a kind of open-air scaffolding overflow with bright-hued bolts of the region’s famous fabrics.


pages: 420 words: 98,309

Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson

Ayatollah Khomeini, classic study, climate anxiety, cognitive dissonance, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donald Trump, false memory syndrome, fear of failure, Lao Tzu, longitudinal study, medical malpractice, medical residency, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, placebo effect, psychological pricing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, sugar pill, telemarketer, the scientific method, trade route, transcontinental railway, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

By the middle of the tenth century, more than a century before the Crusades began, half the Christian world had been conquered by Muslim Arab armies: the city of Jerusalem and countries in which Christianity had been established for centuries, including Egypt, Sicily, Spain, and Turkey. In 1095, Pope Urban II called on the French aristocracy to wage holy war against all Muslims. A pilgrimage to regain Jerusalem would give European towns an opportunity to extend their trade routes; it would organize the newly affluent warrior aristocracy and mobilize the peasants into a unified force; and it would unite the Christian world, which had been split into Eastern and Roman factions. The Pope assured his forces that killing a Muslim was an act of Christian penance. Anyone killed in battle, the Pope promised, would bypass thousands of years of torture in purgatory and go directly to heaven.


Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System by Alexander Betts, Paul Collier

Alvin Roth, anti-communist, centre right, charter city, corporate social responsibility, Donald Trump, failed state, Filter Bubble, global supply chain, informal economy, it's over 9,000, Kibera, mass immigration, megacity, middle-income trap, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, open borders, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, rising living standards, risk/return, school choice, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, trade route, urban planning, zero-sum game

After finding a disused generator and spending seven months repairing it, he began to collect televisions and old PlayStation games consoles. He now charges young refugees a nominal fee to play Fifa World Soccer and other games, ploughing his profits back into gradually expanding the business. Furthermore, Nakivale’s economy is not just an isolated enclave; it is nested within broader trade routes and supply chains. To take an example, across the settlement, many Congolese buy and sell a brightly coloured ceremonial fabric called bitenge. A commonly held belief among many of the international community staff is that the fabric simply comes across the border from the Democratic Republic of Congo.


pages: 354 words: 93,882

How to Be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson

Albert Einstein, Alexander Shulgin, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, call centre, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deskilling, Easter island, financial independence, full employment, Gordon Gekko, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, moral panic, New Urbanism, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, spinning jenny, three-martini lunch, Torches of Freedom, trade route, wage slave, work culture

A good wife would ensure a steady supply; good employers attracted labourers with the quality of their ale. It was the national drink for a chaotic and strong-willed country of ruddyfaced boozers. We may not have been particularly refined, but we knew how to have a good time. Thanks, however, to new trade routes, tea began to filter in to English culture in the late seventeenth century. It was at first fashionable at court, probably because it was expensive and rare. But its popularity began to spread. One early apologist for tea was Dr Johnson. There was none of the oriental refinement in the way he drank it, and the custom of tea at four or five 0' clock had not yet been invented.


pages: 329 words: 95,309

Digital Bank: Strategies for Launching or Becoming a Digital Bank by Chris Skinner

algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, bank run, Basel III, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, buy and hold, call centre, cashless society, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, demand response, disintermediation, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial innovation, gamification, Google Glasses, high net worth, informal economy, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, margin call, mass affluent, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Pingit, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, pre–internet, QR code, quantitative easing, ransomware, reserve currency, RFID, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, software as a service, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Stuxnet, the long tail, trade route, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, We are the 99%, web application, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Greek slave traders often bartered salt for slaves, giving rise to the expression that someone was “not worth his salt”, whilst Roman legionnaires were paid in salt rations known as ‘solarium argentums’ also known as a ‘salarium’, the Latin origin of the word “salary”. Jesus said “Ye are the salt of the earth” and trade routes such as the ancient Via Salaria, which led from northern Italy to the Adriatic Sea, were used to transport the valuable seasoning inland from the coast. This brought riches and prosperity to the bordering cities which were often named for the white mineral: “Salz”, the German word for salt, which gave Salzburg and Salzgitter their names.


pages: 316 words: 90,165

You Are Here: From the Compass to GPS, the History and Future of How We Find Ourselves by Hiawatha Bray

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Albert Einstein, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, digital map, don't be evil, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Edward Snowden, Firefox, game design, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, license plate recognition, lone genius, openstreetmap, polynesian navigation, popular electronics, RAND corporation, RFID, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Thales of Miletus, trade route, turn-by-turn navigation, uranium enrichment, urban planning, Zipcar

“The time was a critical and anxious one in the war,” Jackson wrote in 1920, “and I had also some reasons for expecting that the German fleet might put out to sea during the week.”10 Messages intercepted by Room 40 indicated that eighteen German U-boats had put to sea a couple of weeks earlier, but had not shown up on normal trade routes for their usual attacks on merchant ships. The Royal Navy suspected that the U-boats were being deployed to assist the German fleet in their planned breakout.11 Later that day Round’s radio listening posts issued a new report. The ship that had broadcast the previous message had since moved a few miles north.


pages: 344 words: 93,858

The Post-American World: Release 2.0 by Fareed Zakaria

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge economy, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, mutually assured destruction, National Debt Clock, new economy, no-fly zone, oil shock, open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, The future is already here, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, Washington Consensus, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

In addition, the new nongovernmental forces that are increasingly active will constrain Washington substantially. This is a challenge for Washington but also for everyone else. For almost three centuries, the world has been undergirded by the presence of a large liberal hegemon—first Britain, then the United States. These two superpowers helped create and maintain an open world economy, protecting trade routes and sea lanes, acting as lenders of last resort, holding the reserve currency, investing abroad, and keeping their own markets open. They also tipped the military balance against the great aggressors of their ages, from Napoleon’s France, to Germany, to the Soviet Union. For all its abuses of power, the United States has been the creator and sustainer of the current order of open trade and democratic government—an order that has been benign and beneficial for the vast majority of humankind.


pages: 332 words: 89,668

Two Nations, Indivisible: A History of Inequality in America: A History of Inequality in America by Jamie Bronstein

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, oil shock, plutocrats, price discrimination, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, scientific management, Scientific racism, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, the long tail, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, wage slave, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Over the period between 1780 and 1850, life expectancies at age 10 declined in the United States from a high of almost 56 years to a low of 48, and mean heights dropped from 5 feet 7 inches for white men to 5 feet 6 inches. These factors suggest that in the short run, market revolution changes could be detrimental. Historians have suggested that inequality of distribution, variable trade cycles, urbanization, and the ease with which diseases could travel along new trade routes may have been to blame.11 In his book Democracy in America, written after an 1831 tour of the United States, the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville praised American social and economic mobility.12 Of course the second quarter of the nineteenth century saw the making of many fortunes in diverse industries.


Industry 4.0: The Industrial Internet of Things by Alasdair Gilchrist

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air gap, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, business intelligence, business logic, business process, chief data officer, cloud computing, connected car, cyber-physical system, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, DevOps, digital twin, fault tolerance, fulfillment center, global value chain, Google Glasses, hiring and firing, industrial robot, inflight wifi, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, inventory management, job automation, low cost airline, low skilled workers, microservices, millennium bug, OSI model, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, platform as a service, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RFID, Salesforce, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, smart transportation, software as a service, stealth mode startup, supply-chain management, The future is already here, trade route, undersea cable, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, web application, WebRTC, Y2K

Another possible use-case is in supply chain management where the predictive analysis techniques of Big Data can come into play. The world’s largest logistic companies need to know the latest current events on a global scale, such as the political climate as well as the local weather conditions that affect traditional trade routes. They need to know of impending strike action by traffic controllers or crane drivers in a shipping port, as these could cause massive disruption and have a knock-on effect to a customer’s stock inventory levels. However, with trucks and goods bristling with sensors, it is now possible Industry 4.0 to harvest this data on a global level.


pages: 322 words: 88,197

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, Alfred Russel Wallace, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Book of Ingenious Devices, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, colonial exploitation, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Drosophila, Edward Thorp, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, game design, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, HyperCard, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, megacity, Minecraft, moral panic, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, Necker cube, New Urbanism, Oculus Rift, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pets.com, placebo effect, pneumatic tube, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, SimCity, spice trade, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, talking drums, the built environment, The Great Good Place, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, working poor, Wunderkammern

A Babylonian living two thousand years before Christ would have had no idea about the existence of the Spice Islands, or Indonesia—or the Indian Ocean for that matter. Put another way, those tiny spices traveled thousands of miles farther than any individual human had ever traveled. The epic relay race that brought the cloves to modern-day Syria is lost to us now, but our knowledge of spice-trade routes from Roman times suggests the broad outlines of the itinerary. Outriggers or Chinese traders would have carried the cloves down through the Java Sea, winding their way through the narrow straits of Malacca. At port cities in Sumatra or modern-day Malaysia, they would have been sold to Indian traders who brought them across the Bay of Bengal around Sri Lanka to the Malabar coast of India.


pages: 282 words: 92,998

Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It by Richard A. Clarke, Robert Knake

air gap, barriers to entry, complexity theory, data acquisition, Dr. Strangelove, escalation ladder, Golden arches theory, Herman Kahn, information security, Just-in-time delivery, launch on warning, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, packet switching, RAND corporation, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, undersea cable, Y2K, zero day

It’s not the islands that China, Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Brunei are feuding over, but what is under them and around them. The reefs have some of the largest remaining stocks of fish in the world, a resource not to be discounted among the growing and hungry nations that lay claim to the waters. The islands also skirt the critical trade route that links the Indian Ocean to the Pacific nations through which a large majority of the world’s oil flows out of the Middle East. Then there are the Spratlys’ oil and gas. Undeveloped fields estimated to hold more natural gas than are Kuwait, currently home to the fourth-largest reserves in the world, could fuel the economies of any of the countries for decades to come.


pages: 534 words: 15,752

The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy by Sasha Issenberg

air freight, Akira Okazaki, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, call centre, company town, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, Dutch auction, flag carrier, global supply chain, Golden arches theory, haute cuisine, means of production, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, telemarketer, trade route, urban renewal

Japanese communities on the West Coast were dispersed by mass internments—Hoshizaki and other Mutual Trading executives were sent to the camp at Manzanar—and it took a while for neighborhoods to be resettled. There wasn’t much business to conduct, anyway: The Japanese economy was threadbare, and Pacific trade routes in shambles. Luckily, unlike most Japanese-American businesses, Mutual Trading’s assets had been guarded at the Maryknoll Church, popular with Japanese families who had been exposed to Catholicism from missionary visits in the late nineteenth century. As residents returned to Little Tokyo and tried to rebuild their house holds, Mutual Trading was the only vendor in town with merchandise on hand.


pages: 302 words: 91,517

Baghdad Without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia by Tony Horwitz

Ayatollah Khomeini, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cotton gin, Donald Trump, Farzad Bazoft, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, Mercator projection, trade route

But most of the towers seemed to squat rather than soar. Urine trickled from holes in the upper floors, a primitive sewage system that relied on the hot sun to dry waste water as it dribbled down. From atop the ramparts there was still a glimpse of former glory. A cleft in the mountains marked the site of an ancient trade route, along which passed caravans of myrrh and frankincense on their way to the Mediterranean port of Gaza. Muslim pilgrims also followed the road north to visit Mecca, just over the mountains. Their gravestones, covered in calligraphy, massed outside Saada's walls, facing the holy city. These days, thousands of Yemenis made the pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia for worldlier gain.


pages: 311 words: 89,785

Crossing the Heart of Africa: An Odyssey of Love and Adventure by Julian Smith

Beryl Markham, blood diamond, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, James Watt: steam engine, Livingstone, I presume, Pepto Bismol, Scramble for Africa, trade route

I was amazed she remembered—I’d forgotten saying it myself. But she was right. I could picture the precipice, clear as day. CHAPTER TEN Grogan and Sharp couldn’t wait to get off the Good News at Ujiji, one of the oldest and most famous towns in central Africa. For more than a century, it had been the western end of the lucrative Arab trading route to the island city of Zanzibar, almost due east on the coast. Caravans laden with ivory arrived from the Congo trailing long lines of manacled slaves. Those who survived the journey were auctioned in the markets of Zanzibar and Dar-Es-Salaam, its coastal counterpart. Ujiji’s glory days faded as the slave trade was gradually abolished in the nineteenth century.


pages: 336 words: 90,749

How to Fix Copyright by William Patry

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, barriers to entry, big-box store, borderless world, bread and circuses, business cycle, business intelligence, citizen journalism, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, haute cuisine, informal economy, invisible hand, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lone genius, means of production, moral panic, new economy, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, search costs, semantic web, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

Adam Smith claimed, in the eighteenth century, that an increase in the size of markets leads to increases in the diversity of offerings.16 Trade among countries increases this diversity by introducing people in one country to the goods, services, and cultures of others.17 Most of the early great powers, beginning with the Ancient Greeks, were sea powers. The Greeks spread their culture wherever they went, whether that spread was voluntary or forced as part of a conquest. France, Great Britain, Holland, Spain, and Portugal did the same.The trade routes to the Far East transmitted more than spices. From the Industrial Revolution forward, increased literacy rates and mass production led to an expansion of culture so that it was no longer the province of the upper classes.Walt Whitman remarked, “To have great poets, there must be great audiences.”18 Whitman believed that poetry could be appreciated by the working class 254 HOW TO FIX COPYRIGHT and later regretted that he had not toured the country and given readings to the working class.19 Alexis de Tocqueville, in studying the United States, took a different view, concluding that “market growth serves as a magnet, pulling creators towards mass production and away from serving niches,” resulting in “a culture of the least common denominator. . . .”20 De Tocqueville’s rather than Smith’s views seems to have prevailed.


pages: 312 words: 91,835

Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization by Branko Milanovic

Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, place-making, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, stakhanovite, trade route, transfer pricing, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

I shall argue that the modern historical era, the past five hundred years, is characterized by Kuznets waves of alternating increases and decreases in inequality. Before the Industrial Revolution, when mean income was stagnant, there was no relationship between mean income level and the level of inequality. Wages and inequality were driven up or down by idiosyncratic events such as epidemics, new discoveries (of the Americas or of new trade routes between Europe and Asia), invasions, and wars. If inequality decreased as mean income and wages went up and the poor became slightly better off, Malthusian checks would be triggered: the population would increase to unsustainable levels and would ultimately be driven down (as the average per capita income declined) by higher mortality rates among the poor.


pages: 324 words: 90,253

When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Affluence by Stephen D. King

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bond market vigilante , British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, congestion charging, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, endowment effect, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, mass immigration, Minsky moment, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk free rate, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, technology bubble, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population

The first symptom of the Black Death was the appearance of a bubo – a boil – in either the armpit or the groin, followed by internal bleeding that led to bruising on the skin. After a few days of terrible pain and suffering, the unlucky victim would drop dead. The Black Death probably arrived in Europe via the Silk Road, the trading route that connected China to modern-day Turkey and Syria. It didn't help that corpses of plague victims were catapulted into castles during sieges, a sure way of spreading disease with unseemly haste. The Black Death travelled across Europe at tremendous speed and, by the end of 1348, had arrived in England.


pages: 309 words: 87,414

Paris Revealed by Stephen Clarke

clean water, gentrification, haute couture, Honoré de Balzac, rent control, sexual politics, trade route

And for those who prefer to do nothing, there are several hundred loungers and parasols laid out on artificial beaches (along with an equal number of security men to stop them being stolen). It really is a holiday resort for people who can’t afford to, or don’t want to, leave the city in summer. And Parisians flock there like migrating flamingos. The migration is spreading out from the city centre, too. I live near Napoleon’s Canal de l’Ourcq, which was once one of France’s main trade routes, and is now slowly emerging from decades of industrial and urban decline. In summer, people rent canoes and pedalos, there are one-euro boat trips up the canal to the suburb of Pantin, and a small marina has been installed. Part of the canal, along the Bassin de la Villette, has even been incorporated into the Paris Plage scheme, forcing the city to rename it Paris Plages, plural.


pages: 304 words: 88,773

The Ghost Map: A Street, an Epidemic and the Hidden Power of Urban Networks. by Steven Johnson

call centre, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Dean Kamen, digital map, double helix, edge city, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Google Earth, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, John Snow's cholera map, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, megacity, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, pattern recognition, peak oil, side project, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the scientific method, trade route, unbiased observer, working poor

Newspapers would track the disease’s progress through the harbors and trading towns of Europe, as it marched relentlessly across the Continent. When cholera first appeared in New York City in the summer of 1832, it attacked the city from the north: arriving first in Montreal via ships originating in France, the disease spent a month snaking along the trade routes of upstate New York toward the city, then floating straight down the Hudson. Every few days the papers would announce that the cholera had taken another step; when it eventually arrived, in early July, almost half the city had escaped to the countryside, creating traffic jams that resembled the Long Island Expressway on a modern-day Fourth of July weekend.


pages: 323 words: 94,406

To the Edge of the World: The Story of the Trans-Siberian Express, the World's Greatest Railroad by Christian Wolmar

anti-communist, Cape to Cairo, Crossrail, Kickstarter, land reform, mass immigration, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, railway mania, refrigerator car, stakhanovite, Suez canal 1869, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban planning

He argued that Siberia was no longer ‘a desolate and terrible country inhabited by convicts’,14 but rather a rich source of resources which could be exploited with a railway connection. He wanted it to run from Moscow right through to the Amur river, but if that were impossible, at least as far as Irkutsk. He wanted it to use the northern route through Perm, rather than existing trade routes through the south in order to spur the development of these areas, which were home to tribes and untouched by civilization. His plan, though, attracted scant support from the committee of ministers, the contemporary equivalent of the Cabinet. Although, Posyet’s proposal did not gain the support of the committee, it did decide to go ahead with the construction of a railway from Nizhny-Novgorod along the right bank of the Volga to Kazan and Yekaterinburg, a proposal endorsed by the tsar in December 1875.


pages: 289 words: 90,176

Lions of Kandahar: The Story of a Fight Against All Odds by Rusty Bradley, Kevin Maurer

digital map, friendly fire, operational security, Ronald Reagan, trade route

The sickness quickly turned to anger. My team now had to fight for ground we had already taken. Kandahar was the prize—strategically vital to both us and the Taliban. The third-largest city in Afghanistan, Kandahar has been fought over for centuries. Since the time of Alexander the Great it has stood at the crossroads of trade routes to five major cities: Herat and Gereshk to the west, Kabul and Ghazni to the northeast, and Quetta in Pakistan to the south. With its airport and extensive network of roads, the city served as a center for the mujahideen resistance during the Soviet invasion and was the one-eyed Taliban leader Mullah Omar’s hometown.


pages: 305 words: 97,214

Future Tense: Jews, Judaism, and Israel in the Twenty-First Century by Jonathan Sacks

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Atahualpa, back-to-the-land, cognitive dissonance, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, long peace, Socratic dialogue, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, zero-sum game

It was in Mesopotamia that the first city-states were built, and in Egypt that the greatest and longest-lived of ancient empires had its base. So Israel would almost invariably be a small country at the juncture of powerful empires, in a simultaneously strategic and vulnerable location on major trade routes. The normal movement of population is from poor countries to rich ones, and from rudimentary to more advanced civilisations. The two great Jewish journeys, Abraham’s from Ur of the Chaldees, and Moses’ and the Israelites’ from Egypt, were in the opposite direction. The explanation is, as I have said, that the Bible is a critique of empires.


pages: 297 words: 90,806

Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made by Jason Schreier

cloud computing, crowdsourcing, game design, Google Hangouts, gravity well, imposter syndrome, index card, inventory management, iterative process, Kickstarter, pirate software, side project, SimCity, spice trade, trade route

We would even reference other games, like Red Dead Redemption or Skyrim, check how they did it, and then we wanted to figure out, all right, does this feel good for us, do we need it denser, or vary from that.” Tost’s team didn’t just want The Witcher 3’s world to feel like a collection of disparate quests—they wanted it to support an entire ecosystem. There would be a village that built bricks, connected to the city of Novigrad via elaborate trade routes. There would be manufacturing, agriculture, and all the other accouterments of a realistic medieval world. “If you look at the farming areas around Novigrad, all of these exist to support this huge city which believably could exist in this world,” said Tost. “All of these people living there, they get support from different kinds of infrastructure around the world.


Work! Consume! Die! by Boyle, Frankie

Boris Johnson, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, heat death of the universe, Jeffrey Epstein, Large Hadron Collider, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, millennium bug, no-fly zone, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, open immigration, pez dispenser, Piper Alpha, presumed consent, Slavoj Žižek, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, systems thinking, the medium is the message, trade route, WikiLeaks

In the classical world I could have perhaps enjoyed watching it, as it was training for battle. I would have sat engrossed as lithe men leapt at each other with weapons, happy for them to be celebrated by my society because they would soon be dead. I would have watched their tricks and flips in a different light, knowing that they would soon be slashed to pieces to defend a trade route, their muscular bodies impaled on a stake as a grim warning, their hand-to-eye co-ordination counting for naught now that their hands and eyes had been taken as trophies, while I tried to get into their widows’ togas by writing poems in their memory. ‘I think about whether I care and decide that, on balance, I don’t’ Paul Marsh drives my daughter and me out to Mugdock Park.


pages: 302 words: 92,206

Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World by Gaia Vince

3D printing, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, charter city, circular economy, clean water, colonial exploitation, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, degrowth, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, European colonialism, failed state, gentrification, global pandemic, Global Witness, green new deal, Haber-Bosch Process, high-speed rail, housing crisis, ice-free Arctic, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, job automation, joint-stock company, Kim Stanley Robinson, labour mobility, load shedding, lockdown, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, mass incarceration, mega-rich, megacity, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, old age dependency ratio, open borders, Patri Friedman, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, place-making, planetary scale, plyscraper, polynesian navigation, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rewilding, Rishi Sunak, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, urban planning, urban sprawl, white flight, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game, Zipcar

The Yamnaya would have been an extraordinary sight, like nothing the indigenous European crop farmers had seen before: fair-skinned, dark-eyed warriors decorated with bronze jewellery, hurtling along on horseback and with horse-drawn wagons. Their advanced metalwork and intricately patterned earthenware have been dug up from Scotland to Morocco. They also brought their Indo-European language, whose roots lay in northern Iran, and set up the first Eurasian trade in marijuana. The trade routes created by Yamnaya and their neighbours became part of the Silk Road several millennia later. The Yamnaya were so transformative partly because they were networked – a web of mobile societies that formed an intercontinental communication system – and because of their trading prowess. Successful migration relies on networks of collaboration and exchange.


pages: 1,293 words: 357,735

The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance by Laurie Garrett

Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, biofilm, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, contact tracing, correlation does not imply causation, discovery of penicillin, disinformation, double helix, Edward Jenner, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, global macro, global pandemic, global village, Gregor Mendel, Herbert Marcuse, indoor plumbing, invention of air conditioning, it's over 9,000, John Snow's cholera map, land reform, Live Aid, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, megacity, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, phenotype, price mechanism, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, San Francisco homelessness, seminal paper, South China Sea, the scientific method, trade route, transfer pricing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Zimmermann PGP

Like Evans, McNeill saw stages over time in human relations with the microbes, but he linked them not so much to economic development as to the nature at any given moment of the ecology of a society. He argued that waterborne parasitic diseases dominated the human ecology when people invented irrigation farming. Global trade routes facilitated the spread of bacterial diseases, such as plague. The creation of cities led to an enormous increase in human-to-human contact, allowing for the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and respiratory viruses. Over the long course of history, McNeill said, pathogenic microbes sought stability in their relationships with hosts.

According to what little archaeological information and scientific conjecture is available, their microbial threats came primarily from parasites in their food and water or were carried by local insects. Over the next 4,000 years the human population slowly increased and people congregated around rivers, ocean ports, and sites of rich food resources. Trade routes emerged, connecting the nascent urban centers, and the city’s residents thrived off their merchants’ exploits and the taxes they levied on their poorer rural subjects. By the time the Egyptians ceased building pyramids, around 2000 B.C., there were several cities with thousands of inhabitants each: Memphis, Thebes, Ur—the religious or political capitals of empires.

In these areas two factors may have played a role: a highly mobile Asian population that traveled frequently to India and other regions of resistant malaria, and relatively high availability of chloroquine through both legal and black-market venues. From there, resistance spread along the equatorial travel routes connecting traders from Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Zaire, Burundi, Rwanda, and Uganda—the same trade routes implicated in the spread of the region’s AIDS epidemic. The problem eventually spread outward, from Addis Ababa to Cape Town, from Senegal to Madagascar.150 Studies of the newly emerging P. falciparum strains showed that the mutations involved in resistance, once present, were permanent features in the parasitic line.


The Rough Guide to Brazil by Rough Guides

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-communist, bike sharing, car-free, clean water, Day of the Dead, digital nomad, haute cuisine, income inequality, James Watt: steam engine, land tenure, mass immigration, Murano, Venice glass, Scientific racism, sexual politics, spice trade, Stephen Fry, sustainable-tourism, trade route, trickle-down economics, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, éminence grise

On the way up, sit on the left-hand side of the bus for great views along a oneway road, bordered by naked rock on one side and a sheer drop on the other; the return to Rio is made by a slightly different route that also snakes its way through terrifying mountain passes. The landscape is dramatic, climbing among forested slopes that give way suddenly to ravines and gullies, while clouds shroud the surrounding mountains. In 1720, Bernardo Soares de Proença opened a trade route between Rio and Minas Gerais, and in return was conceded the area around the present site of Petrópolis as a royal land grant. Surrounded by stunning scenery, and with a gentle, alpine summer climate, it had by the nineteenth century become a favourite retreat of Rio’s elite. The arrival of German immigrants contributed to the development of the town, and has much to do with its curious European Gothic feel.

Its downtown area manages to combine skyscraping banks and apartment buildings with ranchers’ general stores and poky little shops selling strange forest herbs and Catholic ex votos. Reminiscent in parts of quiet southern US cities, it’s a relatively salubrious market centre for an enormous cattle-ranching region, as well as being an important centre of trade routes from Paraguay, Bolivia, Argentina and the south of Brazil. A pioneering place, many of the early twentieth-century settlers here were Arabs, some of whom have since started businesses such as restaurants and hotels. There is also a large Japanese section of the immigrant population, which has left its mark on the local culinary trade.

There was no use of metal or the wheel, and no centralized, state-like civilizations on the scale of Spanish America. The arrival of the Portuguese was an utter catastrophe for these peoples: measles, smallpox, tuberculosis, gonorrhoea and influenza killed thousands, often spreading along local trade routes long before direct contact with Europeans. In 1500 the total number of indigenous people was probably around five million – by 1800 there were just 250,000. However, the 2010 census revealed that 817,000 Brazilians now classify themselves as indigenous, and given that almost every single Portuguese colonist took a local wife in the early years of settlement, millions of Brazilians are likely to carry indigenous genes today.


pages: 857 words: 232,302

The Evolutionary Void by Peter F. Hamilton

clean water, information retrieval, Kickstarter, megacity, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, plutocrats, trade route, urban sprawl

The constables also had to ensure free movement along those streets, which, given that a lot of the elderly had difficulty walking, was becoming quite taxing. The charity and goodwill of the permanent residents that had blossomed after the first couple of visits by Skylords were all but gone now. The gondola arrived in Mid Pool and headed up Trade Route Canal. They had to wait several minutes before the mooring platform at the end of Jodsell Street had a free berth. From there it was only a short walk along the street to the district master’s mansion at the center of Sampalok. Edeard always felt slightly bashful whenever he entered the big square at the heart of Sampalok.

Something in human nature just called out to occupy and use the empty city. The boat idea was a good one, she thought, both therapeutic and practical. However, it overlooked the fact she’d never done any manual work in her life and didn’t know the first thing about carpentry. Maybe tomorrow. She went over the flat pink bridge across Trade Route Canal and into the tip of Pholas Park. From there she had to walk along Lilac Canal for several minutes until she came to a blue humpback bridge into Fiacre. The human bridges of metal and wood must have been the first artifacts to disappear after their builders left. Now she had to use the city’s own crossings.


pages: 927 words: 236,812

The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food by Lizzie Collingham

agricultural Revolution, air gap, American ideology, Bletchley Park, British Empire, centre right, clean water, colonial exploitation, distributed generation, European colonialism, fixed income, full employment, global village, guns versus butter model, indoor plumbing, labour mobility, land reform, mass immigration, means of production, profit motive, rising living standards, trade route, V2 rocket, women in the workforce

The British food supply was heavily dependent on the diplomatic skills of the men of the British Food Mission in Washington who represented Britain’s food needs at the Combined Food Board and worked hard to persuade the Americans and Britain’s other allies that British food requests were reasonable and that they should take priority over competing raw-material and military requirements.5 The success of the British Food Mission meant that although the Battle of the Atlantic hampered the Allies’ ability to conduct military operations, at no point in the war did it threaten the British people with hunger, let alone starvation. THE WORST WINTER OF THE WAR As German troops marched into Poland, Hitler ordered all submarines patrolling the ocean trade routes to attack hostile ships without warning.6 The Germans used submarines, planes and mines to sink the British merchant marine. Throughout 1940 Admiral Karl Dönitz, head of the U-boat arm of the German navy, was able to inflict severe damage on British merchant shipping with the fifty-seven submarines under his command.7 Without radar or sophisticated anti-submarine technology, the British navy were unable to provide ships with adequate protection from this invisible enemy.

This is remembered in Tanganyika as ‘Europe’s famine’.69 By caving in to settler demands the colonial East African governments failed to implement policies which secured the benefits of higher wartime prices for food for African farmers. Nevertheless, the official price, even for African maize, doubled, and many Africans made their own efforts to ensure that they were able to participate in the wartime bonanza. Some simply side-stepped the government and evaded controls by transporting their maize along pre-colonial trade routes at night. Black market maize fetched an even higher price than that paid to the settlers by the government purchasing boards.70 Whether East Africans went hungry depended on the ways in which the war disrupted their local economy. In areas where there was road-building, a disproportionate number of wage labourers compared to farmers led to a tendency towards over-selling and later hunger.


pages: 315 words: 99,065

The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership by Richard Branson

barriers to entry, Boeing 747, call centre, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, clean water, collective bargaining, Costa Concordia, do what you love, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, flag carrier, friendly fire, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, index card, inflight wifi, Lao Tzu, legacy carrier, low cost airline, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, Tony Fadell, trade route, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, work culture , zero-sum game

He desperately wanted to build a bridge from Asia to Europe. While not quite as daunting a task as it sounds, at the time crossing the River Bosphorus in Istanbul (or Constantinople as it was then) with a single-span 240-metre-long bridge would have been an unprecedented feat of engineering. The commercial pay-off from linking the east–west trade routes would have been huge, however, and so the challenging project demanded some radical thinking. A number of the leading bridge-building experts of the time were struggling without much success to adapt the classic and simple keystone arch design to the span and height that the Bosphorus project necessitated.


pages: 362 words: 97,862

Physics in Mind: A Quantum View of the Brain by Werner Loewenstein

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, complexity theory, dematerialisation, discovery of DNA, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, informal economy, information trail, Isaac Newton, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, Norbert Wiener, Richard Feynman, stem cell, trade route, Turing machine

Ikats The two random generators—their information structure, their information parsimony, even their dynamics—are so out of the ordinary that an analogy would be helpful. Alas, in all of human technology there is nothing that works that way—certainly not in three dimensions. However, if you are willing to make do with one less dimension, I can offer an analogy of sorts: the Ikat. This is an old weaving art that once flourished along the silk trade route (China, Bokhara, Samarkand). Sadly it is disappearing, but you can still see it practiced here and there—Indonesia is a good place. And it is a feast for the eyes: from one silk fiber, the weaver makes an exquisite fabric; he feeds into the loom a single prestained thread of silk and, abracadabra, out of the warp and woof emerges a cloth with resplendent color play and complex design.


The Despot's Accomplice: How the West Is Aiding and Abetting the Decline of Democracy by Brian Klaas

Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, citizen journalism, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, failed state, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, moral hazard, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Seymour Hersh, Skype, Steve Jobs, trade route, Transnistria, Twitter Arab Spring, unemployed young men, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

From the perspective of those in power, the transition to democracy currently offers concrete and serious risks, but only shaky and indeterminate rewards. â•… The League of Democracies would drastically shift that calculation: with a clear reward waiting, two new pressures would push despots to open their political systems as they drift ever closer toward that tantalizing economic carrot. First, business would be on board with democracy. Whether in Turkmenistan, Bolivia, or even a solid democracy such as Japan, business interests exert an important force on politics. By making clear that further democratic reform will result in new (and potentially major) economic trade routes, business can be enlisted as democracy’s ally. â•… Second, despots themselves may be tempted to experiment with democratic reforms in order to retain political popularity. It is a myth that people like Islam Karimov and Alexander Lukashenko are indifferent toward their people; they may not care deeply for their wellbeing and they may not care to hear their political voices, but they do worry consistently about the risks of becoming deeply unpopular with their own citizenry.


pages: 328 words: 96,141

Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race by Tim Fernholz

Amazon Web Services, Apollo 13, autonomous vehicles, business climate, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deep learning, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fulfillment center, Gene Kranz, high net worth, high-speed rail, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Masayoshi Son, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, multiplanetary species, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, new economy, no-fly zone, nuclear paranoia, paypal mafia, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planetary scale, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Scaled Composites, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, trade route, undersea cable, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize, Y2K

Enforcing a no-fly zone over Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the most active military mission at the time, relied on satellite communications and imaging and positioning technology. Without the ability to maintain a constellation of satellites in orbit, the United States would be in no position to project military force around the world. And, by extension, this meant that the global economy hung in the balance as well: without the ability to secure trade routes and enforce global security pacts, the whole international system could unravel. Still, the private companies had yet to deliver a viable rocket, despite the government’s $1 billion investment and years of work. Lockheed Martin’s replacement for the Titan IV, a rocket that would be called Atlas V, was still two years away from flying.


Who Rules the World? by Noam Chomsky

Able Archer 83, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, classic study, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, liberation theology, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, one-state solution, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, structural adjustment programs, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, uranium enrichment, wage slave, WikiLeaks, working-age population

One need not be a supporter of China’s provocative and aggressive actions in the South China Sea to notice that the incident did not involve a Chinese nuclear-capable bomber in the Caribbean, or off the coast of California, where China has no pretensions of establishing a “Chinese lake.” Luckily for the world. Chinese leaders understand very well that their country’s maritime trade routes are ringed with hostile powers from Japan through the Malacca Straits and beyond, backed by overwhelming U.S. military force. Accordingly, China is proceeding to expand westward with extensive investments and careful moves toward integration. In part, these developments are within the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which includes the Central Asian states and Russia, and soon India and Pakistan with Iran as one of the observers—a status that was denied to the United States, which was also called on to close all military bases in the region.


The rough guide to walks in London and southeast England by Helena Smith, Judith Bamber

Alfred Russel Wallace, Isaac Newton, land tenure, the market place, trade route, urban sprawl

Trains London Paddington to Swindon (every 20min; 1hr); return from Goring to London Paddington (every 15min; 1hr). Map OS Landranger 174: Newbury & Wantage; OS Explorer 170: Abingdon, Wantage & Vale of White Horse. The Ridgeway, a 136-kilometre path starting at Overton Hill in Wiltshire and ending at Ivinghoe Beacon in Buckinghamshire, formed part of an ancient trading route between southwest England and mainland Europe, which may have started on the Dorset coast and run up to Norfolk. The route has been used by traders, invaders and drovers for at least five thousand years, the proliferation of Neolithic and Bronze Age burial sites and Iron Age forts along the way attesting to its cultural and strategic importance.


pages: 325 words: 99,983

Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language by Robert McCrum

Alistair Cooke, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, colonial rule, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, Etonian, export processing zone, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, invention of movable type, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, knowledge economy, Livingstone, I presume, Martin Wolf, Naomi Klein, Norman Mailer, Parag Khanna, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile

Britain, having lost one empire in the West, found a second one in the East. With remarkable foresight, the Scots economist Adam Smith identified this process as early as 1776 in The Wealth of Nations. There were, wrote Smith, two milestones on Britain’s road to global empire: the settlement of North America and the opening of trade routes to India and the East: The discovery of America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind. By uniting, in some measure, the most distant parts of the world, by enabling them to relieve one another’s wants, to increase one another’s enjoyments, and to encourage one another’s industry, their general tendency would seem to be beneficial.


pages: 304 words: 96,930

Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture by Taylor Clark

Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deskilling, digital capitalism, Edmond Halley, fear of failure, gentrification, Honoré de Balzac, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, McJob, McMansion, Naomi Klein, pneumatic tube, Ray Oldenburg, Ronald Reagan, tech worker, The Great Good Place, trade route

This Frenchman’s name was Gabriel Mathieu de Clieu, and when his quest began, in the autumn of 1720, he was an ambitious young naval officer on leave in Paris from his post on the Ca-rib-be-an island of Martinique. De Clieu was acutely aware of the fact that the early eighteenth century was a terrible time to be a coffee drinker; beans were both scarce and costly. At the time, the Dutch trading empire controlled the continent’s two major coffee sources — plantations on the Indonesian island of Java and trade routes with the Yemeni port of Mocha — and as with any monopoly, they made the most of it. * Continental coffee aficionados had little recourse in the matter. They couldn’t grow the beans themselves, as coffee trees withered in European soil without meticulous supervision. Dutch hegemony appeared inescapable.


pages: 309 words: 101,190

Climbing Mount Improbable by Richard Dawkins, Lalla Ward

Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, computer age, Drosophila, Fellow of the Royal Society, industrial robot, invention of radio, John von Neumann, Menlo Park, phenotype, Robert X Cringely, stem cell, the long tail, trade route

Their trick is to exploit external energy sources. If it weren’t for the sun’s heat and the moon’s shifting gravity, air and sea would be still. External energy charges up the ocean currents, pumps up the winds, stirs the dust-devils, rocks the atmosphere with powerful forces capable of flattening a house or driving a trade-route; it also engenders thermal up-currents which, if you use them judiciously, can raise you to the clouds. Vultures, eagles and albatrosses use them to perfection. They may be the only animals to match our skill in mining the energy of the weather. My main source of information on soaring birds is the writings of Dr Colin Pennycuick of Bristol University.


pages: 324 words: 101,552

The Pineapple: King of Fruits by Francesca Beauman

British Empire, Columbian Exchange, Corn Laws, Fellow of the Royal Society, Honoré de Balzac, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, language of flowers, Maui Hawaii, refrigerator car, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route

The first successful crossing of the Atlantic by steamship took place in 1819 when the Savannah sailed from Georgia to Liverpool. The 1830s saw a boom in the industry, with the launch of the first such ship to make the journey regularly, the Great Western, which took just over fifteen days. Soon steamships plied all the world’s major trade routes, presenting an unprecedented opportunity for the pineapple. It had constantly had to face up to the problem that once plucked from the plant, it no longer ripened but merely decayed. Of all the produce of the West Indies, it was one of the most delicate. Speed was of the essence and this is what the steamship delivered.


pages: 463 words: 105,197

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society by Eric Posner, E. Weyl

3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, augmented reality, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Branko Milanovic, business process, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, feminist movement, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gamification, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global macro, global supply chain, guest worker program, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, market bubble, market design, market friction, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, negative equity, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, plutocrats, pre–internet, radical decentralization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Rory Sutherland, search costs, Second Machine Age, second-price auction, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, telepresence, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, Zipcar

What is special about migration (a term that we will henceforth use to refer to migration of ordinary workers rather than highly skilled workers and tourists)? The Origins of Free Trade Long-distance movements of goods and tools have been a feature of human civilization since the beginning of agriculture. The Mediterranean trade was central to Athenian, Carthaginian, and Roman development. Mohammad was a trader and the trading routes of the Muslim world and on to Asia via the Silk Road helped maintain the light of civilization through the Middle Ages in the West.1 Mass migrations were also a feature of early history. Many of the great empires were established and later destroyed by nomadic tribes that flooded from the North Asian steppe southward, westward, and eastward.


pages: 348 words: 97,277

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Blythe Masters, business process, buy and hold, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, circular economy, cloud computing, computer age, computerized trading, conceptual framework, content marketing, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, informal economy, information security, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, linked data, litecoin, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, market clearing, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, off grid, pets.com, post-truth, prediction markets, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, Project Xanadu, ransomware, rent-seeking, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, social web, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, the market place, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, web of trust, work culture , zero-sum game

The group, which includes firms like KPMG and HSBC and has engaged shipping and logistics firms like Hong Kong behemoth Li & Fung, takes its name from a massive Chinese global investment program. Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative—also known as the “One Belt, One Road” project—contains a plan to invest $3 trillion in collaboratively developing high-tech manufacturing within sixty-five different countries along three separate trade routes tying Asia to Europe and Africa. Some have described it as a Beijing-led Marshall Plan, but as McKinsey partner Kevin Sneader notes, the ambitious program is twelve times the size of General George C. Marshall’s 1948 project to reconstruct Europe with American investment. The way Pindar Wong, founder of the Belt and Road Blockchain Consortium, sees it, “such a complex set of supply relationships across 65 different jurisdictions with varying degrees of trust will need a distributed information-sharing paradigm if it is to work.”


pages: 334 words: 100,201

Origin Story: A Big History of Everything by David Christian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Arthur Eddington, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cepheid variable, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, demographic transition, double helix, Easter island, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, Haber-Bosch Process, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, Late Heavy Bombardment, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, nuclear winter, Paris climate accords, planetary scale, rising living standards, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route, Yogi Berra

States emerged in societies that were populous and wealthy enough to have towns and cities as well as large numbers of farming villages and plenty of surplus labor that could staff and pay for armies and bureaucracies. From Towns to Cities and Rulers: Mobilization and a New Trophic Level As populations and surpluses grew, so did the size of the largest human communities. And communities as well as people began to specialize. Some villages grew and acquired new roles because they were near trade routes, controlled strategic river crossings, held markets that attracted buyers and sellers from other villages, or were near important religious sites. Çatalhüyük in southern Anatolia was surrounded by good farming land, but it also had obsidian, the hard volcanic glass used to make the finest and sharpest Neolithic blades.


The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catherine Nixey

classic study, Eratosthenes, Index librorum prohibitorum, Socratic dialogue, the market place, trade route, wikimedia commons

64 CHAPTER NINE THE RECKLESS ONES ‘For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God,’ 1 Corinthians 3:19 They called them the ‘parabalani’ – ‘the reckless ones’.1 At first, the name had been a compliment. Under the scorching heat of the Alexandrian sun, in this city at the crossroads of busy trading routes, someone needed to carry away the bodies of the sick and the weak – not to mention the merely unsavoury poor – and do so swiftly, to protect everyone else. This was a city that knew how devastating a plague could be. A hundred and fifty years before, a new disease had arrived in Alexandria, then fanned out into the rest of the empire, killing millions.


pages: 404 words: 95,163

Amazon: How the World’s Most Relentless Retailer Will Continue to Revolutionize Commerce by Natalie Berg, Miya Knights

3D printing, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, asset light, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business intelligence, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, computer vision, connected car, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, driverless car, electronic shelf labels (ESLs), Elon Musk, fulfillment center, gig economy, independent contractor, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kiva Systems, market fragmentation, new economy, Ocado, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, QR code, race to the bottom, random stow, recommendation engine, remote working, Salesforce, sensor fusion, sharing economy, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, trade route, underbanked, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, white picket fence, work culture

Towards the end of 2015, it emerged in rapid succession that it had been negotiating to lease 20 Boeing 767 jets for its own air-delivery service, had registered to provide ocean freight services in China, and had purchased thousands of truck trailers to ship merchandise between distribution facilities.21 Amazon China then registered to provide ocean freight services, essentially pushing Chinese sellers to use its services for shipping to Amazon US customers and giving it control over the significant trading routes between China and the US. Amazon Maritime, Inc. holds a US Federal Maritime Commission operating licence, as a non-vessel-owning common carrier (NVOCC). Amazon as a carrier In 2016, Amazon received options to purchase up to 19.9 per cent of Air Transport International’s stock and began scheduled operations with 20 Boeing 767 aircraft.


pages: 340 words: 97,723

The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity by Amy Webb

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Flynn Effect, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Inbox Zero, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, optical character recognition, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, uber lyft, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

Our global population is a problem because we didn’t take action on climate change quickly enough, not even after China took up the mantle of sustainability and environmental protection. We have lost two-thirds of the Earth’s arable land. While we made great efforts to build underground farms in America, we cannot grow food quickly enough to feed our local populations. Global sanctions have blocked trade routes and have cut us and our allies off from food-producing nations, but even China and its One China nations are struggling. One day, Apple families suffer from what appears to be a mysterious illness. Their PDRs show an anomaly but offer no detail or specifics. At first, we think that this latest version of nanobots are defective, so product managers rush to develop patch AGIs.


pages: 344 words: 100,046

The Hidden Family by Charles Stross

correlation does not imply causation, germ theory of disease, illegal immigration, out of africa, Silicon Valley, trade route

Those of you who’ve wired up your estates will know what I’m talking about. But we can import tools and ideas and even teachers from New Britain, and deliver a real push to the economy over here. Within thirty years you could be traveling to your estates by railway, your farmers could be producing three times as much food, and your ships could dominate the Atlantic trade routes.” Angbard rapped his gavel on the wooden block in front of him for attention. “The chair thanks Countess Helge,” he said formally. “Are there any more questions from the floor?” A new speaker stood up: a smooth-looking managerial type who smiled at Miriam in a friendly manner from the bench behind her grandmother.


pages: 378 words: 102,966

Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic by John de Graaf, David Wann, Thomas H Naylor, David Horsey

Abraham Maslow, big-box store, carbon tax, classic study, Community Supported Agriculture, Corrections Corporation of America, Dennis Tito, disinformation, Donald Trump, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, God and Mammon, greed is good, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, low interest rates, Mark Shuttleworth, McMansion, medical malpractice, new economy, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Peter Calthorpe, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, Ray Oldenburg, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, space junk, SpaceShipOne, systems thinking, The Great Good Place, trade route, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra, young professional

—KARL MARX, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 Fear of affluenza has been part of the American tradition since some of the first colonists arrived here from Europe. It was a mixed bunch that risked life and livelihood to cross the Atlantic on small wooden ships. The first came seeking riches. The Spanish wanted gold; the French, furs. The Dutch sought new trade routes to the fabled Indies. But among the early arrivals from England were refugees seeking to escape what they had come to view as a godless materialism taking root in Europe. “When the Puritans arrived in the New World, one of their major premises was their desire to try to create a Christian commonwealth that practiced simple living,” explains historian David Shi.1 In the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Puritans adopted what were known as sumptuary laws, forbidding conspicuous displays of wealth.


pages: 469 words: 97,582

QI: The Second Book of General Ignorance by Lloyd, John, Mitchinson, John

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, Ada Lovelace, Apple Newton, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, disinformation, double helix, Etonian, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, Isaac Newton, Lao Tzu, Louis Pasteur, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, Stephen Fry, the built environment, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, traveling salesman, US Airways Flight 1549

Bartolomeu Dias (1451–1500), the Portuguese navigator who discovered the Cape of Good Hope and became the first European to make the hair-raising trip around the foot of Africa, named it Cabo das Tormentas (‘Cape of Storms’). His employer, King John II of Portugal (1455–95), keen to encourage others to adopt the new trade route, overruled him and tactfully rechristened it Cabo da Boa Esperança (‘Cape of Good Hope’). The King died childless, aged only forty. Five years later Bartolomeu Dias also died. He was wrecked in a terrible storm – along with four ships and the loss of all hands – off the very cape he had so presciently named.


pages: 307 words: 96,974

Rats by Robert Sullivan

gentrification, Louis Pasteur, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, trade route, urban renewal, yellow journalism

It is theorized that the nomads who lived in the area were spared plague death because the fleas on the tarbagans were apparently repelled by the smell of the tribe's horses; a balance existed between flea-infected tarbagans and humans. Then something happened to the area that disturbed that balance. Historians speculate about earthquakes, but no one knows for certain. Another change occurring at the time was the building of a road, a great silk-trading route that connected Europe with China. Italians were especially interested in trading for silk, and they set up colonies along the eastern shore of the Black Sea, which was from where people like Marco Polo made their way to China. Along with silk and other trading goods, the traders brought back rats, probably black rats, which preceded Rattus norvegicus into Europe and were migrating along the human routes from Asia.


pages: 302 words: 97,076

The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War by Tim Butcher

Bletchley Park, centre right, colonial rule, Kickstarter, land reform, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, Scramble for Africa, trade route, urban sprawl, éminence grise

It led to a golden age of construction in the first half of the sixteenth century, when some of Europe’s most elegant mosques were built and the Miljacka was laced with fine stone bridges. ‘The Bosnian countryman gapes with as much wonderment at the domes of the two chief mosques as an English rustic at the first sight of St Paul’s,’ wrote Arthur Evans when he trekked here in 1875 at the end of Ottoman rule. Established as a hub on trade routes across the Balkan Peninsula, Sarajevo grew quickly through commerce, with one seventeenth-century visitor reporting that the population had already reached 80,000, making it a true metropolis for that era, one of the largest cities in the Balkans. It was a city then dominated by Islam, the faith both of the Ottoman colonial outsiders deployed to Bosnia and of the growing cohort of local Slavs who converted to the religion of the occupier.


pages: 359 words: 98,396

Family Trade by Stross, Charles

book value, British Empire, glass ceiling, haute couture, indoor plumbing, junk bonds, land reform, Larry Ellison, new economy, retail therapy, sexual politics, trade route

Vikings, but Vikings who had assimilated the Roman church—the worship of the divine company of gods—and such learning as the broken wreckage of Europe had to offer. We sent agents across the Atlantic to explore the Rome of this world thirty years or so ago: It lies unquiet beneath the spurs of the Great Khan, but the churches still make burned offerings before the gods. Maybe when there are more of us we will open up trade routes in Europe … but not yet.” “Um. Okay.” Miriam nodded, reduced to silence by a sudden sense of cultural indigestion. This is so alien! “So what about you? The Clan, I mean. Where do you—we—fit into the picture?” “The Clan families are mostly based in Gruinmarkt, which is roughly where Massachusetts and New York and Maine are over here.


pages: 402 words: 98,760

Deep Sea and Foreign Going by Rose George

Admiral Zheng, air freight, Airbus A320, Albert Einstein, bank run, cable laying ship, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Costa Concordia, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Filipino sailors, global supply chain, Global Witness, Google Earth, intermodal, Jones Act, London Whale, Malacca Straits, Panamax, pattern recognition, profit maximization, Skype, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, urban planning, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

Then, in the words of Abdirahman Mohamed Farole, president of Somalia’s semi-autonomous northern region of Puntland, this is what happened next: ‘The violation of Somali waters by foreign trawlers expectedly triggered a reaction of armed resistance by Somali fishermen [who] linked themselves with local warlords for protection, placing armed militiamen on board the trawlers.’ He calls this new breed of fishers ‘fishermen-turned-pirates’. They then targeted unarmed commercial vessels, ‘inhumanly taking hostages for ransom and disrupting international maritime trade routes’. There are other versions of their origins. For Robert Young Pelton, who ran the Somalia Report news agency, pirates emerged originally from the Puntland coastguard. When the national government fell, the coastguard turned pirate ‘in about a day’. A London-based Somalia expert told me modern pirates had never been fishermen or coastguards.


pages: 398 words: 100,679

The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch by Lewis Dartnell

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, clean water, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, decarbonisation, discovery of penicillin, Dmitri Mendeleev, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, global village, Haber-Bosch Process, invention of movable type, invention of radio, invention of writing, iterative process, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Kim Stanley Robinson, lone genius, low earth orbit, mass immigration, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, nuclear winter, off grid, Oklahoma City bombing, Richard Feynman, safety bicycle, tacit knowledge, technology bubble, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, trade route

Fore-and-aft rigging dates back to Roman navigation of the Mediterranean, but really came into its own during the Age of Discovery, hauling the great European exploration ships, led by the Portuguese and Spanish, across the oceans of the world to encounter distant new lands and establish long-range trade routes. When you present a fore-and-aft sail obliquely to the wind, a whole new effect comes into play. The wind filling the sail causes it to bulge outward and behave like an airfoil—the airflow rushing over the curved surface is deflected and creates a region of low pressure in front of the sail. Rather than being blown through the water with the wind drag created by a square sail, the fore-and-aft sail is sucked forward by this aerodynamic lift force.


pages: 364 words: 99,613

Servant Economy: Where America's Elite Is Sending the Middle Class by Jeff Faux

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, back-to-the-land, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disruptive innovation, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, McMansion, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, old-boy network, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Solyndra, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, working poor, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, you are the product

China, he thinks, is no paper tiger. Whereas Friedman sees China as hopelessly dependent on the U.S. market, Starobin argues that the creditor always has the upper hand over the borrower. China and India are using their surplus to build up their navies, which could gradually push the U.S. out of the trade routes in the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific. Starobin lays out several possibilities for what might follow the decline of U.S. global power. The first is chaos. If U.S. imperialism has been the bulwark against a return to a geopolitics of savagery and war, then its shrinking authority will leave anarchy in its wake.


pages: 391 words: 99,963

The Weather of the Future by Heidi Cullen

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, air freight, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, availability heuristic, back-to-the-land, bank run, California gold rush, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, data science, Easter island, energy security, hindcast, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, millennium bug, ocean acidification, out of africa, Silicon Valley, smart cities, trade route, urban planning, Y2K

But maybe that’s the point. Maybe the climatologists know we have to do both. We have to look forward and we have to look back. In 1609, 400 years ago, the English explorer Henry Hudson sailed into New York Bay. Hudson had been hired by the Dutch East India Company to find a northeast all-water trade route to Asia. On his ship, the Half Moon, Hudson and his crew left Amsterdam and sailed along the coast of Norway until they hit ferocious weather and sea ice. Rather than return empty-handed, and disobeying orders to search only for a northeast route, Hudson made a 3,000-mile detour in search of warmer weather and the dream of finding a southwest route to Asia through North America.


pages: 371 words: 98,534

Red Flags: Why Xi's China Is in Jeopardy by George Magnus

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, AlphaGo, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business process, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, corporate governance, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land reform, Malacca Straits, means of production, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old age dependency ratio, open economy, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, speech recognition, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade route, urban planning, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game

It adopted paper as a replacement for silk and bamboo as early as the second century, and invented movable type printing technology in the eleventh century, some four hundred years before Gutenberg introduced it to Europe. The bureaucracy used this technology to disseminate information about technological best practices to farmers and peasants. Trade figured prominently in ancient China as it does in modern China. It is best known in older times because of the Silk Road trading routes and caravan trails that went west from the imperial capital of Xi’an via central and southern Asia and the Middle East to the Mediterranean. They took spices, silk and cotton out of China, while new crops and payments for trade in silver, and, importantly, ideas about culture, philosophy and religion, came in the opposite direction.


Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World by Laura Spinney

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, autism spectrum disorder, British Empire, colonial rule, dark matter, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Jenner, experimental subject, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, global pandemic, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, invisible hand, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, nocebo, placebo effect, social distancing, trade route, urban renewal

A sacred site for Shi’ite Muslims, it received the equivalent of its 70,000 inhabitants each year in pilgrims from all over the Shi’ite world. They came to pray at the shrine of Imam Reza, the eighth of twelve sacred imams considered by Shi’ites to be the spiritual heirs of the prophet Muhammad. But it was also a centre of the saffron and turquoise industries, known, too, for its beautiful carpets, and an important stop on the trade route from British India to the west, and from Persia to Russia. The government, 900 kilometres away in Tehran, had little or no authority in Mashed, but Mashed was not immune from the political and economic crisis that had engulfed the rest of the country. For more than half a century, Persia had been a battleground for imperialist interests–the backdrop to the so-called ‘Great Game’, in which the British and Russians struggled for control of the huge area between the Caspian and Arabian Seas–and by 1918 its government was weak and almost bankrupt.


The Domestic Revolution by Ruth Goodman

air gap, British Empire, clean water, Ford Model T, gentleman farmer, haute cuisine, James Watt: steam engine, period drama, trade route, upwardly mobile

Criss-crossing this new landscape were transport routes and supply lines that received much of their early boost from the bulk trade in coal for the home. Although often overlooked, the first great domestically driven expansion in coal haulage by land and by water, both inland and at sea, strengthened trade routes and encouraged investment in seventeenth-century Britain. Seamen trained upon the coal run from Newcastle to London provided skilled and semi-skilled labour for the rapidly expanding Royal Navy and the tougher mercantile routes across the Atlantic. The Newcastle run made ship-building more economically worthwhile, reducing the financial risks involved in a once volatile trade.


pages: 342 words: 101,370

Test Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut by Nicholas Schmidle

Apollo 11, bitcoin, Boeing 737 MAX, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, crew resource management, crewed spaceflight, D. B. Cooper, Dennis Tito, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, game design, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, no-fly zone, Norman Mailer, Oklahoma City bombing, overview effect, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, time dilation, trade route, twin studies, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

He wished there were more people like him, he said, more people “not satisfied staying within the box, or looking within the horizon.” More who wanted to “get on ships and sail out beyond where they can’t see, beyond the horizon, into the unknown. That is how the human race advances to the next thing, discovers new worlds, new trade routes,” said Stucky. “Voyagers and explorers have always carried more risk than a standard person. But you need the majority to stay behind while explorers go out and establish things and open it up for the masses. And to me that’s what space flight is.” They slapped hands. Branson asked Stucky how it was.


pages: 363 words: 98,496

Dead in the Water: A True Story of Hijacking, Murder, and a Global Maritime Conspiracy by Matthew Campbell, Kit Chellel

big-box store, coronavirus, COVID-19, drone strike, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, eurozone crisis, failed state, Filipino sailors, financial innovation, information security, lockdown, megacity, offshore financial centre, Skype, South China Sea, trade route, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

Next came the British, who set their sights on Aden as a way station for ships sailing to and from the Indian colonies. In 1837, an attack on a British-flagged vessel provided a pretext for the East India Company to seize what was then a fishing village. British investment helped bring a degree of prosperity to southern Yemen, especially after the Suez Canal opened up the trade route through Egypt, and Aden became one of the most important ports in the Empire, a gateway between East and West. Colonial administrators installed a clocktower known as “Little Ben,” a statue of Queen Victoria, and a Western-style bureaucracy. Once again, though, the region’s inhabitants vigorously asserted their independence.


pages: 349 words: 99,230

Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice by Jamie K. McCallum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, occupational segregation, post-work, QR code, race to the bottom, remote working, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, side hustle, single-payer health, social distancing, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, The Great Resignation, the strength of weak ties, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

But the lessons from history, drawn from the tragic collisions between plagues and people, show us that we need to understand the fault lines in our current system in order to build a better one. Pandemics were relatively common in the ancient world. The Black Death crept across the continents, migrating with merchants by sea and traders along the Silk Road, a series of paths, trade routes, and caravanserais that crisscrossed the steppes of Central Asia. By the time it arrived in Europe, it collided with a society made vulnerable by the horrific conditions wrought by feudalism—famine, poverty, slavery, and the roving armies of the Hundred Years’ War. Plague killed a staggering fifty million people, wiping out almost one-half of Europe’s population.


pages: 316 words: 100,329

A Short Ride in the Jungle by Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent

colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, digital map, Global Witness, Higgs boson, Kickstarter, Skype, South China Sea, trade route

In the early eighties Soviet geologists found villagers panning for gold using chunks of shrapnel and bits of US plane wreckage. A decade later, when the Laos government had lowered the red tape enough to let foreign investors in, Australian surveyors started sniffing around. In 2002 they opened Laos' first modern mine, the Sepon gold and copper mine. I say modern because the site, situated on an ancient trade route between Thailand, Laos and Vietnam, had first been mined for copper 2,000 years ago. Ten years on the open cast mine, a few miles south of Vilabury, has transformed the place from a UXO-ridden backwater to a rapidly growing town; an island of health and safety in the middle of the wilderness.


pages: 920 words: 237,085

Rick Steves Florence & Tuscany 2017 by Rick Steves

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, carbon footprint, Dava Sobel, Google Hangouts, index card, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, Murano, Venice glass, new economy, place-making, Skype, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, wikimedia commons, young professional

The tomb was a home in the hereafter, complete with the deceased’s belongings. The funerary urn might have a statue on the lid of the deceased at a banquet—lying across a dining couch, spooning with his wife, smiles on their faces, living the good life for all eternity. Seven decades of wars with the Greeks (545-474 B.C.) disrupted their trade routes and drained the Etruscan League, just as a new Mediterranean power was emerging: Rome. In 509 B.C., the Romans overthrew their Etruscan king, and Rome expanded, capturing Etruscan cities one by one (the last in 264 B.C.). Etruscan resisters were killed, the survivors intermarried with Romans, and their kids grew up speaking Latin.

Then, in 1348, a six-month plague decimated the population, leaving the once-mighty town with barely 4,000 survivors. Once fiercely independent, now crushed and demoralized, San Gimignano came under Florence’s control and was forced to tear down most of its towers. (The Banca CR Firenze building occupies the remains of one such toppled tower.) And, to add insult to injury, Florence redirected the vital trade route away from San Gimignano. The town never recovered, and poverty left it in a 14th-century architectural time warp. That well-preserved cityscape, ironically, is responsible for the town’s prosperity today. • From the well, walk 30 yards uphill to the adjoining square with the cathedral. Piazza del Duomo Stand at the base of the stairs in front of the church.


pages: 796 words: 242,660

This Sceptred Isle by Christopher Lee

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, failed state, financial independence, flying shuttle, glass ceiling, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Northern Rock, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, urban decay

The Britons were warlike and because there were some twenty-three tribal regions, it was impossible to get overall agreement, or even an understanding, with more than a few of them. The south and the east were the most easily controllable. The Romans had large forces there, they had set up their capital at Colchester and there were good trade routes through Essex and Kent. The uplands of Britain presented a bigger problem. In AD 54 Claudius died and his stepson, Nero became emperor. The death of another leader, this one in Britain, left a longer lasting impression upon British history and folklore. Her name was Boudicca and she was the widow of the King of the Iceni in East Anglia.

In 1797, Commodore Horatio Nelson had just been promoted to Rear Admiral, was about to be knighted and, within months, he, the nation and the wife of Sir William Hamilton would be celebrating his destruction of the French fleet at the mouth of the River Nile; this ruined Napoleon Bonaparte’s ambitions to invade Egypt and thus interrupt British trade routes to and from the Far East, threaten British India and extend his empire to the sub-continent. Like Bismarck in the next century, Napoleon saw the taking of territory as a mark of progress. Nelson knew well the naval role of disrupting enemy ambition, ideally by stopping the enemy fleet from putting to sea and, when they did so, defeating them and taking ships as prizes.


pages: 385 words: 111,113

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane by Brett King

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion charging, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, different worldview, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, distributed ledger, double helix, drone strike, electricity market, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial exclusion, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, future of work, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Leonard Kleinrock, lifelogging, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, mobile money, money market fund, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Turing complete, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, yottabyte

The trust that was central to the 14th-century economy of Sienna and Verona was a trust that let you do something, be part of something, usually a trading community. And this trust could be taken away if you didn’t act in keeping with the values of that community. Bankers too had to deal with the challenges of diaspora and distance. There was a time when everyone knew everyone. Then along came shipping and trade routes and suddenly people wanted to do business with each other across great distances, and without really knowing each other to begin with. Nature abhors a vacuum; so does business. An opportunity was smelt, and the merchant bank of the trading empires was born. These banks worked closely with the trading houses as well as the burgeoning London Money Market.


Antonio-s-Gun-and-Delfino-s-Dream-True-Tales-of-Mexican-Migration by Unknown

Berlin Wall, centre right, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, trade route

An Indian guide told Coronado that he would discover an Indian land of unimaginable wealth, of fish the size of horses and rivers six miles wide. Instead he found a few hundred Indians in huts and oceans of buffalo. Coronado recognized that the land had rich black soil that could, with effort, be farmed and where trade routes could be developed. But the Spaniards wanted gold and weren’t inclined to settle for less. Coronado and his crew strangled the guide who’d led them there, turned around, and went home. Three centuries later, in the late s, the pioneers in western Kansas would understand how Coronado felt. Promoters of the region had to invent ploys and get-rich-quick schemes to attract settlers, because people tended not to stay, and without people the region had no future.


pages: 388 words: 106,138

The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory by John Seabrook

AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, financial independence, game design, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, Russell Brand, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the long tail, trade route

“We don’t want to travel all that way just to go record four bars of music, especially since we thought it was really good just like it was,” Max Martin said. But on reflection, the opportunity to meet the King of Pop and work with him in his own studio was too great to pass up, and they flew west, early Nordic navigators of what would become a popular trade route of Swedish song Vikings for decades to come. Expecting a state-of-the-art facility, “instead we went to this little studio out in the country, although not far from Hollywood, but it was like a shack,” Max Martin said in the Swedish Radio documentary. “Our studio was like a dream studio compared to where we went to record over there.


pages: 363 words: 109,417

Big Dead Place: Inside the Strange and Menacing World of Antarctica by Nicholas Johnson

Apollo 13, Easter island, intentional community, Joan Didion, job satisfaction, Milgram experiment, Neil Armstrong, Oklahoma City bombing, PalmPilot, post-work, Ronald Reagan, telerobotics, trade route, young professional

In 1826, when Antarctica had been poked and prodded around the edges but was still thought to be a smattering of islands, John Cleves Symmes revealed his theory that there was a giant hole at the South Pole through which one could enter the earth and find balmy weather, abundant reindeer, lush gardens, and a race of humanoids eager to open a new trade route to the surface world. Symmes sought funds for an expedition to prove his theory, and enlisted charismatic disciple Jeremiah Reynolds to give lectures, which Symmes hoped would increase the public’s receptiveness to his theory, thereby eventually coaxing official support. Unfortunately for Symmes, Reynolds fluttered away once boosted into the limelight.


pages: 385 words: 105,627

The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom by Simon Winchester

Berlin Wall, British Empire, David Attenborough, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, double helix, Etonian, Fellow of the Royal Society, Great Leap Forward, index card, invention of gunpowder, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, New Urbanism, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, stakhanovite, Stephen Hawking, Ted Kaczynski, trade route

Some of these monks were Indian, some were Chinese, and in the first decades of the first millennium they had managed, through grim determination and no doubt some memorable heroics, to carry the message of the Buddha—usually by word of mouth—across the dangerous high-altitude passes between the two great empires. They brought their stories down to the main trade route between central Asia and China that would in time become known as the Silk Road—the same road Needham had been so patiently traveling for the last eight weeks. Once on the road, the Buddha’s word soon reached the Chinese court. As soon as the senior mandarins at Chang’an, or Xi’an, had been shown images of great golden statues of his calming presence, and told the finer details of his teaching, they officially declared themselves impressed.


pages: 440 words: 109,150

The Secrets of Station X: How the Bletchley Park codebreakers helped win the war by Michael Smith

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Etonian, haute cuisine, QWERTY keyboard, trade route

An MI6 agent was dispatched to monitor the passage of ships through the Kattegat, the narrow strip of water separating Denmark from Sweden, and, on 20 May, he reported that two large German warships had left the Baltic bound for the North Sea. The sighting was confirmed by photographic reconnaissance and a few isolated breaks into the main Naval Enigma cypher showed that the Bismarck, accompanied by the new cruiser the Prinz Eugen, was about to attack Britain’s transatlantic trade routes. A British naval squadron was dispatched to hunt the Bismarck down. She was sighted on the evening of 23 May and next morning was engaged by the Hood and the Prince of Wales. The Hood was sunk and the Prince of Wales hit but not without the Bismarck herself sustaining some damage. She parted company with the Prinz Eugen and the Royal Navy ships lost contact with her.


pages: 379 words: 109,612

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future by John Brockman

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asperger Syndrome, availability heuristic, Benoit Mandelbrot, biofilm, Black Swan, bread and circuses, British Empire, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Danny Hillis, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, financial engineering, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Google Earth, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of writing, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lone genius, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Schrödinger's Cat, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, social distancing, social graph, social software, social web, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telepresence, the medium is the message, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Yochai Benkler

By the time of Jesus Christ, two millennia ago, four great neighboring polities spanned Eurasia’s middle latitudes: the Roman Empire; the Parthian Empire, centered in Persia and Mesopotamia; the Kushan Empire of Central Asia and Northern India; and the Han Empire of China and Korea. The Kushan Empire had diplomatic links with the other three, and all four were linked by a network of trade routes known to posterity as the Silk Road. It’s along the Silk Road that Eurasia’s three universalist moral religions—Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and Hinduism—interacted and mutated from their respective territorial and tribal origins into the three proselytizing, globalizing religions that today vie for the soul of humanity: Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism.


pages: 375 words: 109,675

Railways & the Raj: How the Age of Steam Transformed India by Christian Wolmar

Beeching cuts, British Empire, collective bargaining, colonial rule, James Dyson, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, Meghnad Desai, Ponzi scheme, railway mania, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, trade route, women in the workforce

The hawks eventually prevailed thanks to yet another conflict with Afghanistan, straight after the First World War, which gave the more bellicose members of the government the chance to resurrect their pet project. There were in fact 300 passes through the mountains of the North-West Frontier, and some particularly combative generals had wanted railways constructed up all of them. The most obvious gap in the potential defences against a hostile Afghanistan was the Khyber Pass, which was the most direct trade route between India and central Asia via Kabul, and was in fact part of the old Silk Road. As we saw in Chapter 5, several railways ran up to the Indo-Afghani border and the hope among the more optimistic hawks was that, this time, a railway could be built right into Afghanistan. A survey of the Khyber Pass in 1890 had concluded that it was impassable, but in 1901 the North Western Railway, which was a state-owned company created in 1886 by merging the various railways that were mostly in what is now Pakistan, built a line to Jamrud, the entrance to the Pass.


pages: 410 words: 106,931

Age of Anger: A History of the Present by Pankaj Mishra

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, informal economy, invisible hand, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, plutocrats, power law, precariat, public intellectual, Republic of Letters, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, smart cities, Snapchat, stem cell, technological solutionism, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

In German eyes, the West was increasingly identified with soulless capitalism, and England replaced France as the embodiment of the despised bourgeois world, followed by the United States. As Treitschke wrote: ‘The hypocritical Englishman, with the Bible in one hand and a pipe in the other, possesses no redeeming qualities. The nation was an ancient robber knight, in full armour, lance in hand, on every one of the world’s trade routes.’ The United States became the ‘land without a heart’, another heir of the ultra-rational Enlightenment. But the main embodiment of Western moral degeneracy and treachery was the Jew. Whether capitalist modernization boomed or went into crisis (which it did severely in Germany in 1873), the Jews were to blame.


pages: 565 words: 122,605

The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us by Joel Kotkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, birth tourism , blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, citizen journalism, colonial rule, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic winter, Deng Xiaoping, Downton Abbey, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, financial independence, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, labor-force participation, land reform, Lewis Mumford, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, microapartment, new economy, New Urbanism, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, pensions crisis, Peter Calthorpe, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seaside, Florida, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, starchitect, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, Ted Nelson, the built environment, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, young professional

Global cities, such as New York, Hong Kong, and San Francisco, were all port cities; investments in trade brought with them the resources of the world and opened up the business of servicing that trade.30 In today’s global economy, a “connected” city still benefits from striding along the world’s most critical maritime trade routes. Singapore’s prosperity, for example, stems in part from its being the second-largest container port in the world.31 Beyond the port, Singapore has developed arguably the best urban infrastructure in the world. Driving in Singapore is a revelation after life in congested New York or Los Angeles, not to mention such megacities as Mexico City or Jakarta.


Lonely Planet Jamaica by Lonely Planet

British Empire, buttonwood tree, carbon footprint, estate planning, European colonialism, fixed-gear, food miles, jitney, Kickstarter, talking drums, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning

Alternatively have a peaceful soak in the spa at the Bath Fountain Hotel & Spa. The homey spa also offers a variety of massages. Arrive early on weekends. To get here, turn up the road opposite the church in Bath and follow the road 3km uphill. Bath Fountain–Bowden Pen TrekHIKING This one-day trek, a former Maroon trading route – for experienced hikers only – leads from Bath Fountain up over Cuna Cuna Gap to Bowden Pen. Obtain Sheets 19 (St Thomas parish) and 14 (Portland parish) of the Ordnance Survey 1:12,500 map series from the Survey Department for more detailed information or hire a guide from the JCDT. 4Sleeping Bath Fountain Hotel & SpaHOTEL$ ( GOOGLE MAP ; %308-5736; bathmineralspahotelja@yahoo.com; r US$60; p) Your only option is this 18th-century pink colonial hotel, which contains the spa baths on the ground floor.


pages: 461 words: 109,656

On Grand Strategy by John Lewis Gaddis

British Empire, David Brooks, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, invisible hand, joint-stock company, long peace, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Ronald Reagan, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway

“Newfoundland,” whose shores they’d visited, meant fish. “Exploration” meant joint-stock companies, the first of which had a grand title—“The Mystery, Company, and Fellowship of Merchant Adventurers for the Discovery of Unknown Lands &c”5—but an ill-conceived mission: it directed its energies, in an age of global cooling, toward finding trade routes to China through Hudson’s Bay and around northern Russia. Drake’s circumnavigation of 1577–80 signaled Elizabeth’s curiosity about wider worlds: by then, though, Spain had for half a century controlled the Caribbean, Mexico, and large portions of South America. Sir Walter Raleigh’s Roanoke, the first English settlement in North America, came only in 1584–85, but quickly and humiliatingly failed.6 Despite Spain’s lead, Elizabeth refused to rush.


pages: 361 words: 105,938

The Map That Changed the World by Simon Winchester

British Empire, gentleman farmer, Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, mortgage debt, spinning jenny, the market place, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman

Farmers, angry that their land would be torn up, raised all manner of objections. But, one by one, Parliament passed canal acts and navigation acts at a staggering rate. Small armies of navvies—workers on the inland navigations—descended on the hills and valleys to carve and cement these revolutionary new trade routes into place. Grand plans were conceived for connecting the whole country, Carlisle to Cornwall, Dover to Dumfries, with a network of waterways. The great existing trade rivers of England, the Thames, the Severn, the Mersey, and the Trent, were all to be linked. Maybe, one overambitious inventor suggested, the English Midlands could have their own canal that followed the contour lines and so did not need the costly and cumbersome mechanism of locks.


The Future of Money by Bernard Lietaer

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, banks create money, barriers to entry, billion-dollar mistake, Bretton Woods, business cycle, clean water, complexity theory, corporate raider, currency risk, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, diversification, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, full employment, geopolitical risk, George Gilder, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, Golden Gate Park, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, invention of the telephone, invention of writing, John Perry Barlow, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, microcredit, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Norbert Wiener, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, post-industrial society, price stability, Recombinant DNA, reserve currency, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, The Future of Employment, the market place, the payments system, Thomas Davenport, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, working poor, world market for maybe five computers

It was in the nature of things that the few had access to key resources and the many did not. The inherent characteristics of physical resources (natural and human-made) made possible the development of hierarchies of power based on control (of new weapons, of energy resources, of transport vehicles, of trade routes, of markets, and especially of knowledge); hierarchies of influence based on secrecy hierarchies of class based on ownership; hierarchies of privilege based on early access to particular pieces of land or especially valuable resources; and hierarchies of politics based on geography. ‘.. Each of these five bases for hierarchy and discrimination is crumbling today because the old means of control are of dwindling efficacy.


pages: 354 words: 26,550

High-Frequency Trading: A Practical Guide to Algorithmic Strategies and Trading Systems by Irene Aldridge

algorithmic trading, asset allocation, asset-backed security, automated trading system, backtesting, Black Swan, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, centralized clearinghouse, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, diversification, equity premium, fault tolerance, financial engineering, financial intermediation, fixed income, global macro, high net worth, implied volatility, index arbitrage, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, inventory management, Jim Simons, law of one price, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, machine readable, margin call, market friction, market microstructure, martingale, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, p-value, paper trading, performance metric, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, pneumatic tube, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Small Order Execution System, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, systematic trading, tail risk, trade route, transaction costs, value at risk, yield curve, zero-sum game

Trading Platform Most high-frequency trading systems today are built to be “platformindependent”—that is, to incorporate flexible interfaces to multiple brokerdealers, ECNs, and even exchanges. The independence is accomplished through the use of FIX language, a special sequence of codes optimized for exchange of financial trading data. With FIX, at a flip of a switch the trading routing can be changed from one executing broker to another or to several brokers simultaneously. Risk Management Competent risk management is key to the success of any high-frequency trading system. A seemingly harmless glitch in the code, market data, market conditions, or the like can throw off the trading dynamic and result in large losses.


pages: 376 words: 109,092

Paper Promises by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, delayed gratification, diversified portfolio, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, fear of failure, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, Goodhart's law, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, paradox of thrift, peak oil, pension reform, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, too big to fail, trade route, tulip mania, value at risk, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

In 1896, while William Jennings Bryan was leading his campaign for debtors on the other side of the Atlantic, the yield on Consols fell to its lowest level in history – 2.2 per cent.3 Creditors had no inkling of the problems to come in the twentieth century; they would never be so complacent again. What the gold standard also helped to create was the first great era of globalization. This was particularly true in Great Britain which had an empire stretching round the world, a navy that protected trade routes, a sound currency in sterling, and a willingness to invest its savings overseas. Low yields on British government debt (gilts) caused the prosperous middle classes to buy bonds in Argentine railways in search of higher incomes (an early version of the ‘search for yield’ that would be seen in the current era).


The Case for Israel by Alan Dershowitz

affirmative action, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, different worldview, disinformation, facts on the ground, Jeffrey Epstein, Nelson Mandela, one-state solution, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, Yom Kippur War

As Martin Buber, a strong supporter of Palestinian rights, observed in 1939: “Our settlers do not come here as do the colonists from the Occident, to have natives do their work for them; they themselves set their shoulders to the plow and they spend their strength and their blood to make the land fruitful.”3 Nor was the land they sought to cultivate rich in natural resources such as oil or gold, or strategically positioned as a trade route. It was a materially worthless piece of real estate in a backwater of the world whose significance to Jews was religious, historical, and familial. Clearly these Jewish workers were not your typical imperialists. They were refugees from oppressive regimes who were seeking to begin new lives in a place their ancestors had long ago settled and from which most but not all of them had eventually been driven.


pages: 459 words: 103,153

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure by Tim Harford

An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Wiles, banking crisis, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Boeing 747, business logic, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, Deep Water Horizon, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fermat's Last Theorem, financial engineering, Firefox, food miles, Gerolamo Cardano, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Harrison: Longitude, knowledge worker, loose coupling, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Netflix Prize, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, PageRank, Piper Alpha, profit motive, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade route, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Virgin Galactic, web application, X Prize, zero-sum game

The Royal Observatory was founded with the aim of improving navigation at sea, and in particular of solving the ‘longitude’ problem of figuring out how far east or west a ship at sea was. (The latitude problem was far more easily solved, by measuring the length of the day, or the elevation of the sun or stars.) For a great naval power such as Great Britain, with trade routes stretching across the world, the significance of a ship’s captain being unable to figure out his location could hardly be overstated. And the Royal Observatory today gladly associates itself with the sensational breakthrough that solved the conundrum. Its original site in Greenwich, East London, is bisected by what the Observatory still proudly describes as ‘the Prime Meridian of the World’ – Longitude 0° 0′ 0″.


pages: 624 words: 104,923

QI: The Book of General Ignorance - The Noticeably Stouter Edition by Lloyd, John, Mitchinson, John

Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, Barry Marshall: ulcers, British Empire, discovery of penicillin, disinformation, Dmitri Mendeleev, Fellow of the Royal Society, Helicobacter pylori, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, invention of the telephone, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Olbers’ paradox, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, placebo effect, Pluto: dwarf planet, Stephen Fry, sugar pill, trade route, two and twenty, V2 rocket, Vesna Vulović

In 2003, archaeologists in Venezuela discovered the fossilised remains of a huge guinea pig-like creature that lived eight million years ago. Phoberomys pattersoni was the size of a cow and weighed 1,400 times more than the average pet guinea pig. Nobody really knows where the expression ‘guinea pig’ comes from but the most likely suggestion is that they reached Europe as part of the triangle of slave-trade routes that linked South America to the Guinea coast of West Africa. What was the first animal in space? The fruit fly. The tiny astronauts were loaded on to an American V2 rocket along with some corn seeds, and blasted into space in July 1946. They were used to test the effects of exposure to radiation at high altitudes.


pages: 335 words: 107,779

Some Remarks by Neal Stephenson

airport security, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cable laying ship, call centre, cellular automata, edge city, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Hacker Ethic, high-speed rail, impulse control, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, megaproject, music of the spheres, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, packet switching, pirate software, Richard Feynman, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, social web, Socratic dialogue, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, trade route, Turing machine, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, X Prize

Another, a hard-core science fiction fan, had been boning up on supplemental materials: “Clone Wars,” an animated TV series consisting of “epic adventures that bridge the story arc between ‘Episode II: Attack of the Clones’ and ‘Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.’ ” If you have watched these cartoons—or if you’ve enjoyed some of the half-dozen “Clone Wars” novels, flipped through the graphic novels, read the short stories or played the video game—you will know that the battle cruiser in question is owned by the New Droid Army of the Confederacy of Independent Systems, which is backed by the Trade Federation, a commercial guild that is peeved about taxation of trade routes. And that is not the only aspect of Episode III that you will see in a different light. If you watch the movie without doing the prep work, General Grievous—who is supposed to be one of the most formidable bad guys in the entire Star Wars cycle—will seem like something that just fell out of a Happy Meal.


pages: 324 words: 106,699

Permanent Record by Edward Snowden

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, air gap, Berlin Wall, call centre, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, disinformation, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Free Software Foundation, information security, it's over 9,000, job-hopping, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Neal Stephenson, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, operational security, pattern recognition, peak oil, pre–internet, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snow Crash, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, trade route, WikiLeaks, zero day

Because the lineage is almost exclusively through the women, though, the surnames changed with nearly every generation—with an Alden marrying a Pabodie marrying a Grinnell marrying a Stephens marrying a Jocelin. These seafaring ancestors of mine sailed down the coast from what’s now Massachusetts to Connecticut and New Jersey—plying trade routes and dodging pirates between the Colonies and the Caribbean—until, with the Revolutionary War, the Jocelin line settled in North Carolina. Amaziah Jocelin, also spelled Amasiah Josselyn, among other variants, was a privateer and war hero. As captain of the ten-gun barque The Firebrand, he was credited with the defense of Cape Fear.


pages: 374 words: 111,284

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age by Roger Bootle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, anti-work, antiwork, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, blockchain, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, facts on the ground, fake news, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, low interest rates, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mega-rich, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Ocado, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, positional goods, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra

For instance, the Venetian shipwrights, who for centuries had made their living out of constructing galleys and ships with fixed sails to ply their trade across the Mediterranean, eventually faced redundancy when oceangoing ships with adjustable sails came to dominate international trade. Nor was it open to them simply to learn how to make these different types of vessel. The dominant trade routes changed as well. Asian trade with Europe no longer passed across land to the Eastern Mediterranean, and hence to Venice, but rather went by sea around Africa. And soon the transatlantic trade, conducted by the Atlantic-facing countries – Spain, Portugal, France, Holland, and England – dramatically rose in importance, too.


pages: 404 words: 110,942

A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order by Judith Flanders

computer age, death from overwork, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, index card, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of movable type, invention of the wheel, invention of writing, trade route, Y2K

The petition is in the centre, reading conventionally, top to bottom and left to right, while the signatures deviate from this standard pattern to obscure the petition’s originators. The first page of a letter in rebus form from Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Note that ‘and’ is represented by a picture of a hand, presumably with the dropped H common in many English dialects. By around 3000 BCE, trading routes between Mesopotamia and Egypt were well established. Ideas, as well as goods, travelled along these routes in both directions, and one of those ideas was a phonetic writing system. Initially, the new Egyptian hieroglyphics were pictographic, representing objects, but within a century Egyptian writing had made the same conceptual leap as cuneiform had done, incorporating rebus-like wordplay to convey abstractions.


Discover Greece Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

car-free, carbon footprint, credit crunch, G4S, haute couture, haute cuisine, low cost airline, pension reform, sensible shoes, too big to fail, trade route, urban renewal

Delos reached the height of its power in Hellenistic times, becoming one of the three most important religious centres in Greece and a flourishing centre of commerce. The Romans made Delos a free port in 167 BC. This brought even greater prosperity, due largely to a lucrative slave market that sold up to 10,000 people a day. During the following century, as ancient religions lost relevance and trade routes shifted, Delos began a long, painful decline. Getting There & Away Boats for Delos (return €17, 30 minutes) leave Hora (Mykonos) around six times a day from about 9am in high season with the last outward boat about 12.50pm. Departure and return times are posted on the ticket kiosk at the entrance to the Old Port at the south end of the harbour.


pages: 339 words: 103,546

Blood and Oil: Mohammed Bin Salman's Ruthless Quest for Global Power by Bradley Hope, Justin Scheck

"World Economic Forum" Davos, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boston Dynamics, clean water, coronavirus, distributed generation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, financial engineering, Google Earth, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, megaproject, MITM: man-in-the-middle, new economy, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, Vision Fund, WeWork, women in the workforce, young professional, zero day

Whereas Abu Dhabi had taken an approach of bringing art into the UAE via its relationship with the Louvre, Saudi Arabia’s consultants came up with a strategy that propped up its size, diversity, and history. Rather than have a “starchitect” design a big, impressive museum to put it on the map, the country would focus on smaller museums and archaeological restorations. Some would be devoted to just one thing, such as a Museum of Incense celebrating the love of perfume and the legendary trade routes through the kingdom. Building such attractions represented a huge change in a country whose Wahhabist religious establishment viewed museums, especially those displaying antiquities, as facilitating idol worship. In the first decade of the 2000s, Saudi archaeological finds were kept in a secret museum in a Riyadh palace so the clerics wouldn’t know the Al Saud were preserving historical relics.


pages: 344 words: 104,522

Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam by Vivek Ramaswamy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-bias training, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, critical race theory, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, defund the police, deplatforming, desegregation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fudge factor, full employment, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, green new deal, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, impact investing, independent contractor, index fund, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Network effects, Parler "social media", plant based meat, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, random walk, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Bork, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, single source of truth, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, Susan Wojcicki, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Virgin Galactic, WeWork, zero-sum game

From the very birth of the corporation, people rightly worried about the power that monstrous corporate behemoths could wield. Take the Dutch East India Company. It wielded not only financial power, but state-like political power as well. Like modern corporations, the Dutch East India Company received special privileges—in its case, to access trade routes across vast swaths of territories. According to British corporate historians Leonardo Davoudi, Christopher McKenna, and Rowena Olegario chartered companies in the Old World waged wars with their own private armies and fleets, built forts and infrastructure, conquered territories, negotiated treaties, and, in the case of the Dutch East India Company, even minted their own corporate currency.4 I heard echoes of the Dutch East India Company’s voice in Mark Zuckerberg’s statement in 2020 that he wanted Facebook to launch its own cryptocurrency.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab, Peter Vanham

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

See South Korea Reuters, 246 Rheinreise (“Journey on the Rhine”) board game, 8 Ride-hailing companies, 66, 97, 98, 187, 237, 238, 241 Rideshare Drivers United (California), 187 Robber barons (19th century), 132–134 Robust institutions, 185, 193–198 Rockefeller Center, 132 Rockefeller, John D., 23, 132, 134 Rodrik, Dani, 109–110, 112 Rogoff, Kenneth, 127 Romania, 41 Romei, Valentina, 70–71 Rome–China trade routes, 99 Rushkoff, Douglas, 210 Russia, 64. See also Soviet Union S Saez, Emmanuel, 41, 127 Salesforce (US), 164, 201, 207, 212, 213, 215 SAP (US), 199, 201, 202–203 SARS–CoV–2 vaccines, 248 SARS–CoV–2 virus. See COVID-19 pandemic Saudi Arabia, 64 School of Economics and Management (Tsinghua University), 225–226 School Strike for Climate (2918), 147, 148–149 Schroder, Gerhard, 80 Schumpeter, Joseph, 136 Schwab, Klaus, 85, 191 Scientific American, 42 Scientific Resolution (15th century), 101, 130 Second and third wave globalization (20th century), 105–106 Second Industrial Revolution (1945–early 1970s), 8, 18, 45fig, 105–106, 116, 119, 134–136, 204 Second Technological Revolution, 45fig–46 Second World War.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

See South Korea Reuters, 246 Rheinreise (“Journey on the Rhine”) board game, 8 Ride-hailing companies, 66, 97, 98, 187, 237, 238, 241 Rideshare Drivers United (California), 187 Robber barons (19th century), 132–134 Robust institutions, 185, 193–198 Rockefeller Center, 132 Rockefeller, John D., 23, 132, 134 Rodrik, Dani, 109–110, 112 Rogoff, Kenneth, 127 Romania, 41 Romei, Valentina, 70–71 Rome–China trade routes, 99 Rushkoff, Douglas, 210 Russia, 64. See also Soviet Union S Saez, Emmanuel, 41, 127 Salesforce (US), 164, 201, 207, 212, 213, 215 SAP (US), 199, 201, 202–203 SARS–CoV–2 vaccines, 248 SARS–CoV–2 virus. See COVID-19 pandemic Saudi Arabia, 64 School of Economics and Management (Tsinghua University), 225–226 School Strike for Climate (2918), 147, 148–149 Schroder, Gerhard, 80 Schumpeter, Joseph, 136 Schwab, Klaus, 85, 191 Scientific American, 42 Scientific Resolution (15th century), 101, 130 Second and third wave globalization (20th century), 105–106 Second Industrial Revolution (1945–early 1970s), 8, 18, 45fig, 105–106, 116, 119, 134–136, 204 Second Technological Revolution, 45fig–46 Second World War.


pages: 400 words: 108,843

Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy by Adam Jentleson

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", active measures, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, collective bargaining, cotton gin, COVID-19, desegregation, Donald Trump, global pandemic, greed is good, income inequality, invisible hand, obamacare, plutocrats, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, W. E. B. Du Bois

In 1787, the Northwest Ordinance passed unanimously, banning slavery in the Midwest; southerners supported it for several reasons, but mainly they were focused on protecting slavery within the South, not expanding it. But in 1794 the cotton gin was invented, making cotton farming massively profitable. In 1815 the Napoleonic wars ended, reopening trade routes with Europe. By the 1830s, the South had a massively profitable cash crop and an enormous market in which to sell it. But it lacked a national leader. And the threats were coming from all sides: the global abolitionist movement drove Britain to ban slavery in its colonies in 1833, freeing more than eight hundred thousand enslaved people.


pages: 403 words: 105,550

The Key Man: The True Story of How the Global Elite Was Duped by a Capitalist Fairy Tale by Simon Clark, Will Louch

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, dark triade / dark tetrad, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, fake news, forensic accounting, high net worth, impact investing, income inequality, Jeffrey Epstein, Kickstarter, load shedding, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, trade route, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, young professional

In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001, Arif persuaded Western politicians that he was an ally who could help bring stability to the Middle East by creating jobs in fragile states where terrorism had deep roots. He was sought out by billionaires and their millennial heirs who enthusiastically adopted the idea of impact investing and the feel-good veneer it gave to the old game of making money. When China’s economic expansion breathed new life into countries along the ancient Silk Road trading routes of Asia, Arif guided Western executives to business opportunities in cities they struggled to find on a map. Microsoft’s founder Bill Gates helped Arif set up a $1 billion fund to improve healthcare in poor countries, and the World Bank and the American, British, and French governments invested in this pioneering fund alongside the Gates Foundation.


pages: 366 words: 110,374

World Travel: An Irreverent Guide by Anthony Bourdain, Laurie Woolever

anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Brexit referendum, British Empire, colonial rule, company town, COVID-19, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Easter island, European colonialism, flag carrier, gentrification, glass ceiling, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Kibera, low cost airline, megacity, off-the-grid, Pier Paolo Pasolini, place-making, ride hailing / ride sharing, spice trade, tech bro, trade route, walkable city, women in the workforce

And yet, here it is, relatively small, tolerant, welcoming to outsiders, peaceful, and stunningly beautiful. But Oman is facing uncertainty, with succession issues and dwindling oil reserves. The question of what’s next is a big, if often, unspoken one. “Oman, it should be understood, sits at the top of the Indian Ocean rim. The empire once stretched from Pakistan to East Africa, with important trade routes that reached from southern Africa all the way to the China Straits, Indonesia, and deep into East Asia. Modern Oman is a fraction of that size now, but its DNA, culture, cuisine, and to some extent, attitude toward the outside world is a reflection of that history. “In the 1930s, Winston Churchill switched the [British] Royal Navy’s mode of power from coal to oil.


pages: 430 words: 111,038

Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain by Sathnam Sanghera

Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, cognitive dissonance, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Etonian, European colonialism, food miles, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Neil Armstrong, period drama, phenotype, Rishi Sunak, school choice, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Shamima Begum, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce

Liverpool, a city which Karl Marx famously claimed ‘waxed fat on the slave trade’, has its imperial legacy reflected not just in its size, growing as it did from a handful of streets in 1207 to a vigorous eighteenth-century city, but also in a frieze around the handsome Town Hall illustrating trading routes and featuring lions, crocodiles, elephants and African faces. Meanwhile, in Belfast, Empire Awareness Day participants could be encouraged to visit Bombay Street, Kashmir Street, Cawnpore Street, Lucknow Street and Benares Street, all named in celebration of famous campaigns of the British empire, with nests of similar imperial street names existing across Britain, wherever terraced housing was being built at the height of imperialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.


pages: 1,364 words: 272,257

Jerusalem: The Biography by Simon Sebag-Montefiore

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, California gold rush, Etonian, facts on the ground, haute couture, Khartoum Gordon, Mount Scopus, place-making, plutocrats, sexual politics, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, Yom Kippur War

The phrase 'Holy City' is constantly used to describe the reverence for her shrines, but what it really means is that Jerusalem has become the essential place on earth for communication between God and man. We must also answer the question: of all the places in the world, why Jerusalem? The site was remote from the trade routes of the Mediterranean coast; it was short of water, baked in the summer sun, chilled by winter winds, its jagged rocks blistered and inhospitable. But the selection of Jerusalem as the Temple city was partly decisive and personal, partly organic and evolutionary: the sanctity became ever more intense because she had been holy for so long.

This territory, just 100 by 150 miles, lies between the south-eastern corner of the Mediterranean and the River Jordan. Its lush coastal plain offered the best path for invaders and traders between Egypt and the empires of the east. Yet the isolated and remote town of Jerusalem, 30 miles from the nearest coast, far from any trade routes, stood high amid the golden-rocked desolation of the cliffs, gorges and scree of the Judaean hills, exposed to freezing, sometimes even snowy, winters and to witheringly hot summers. Nonetheless, there was security atop these forbidding hills; and there was a spring in the valley beneath, just enough to support a town.


Coastal California by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, airport security, Albert Einstein, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, buy and hold, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, company town, Day of the Dead, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, electricity market, Frank Gehry, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Joan Didion, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, low cost airline, machine readable, Mason jar, McMansion, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, Steve Wozniak, trade route, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, white picket fence, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

Downtown Santa Barbara Top Sights El Presidio de Santa Barbara State Historic ParkC3 Santa Barbara County CourthouseB3 Santa Barbara Historical MuseumB4 Santa Barbara Museum of ArtB3 Sights 1Karpeles Manuscript LibraryB3 2Santa Barbara Maritime MuseumA6 3Stearns WharfB6 4Ty Warner Sea CenterB6 Activities, Courses & Tours 5Condor ExpressA6 6Los Baños del MarA6 7Paddle SportsA6 8Santa Barbara Sailing CenterA6 9Santa Barbara Trolley (Main Stop)B6 11Wheel FunB5 10Wheel FunB5 Sleeping 12Brisas del MarA5 13Canary HotelB3 14Harbor House InnB5 15Inn of the Spanish GardenC3 16James HouseB1 17Marina Beach MotelA5 18Presidio MotelB2 19Santa Barbara Tourist HostelB5 Eating 20BouchonB2 21Brophy BrosA6 22D'Angelo Pastry & BreadB5 23El Buen GustoD3 24Lilly's TaqueríaB5 25MetropulosC5 Olio Pizzeria(see 20) 26Palace GrillB4 27Santa Barbara Farmers MarketB4 28Santa Barbara Shellfish CompanyB6 29SilvergreensB4 30SojournerC3 Drinking 31Blenders in the GrassB4 32BrewhouseB5 33French PressB3 34Press RoomB4 Entertainment 35Santa Barbara BowlD2 36SohoB3 37Velvet JonesB4 Shopping 38Channel Island SurfboardsB5 39CRSVRB4 40REIB5 History For hundreds of years before the arrival of the Spanish, the Chumash people thrived here, setting up trading routes over to the Channel Islands, which they reached in redwood canoes called tomols. In 1542 explorer Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo sailed into the channel and claimed it for Spain, then quickly met his doom on a nearby island. The Chumash had little reason for concern until the permanent return of the Spanish in the late 1700s, when priests and soldiers arrived to establish military outposts and to convert the tribe to Christianity.

Maritime Museum MUSEUM ( 619-234-9153; www.sdmaritime.com; 1492 N Harbor Dr; adult/child/senior $14/8/11; 9am-8pm, to 9pm late May-early Sep; ) The 100ft masts of the square-rigger tall ship Star of India – one of seven vessels open to the public here – make this museum easy to find. Built on the Isle of Man and launched in 1863, the restored ship plied the England-India trade route, carried immigrants to New Zealand, became a trading ship based in Hawaii and, finally, worked the Alaskan salmon fisheries. Nowadays she’s taken out once a year for a sail, making her the oldest active ship in the world. Kids can learn the Pirate’s Code at the small but engaging pirate’s exhibit below deck on the HMS Surprise.


Coastal California Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bike sharing, Burning Man, buy and hold, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, company town, Day of the Dead, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, flex fuel, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, income inequality, intermodal, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, low cost airline, Lyft, machine readable, Mason jar, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, Peoples Temple, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, trade route, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Wall-E, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

Santa Barbara Perfect weather, beautiful buildings, excellent bars and restaurants, and activities for all tastes and budgets make Santa Barbara a great place to live (as the locals will proudly tell you) and a must-see place for visitors to Southern California. Check out the Spanish Mission church first, then just see where the day takes you. History For hundreds of years before the arrival of the Spanish, Chumash tribespeople thrived in this region, setting up trade routes between the mainland and the Channel Islands and constructing redwood canoes known as tomols. In 1542 explorer Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo sailed into the channel and claimed it for Spain – then quickly met his doom (from a gangrenous leg injury) on a nearby island. The Chumash had little reason for concern until the permanent return of the Spanish in the late 18th century.

oMaritime MuseumMUSEUM ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %619-234-9153; www.sdmaritime.org; 1492 N Harbor Dr; adult/child $16/8; h9am-9pm late May-early Sep, to 8pm early Sep-late May; c) This museum is easy to find: look for the 100ft-high masts of the iron-hulled square-rigger Star of India. Built on the Isle of Man and launched in 1863, the tall ship plied the England–India trade route, carried immigrants to New Zealand, became a trading ship based in Hawaii and, finally, ferried cargo in Alaska. It’s a handsome vessel, but don’t expect anything romantic or glamorous on board. Coronado Across the bay from downtown San Diego, Coronado is a civilized escape from the jumble of the city and the chaos of the beaches.


Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America by Peter Dale Scott, Jonathan Marshall

active measures, air freight, anti-communist, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, trade route, union organizing

By the late nineteenth century, Honduras meant bananas. Soon much o f the Honduran economy was controlled not from Tegucigalpa but from New Orleans, the capital o f the banana trade. And as the New Orleans banana market, in turn, came under the domination o f organized criminal gangs, established banana trade routes also became drug routes. 51 52 / Narco terrorism, the CIA, and the Contras The history o f the New Orleans Mafia thus sheds light on the longstanding importance o f drugs to the Honduran economy. One historian o f organized crime records that by 1890, “No banana freighter could be unloaded until a fixed tribute was paid by the importer to the firm o f Antonio and Carlo Matranga, originally o f Palermo.


pages: 396 words: 112,748

Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick

Benoit Mandelbrot, business cycle, butterfly effect, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, discrete time, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, experimental subject, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, Isaac Newton, iterative process, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, power law, Richard Feynman, scientific management, Stephen Hawking, stochastic process, trade route

Economists generally assumed that the price of a commodity like cotton danced to two different beats, one orderly and one random. Over the long term, prices would be driven steadily by real forces in the economy—the rise and fall of the New England textile industry, or the opening of international trade routes. Over the short term, prices would bounce around more or less randomly. Unfortunately, Houthakker’s data failed to match his expectations. There were too many large jumps. Most price changes were small, of course, but the ratio of small changes to large was not as high as he had expected. The distribution did not fall off quickly enough.


K2: Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain by Ed Viesturs, David Roberts

British Empire, clockwatching, it's over 9,000, summit fever, trade route

We glimpsed some amazing scenery along the way, but most of the time we were too busy hanging on or too exhausted to care. In 1938, there was no road from Rawalpindi to Skardu, and there certainly wasn’t an airplane flight. Instead, Houston’s team drove to Srinagar, then hiked all the way not only to Skardu but to Askole, crossing high foothills by the legendary trade route over the Zoji La. The Duke of the Abruzzi had made the same journey in 1909, as had Crowley and Eckenstein in 1902. The total distance from Srinagar to Askole is 320 miles, and from there to base camp is another 40. So in 1938, the climbers had to trek some 360 miles just to get to K2. It took them a month to the day.


pages: 385 words: 118,314

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis by Leo Hollis

Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Shoup, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Enrique Peñalosa, export processing zone, Firefox, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, place-making, power law, Quicken Loans, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

In 2003 the British origins of Calcutta, renamed Kolkata in 2001, were challenged in court and a judge was asked to adjudicate on whether the Indian port had been founded by the East India Company or had, as suggested by the plaintiffs, been a more ancient community as proved by the discovery of archaeological finds at Chandraketugarh nearby. Origins matter. These legends hide the practicalities of human life. Almost every world city, however, is in fact defined not by its founding kings and mischievous gods but by geography, circumstance and convenience, either as a redoubt against enemies or an advantageous crossing point along trade routes; and in both cases close to sustaining resources. Rome was founded as a natural defence protected by seven hills; London was the most easterly point on the River Thames that could be crossed safely as the Romans arrived from the south coast; Paris, Lagos and Mexico City were all founded on islands protected by the waters surrounding them; Sana’a, the capital of the Yemen, Damascus, Xi’an, one of the four ancient cities of China, despite their inhospitable surroundings, were all born as important staging posts on prosperous caravan routes.


pages: 347 words: 115,173

Chasing the Devil: On Foot Through Africa's Killing Fields by Tim Butcher

barriers to entry, blood diamond, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, Etonian, Google Earth, Kickstarter, Nelson Mandela, pre–internet, Scramble for Africa, trade route, upwardly mobile

Worse still, the relatively even surface of the road meant my feet would strike the ground at exactly the same angle, step after step, putting repeated pressure on the same small area of my soles. I started to miss the uneven jungle trails when no two strides were the same and the entire underside of my foot was made to have a workout. The road section into town was only about 5 miles long but out of nowhere I sprouted a new set of blisters. Zorzor lies on an old trade route into Guinea and because of its size it was fought over and destroyed repeatedly during the war. Very little reconstruction had taken place by the time we walked gingerly into town and the headquarters of the local police was nothing more than a thatched roadside hut. This was the first government building of any sort we had passed since entering the country and I felt now was the time to sort out our immigration status – without any entry stamps in our passports we could be regarded by nitpicking officials as ‘illegals’.


pages: 441 words: 113,244

Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity From Politicians by Joe Quirk, Patri Friedman

3D printing, access to a mobile phone, addicted to oil, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Celtic Tiger, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, Dean Kamen, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, failed state, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open borders, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, price stability, profit motive, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, stem cell, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, young professional

“Nine of the twelve countries with the lowest Human Development Index scores are landlocked, thirteen landlocked countries are classified as ‘low human development,’ and not one of the non-European landlocked countries is classified as ‘high human development.’ ” www.unmillenniumproject.org/documents/JHD051P003TP.pdf. Sixteen of the top twenty richest countries in the world are coastal states except Switzerland, Luxembourg, Austria—and San Marino is a ten-minute drive from the Adriatic Sea. wealth emerges from fluidity and flow: J. Hagen, “Trade Routes for Landlocked Countries,” UN Chronicle 40, no. 4 (2003): 13. “Consider our world as it would be if the cost of moving from one country to another were zero”: David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 123. “estimate the gains from eliminating various barriers to trade, capital flows, and migration”: Michael A.


Lonely Planet Best of Spain by Lonely Planet

augmented reality, bike sharing, centre right, discovery of the americas, flag carrier, Frank Gehry, G4S, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, market design, place-making, retail therapy, trade route, young professional

The Golden Age of Empire Isabel and Fernando were never going to be content with Spain alone. In April 1492, Los Reyes Católicos (the Catholic Monarchs) granted the Genoese sailor Christopher Columbus (Cristóbal Colón to Spaniards) funds for his long-desired voyage across the Atlantic in search of a new trade route to the Orient. Columbus set off from the Andalucian port of Palos de la Frontera on 3 August 1492, with three small ships and 120 men. After a near mutiny as the crew despaired of sighting land, they finally arrived on the island of Guanahaní, in the Bahamas, and went on to find Cuba and Hispaniola.


pages: 476 words: 118,381

Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier by Neil Degrasse Tyson, Avis Lang

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Arthur Eddington, asset allocation, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, carbon-based life, centralized clearinghouse, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Gordon Gekko, high-speed rail, informal economy, invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Karl Jansky, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Blériot, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pluto: dwarf planet, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, space junk, space pen, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, trade route

A close second in incentives for major funded projects is the prospect of high economic return. Among the most notable examples are the voyages of Columbus, whose funding level was a nontrivial fraction of Spain’s gross national product, and the Panama Canal, which made possible in the twentieth century what Columbus had failed to find in the fifteenth—a shorter trading route to the Far East. Space Tweet #13 Columbus took three months to cross the Atlantic in 1492. The Shuttle takes 15 minutes May 16, 2011 9:30 AM When major projects are driven primarily by the sheer quest to discover, they stand the greatest chance of achieving major breakthroughs—that’s what they’re designed to do—but the least chance of being adequately funded.


pages: 349 words: 114,038

Culture & Empire: Digital Revolution by Pieter Hintjens

4chan, Aaron Swartz, airport security, AltaVista, anti-communist, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, bread and circuses, business climate, business intelligence, business process, Chelsea Manning, clean water, commoditize, congestion charging, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Debian, decentralized internet, disinformation, Edward Snowden, failed state, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, gamification, German hyperinflation, global village, GnuPG, Google Chrome, greed is good, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, independent contractor, informal economy, intangible asset, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Rulifson, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, M-Pesa, mass immigration, mass incarceration, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, no silver bullet, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, packet switching, patent troll, peak oil, power law, pre–internet, private military company, race to the bottom, real-name policy, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, selection bias, Skype, slashdot, software patent, spectrum auction, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, transaction costs, twin studies, union organizing, wealth creators, web application, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day, Zipf's Law

However, there is zero correspondence between good genes and "ethnic origin," except in reverse: the more isolated and homogeneous a gene pool is, the more likely it is to be filled with bugs. The evolutionary justification for tribalism ended perhaps 5,000 years ago when the technologies of agriculture, portable trade goods, and currencies made it more profitable to work collectively than to fight over patches of hunting ground, watering holes, or trade routes. Language identity. Digital society specializes in intense and useless fights called "language wars." When we get attached to languages, that makes us dim witted. All languages are good for something. French for arguments: you can shout for ten minutes and say nothing. English for business: it's easy to pick up yet hard to master.


Discover Maui by Lonely Planet

California gold rush, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, land reform, Maui Hawaii, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, sustainable-tourism, trade route

Here Come the Westerners After Captain Cook’s ships returned to England, news of his discovery quickly spread throughout Europe and America, opening the floodgates to a foreign invasion of explorers, traders, missionaries and fortune hunters. By the 1820s Hawaii was becoming a critical link in the growing trade route between China and the USA. British, American, French and Russian traders all used Hawaii as a mid-Pacific station to provision their ships and to buy Hawaiian sandalwood, which was a highly lucrative commodity in China. Whalers The first whaling ship to stop in Maui was the Balena, which anchored at Lahaina in 1819.


pages: 422 words: 119,123

To the Edges of the Earth: 1909, the Race for the Three Poles, and the Climax of the Age of Exploration by Edward J. Larson

back-to-the-land, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, Livingstone, I presume, Scientific racism, the scientific method, trade route, yellow journalism

OVER THE PREVIOUS HALF century, the North Pole had evolved from a geographic curiosity to an ultimate destination. Since the European discovery of America, interest in the Arctic had focused on finding a navigable northwest sea passage linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. This was an eminently practical goal, promising shortened trade routes between Europe and Asia. For three centuries, Britain’s Royal Navy led the way north by northwest through the labyrinth of sea channels in the Canadian Arctic, but never made it all the way across due to the vicissitudes of ice, shortness of the summer season, darkness of the winter, uncertainty of the route, and limitations of sail and early steamship technology.


pages: 380 words: 116,919

Britain's Europe: A Thousand Years of Conflict and Cooperation by Brendan Simms

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Corn Laws, credit crunch, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, guns versus butter model, imperial preference, Jeremy Corbyn, land reform, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, oil shock, open economy, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, South Sea Bubble, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, éminence grise

In the seventh century, these areas were Christianized, making England part of another, wider European entity, namely the western ‘Christendom’ owing allegiance to the Pope in Rome, a constant for the next nine hundred years or so.4 Their inhabitants spoke ‘English’ and were described as the gens Anglorum.5 They maintained a lively communication with the continent, especially with what was to become Germany, and, thanks to the quality of the soil, their industriousness and their position at the junction of various European trade routes, they were exceptionally wealthy in Europe.6 Despite their insular position, isolation was not an option for these early Englishmen, whose prosperity made them the target of attack from outside. Many years of Viking raids, followed by the seizure of land, soon showed that, even if the English had not been interested in Europe, Europe was interested in them.


pages: 342 words: 114,118

After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made by Ben Rhodes

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, British Empire, centre right, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentrification, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, independent contractor, invisible hand, late capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, open economy, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, South China Sea, the long tail, too big to fail, trade route, Washington Consensus, young professional, zero-sum game

If you look closely, though, a picture is beginning to come into view. A centerpiece of Xi’s global ambitions is the Belt and Road Initiative, a $150 billion per year Chinese-led consortium to build infrastructure involving nearly seventy countries. It started around the time Xi took power, echoing the ancient Silk Road trading route, the age of Marco Polo. Now it has advanced to the point where it is simply one more acronym familiar to government bureaucracies, boardrooms, and readers of The Economist: BRI. If you trace the path of BRI, it begins along China’s periphery in Southeast Asia. It snakes through Myanmar, where China is building pipelines and a port in the same province where the Burmese military—which shares a real and manufactured dislike of Muslim minorities, and stands to profit off BRI—has ethnically cleansed a million Rohingya Muslims.


pages: 458 words: 116,832

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism by Nick Couldry, Ulises A. Mejias

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, behavioural economics, Big Tech, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, corporate governance, dark matter, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, different worldview, digital capitalism, digital divide, discovery of the americas, disinformation, diversification, driverless car, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, extractivism, fake news, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, scientific management, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, social intelligence, software studies, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, work culture , workplace surveillance

The wealth accumulated during feudalism allowed aristocracies to develop increasingly large courts and armies, eventually giving rise to a mercantile system in which the surplus collected by the state and its agents could be made available to merchants, who would in turn engage in the exchange of commodities with those in other parts of the world. In this manner, trade routes were expanded, eventually leading to the “discovery” and conquest of the Americas—that is, the beginning of European colonialism and, with it, the dawn of globalization and what we understand today as “modernity.” The characteristics that defined this modernity in postmedieval Europe and that became associated with European “superiority”—an emphasis on individualism, rationality, and secularism; the values of scientific and technological progress; and the establishment of the nation-state as primary social form7—were all facilitated by processes financed through appropriation.


pages: 356 words: 116,083

For Profit: A History of Corporations by William Magnuson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, bank run, banks create money, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, buy low sell high, carbon tax, carried interest, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, disinformation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Ida Tarbell, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, move fast and break things, Peter Thiel, power law, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, scientific management, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steven Levy, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, work culture , Y Combinator, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

At the time, the geographical area we today call Italy was a patchwork of feuding cities and kingdoms and, looming over them all, the Vatican. Three major cities—Venice, Genoa, and Florence—controlled international trade but fought constantly over their neighboring territories. Venice and Genoa had established thriving sea-trading routes from their own cities, while Florence entered the trading game after conquering Pisa and its ports in 1406. In Rome, the Vatican ran a sprawling empire of “Papal States” peppered throughout central Italy and constantly sought to enlarge it by any means necessary. Further south, the powerful Kingdom of Naples and Sicily struggled with internecine conflict between the rival houses of Anjou and Aragon.4 All of these areas were also recovering from the ravages of the Black Death.


The Next Great Migration by Sonia Shah

Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, British Empire, climate change refugee, colonial rule, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Donald Trump, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Fellow of the Royal Society, Garrett Hardin, GPS: selective availability, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, index card, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Ken Thompson, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, open borders, out of africa, Scientific racism, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, TED Talk, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl

Bigger, faster ships with better navigation capacities had allowed European explorers to travel farther and longer than ever before, catapulting them deep into Asia, Africa, and the New World, where they encountered a previously unimaginable breadth of biodiversity. Companies such as the Dutch East India Company sent battalions of explorers and colonists into remote locales of the world to plunder resources, claim new territory, and establish new trade routes. Aspiring young naturalists joined them on years-long expeditions to the South Pacific and Asia. They returned from their voyages overflowing with breathless tales3 about the bizarre-looking foreigners and creatures they’d glimpsed overseas. “Big fierce people, dark yellow in color,” lived in the Nicobar Islands, recounted Nils Matsson Kioping, who’d visited the islands with the Dutch East India Company in the mid-seventeenth century.


California by Sara Benson

airport security, Albert Einstein, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Blue Bottle Coffee, Burning Man, buy and hold, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Columbine, company town, dark matter, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Frank Gehry, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Joan Didion, Khyber Pass, Loma Prieta earthquake, low cost airline, machine readable, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, planetary scale, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, the new new thing, trade route, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Wall-E, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

It contains one of the most complete collections of Paiute and Shoshone baskets in the country, as well as artifacts from the Manzanar relocation camp (see boxed text,) and historic photographs of primitively equipped local rock climbers scaling Sierra peaks, including Mt Whitney. West of town via Onion Valley Rd (Market St in town), pretty Onion Valley harbors the trailhead for the Kearsarge Pass (10-mile round-trip), an old Paiute trade route. This is also the quickest eastside access to the Pacific Crest Trail and Kings Canyon National Park. Another trail goes to Golden Trout Lake, but it’s strenuous and poorly marked. A herd of California bighorn sheep lives south of Onion Valley around Shepherd Pass. * * * CAMP OF INFAMY On December 7, 1941, Japanese war planes bombed Pearl Harbor, a day that, according to President Roosevelt, would forever live in infamy.

It’s blessed with almost freakishly good weather, a stunning masterpiece of a courthouse and a vibrant downtown. No one can deny the appeal of the public beaches that line the city from tip to toe – just ignore those pesky oil derricks out to sea. History For thousands of years before the arrival of the Spanish, the Chumash people thrived here, setting up canoe trading routes between the mainland and the Channel Islands. In 1542 explorer Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo sailed into the channel, claimed the area for Spain, then sailed off to winter – and eventually die – on one of the nearby islands. The Chumash had little reason for concern until the permanent return of the Spanish in the late 1700s, when priests and soldiers arrived to establish military outposts and to convert the tribe to Christianity.

It’s hard to miss the Maritime Museum (Map; 619-234-9153; www.sdmaritime.org; 1492 N Harbor Dr; all 7 vessels adult/child 6-17yr/senior & military $14/8/11 9am-8pm, to 9pm Memorial Day to Labor Day), just north of Ash St. The 100ft masts of the square-rigger tall ship Star of India – one of seven vessels open to the public here – make the museum easy to find. Built on the Isle of Man and launched in 1863, the restored ship plied the England–India trade route, carried immigrants to New Zealand, became a trading ship based in Hawaii and, finally, worked the Alaskan salmon fisheries. Nowadays she’s taken out once a year for a sail, making her the oldest active ship in the world. Kids can learn the Pirate’s Code at the small but engaging pirate’s exhibit below deck on the HMS Surprise.


Central America by Carolyn McCarthy, Greg Benchwick, Joshua Samuel Brown, Alex Egerton, Matthew Firestone, Kevin Raub, Tom Spurling, Lucas Vidgen

airport security, Bartolomé de las Casas, California gold rush, call centre, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, company town, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Day of the Dead, digital map, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Joan Didion, land reform, liberation theology, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, megaproject, Monroe Doctrine, off-the-grid, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Suez canal 1869, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

HISTORY Belize before Columbus Belize certainly earns its place on the Ruta Maya – ruins are everywhere and the Maya population is still thriving, particularly in the southwest. The Maya have been in Belize since the first human habitation. One of the earliest settlements in the Maya world, Cuello, was near present-day Orange Walk. Maya trade routes ran all through the country, and the New River, Río Hondo and Belize River all played an important role in early trade and commerce. Important archeological sites such as Cahal Pech Click here, near San Ignacio and Lamanai, date from this period. Pirate’s Paradise Lack of effective government and the onshore safety afforded by the barrier reef attracted English and Scottish pirates to Belizean waters during the 17th century.

Despite a ghastly record, Pedrarias established Panamá as an important Spanish settlement, a commercial center and a base for further explorations, including the conquest of Peru. From Panamá, vast riches of Peruvian gold and Oriental spices were transported across the isthmus by foot. Vestiges of this famous trade route, known as the Sendero Las Cruces (Las Cruces Trail), can still be found throughout Panama. As the Spaniards grew fat and soft on the wealth of plundered civilizations, the world began to notice the prospering colony, especially the English privateers lurking in coastal waters. In 1573 Sir Francis Drake destroyed Nombre de Dios, and set sail for England with a galleon laden with Spanish gold.

In 1671 the city was ransacked and destroyed by the Welsh pirate Sir Henry Morgan, leaving only the stone ruins of Panamá Viejo. Three years later, the city was re-established in the peninsular area of Casco Viejo. Yet after the destruction of the Caribbean port at Portobelo in 1746, the Spanish overland trade route declined. Panama City subsequently faded in importance, though it returned to prominence in the 1850s when gold seekers on the way to California flooded across the isthmus by the Panama Railroad. After Panama declared its independence from Colombia on November 3, 1903, Panama City was firmly established as the capital.


The Secret World: A History of Intelligence by Christopher Andrew

Able Archer 83, active measures, Admiral Zheng, airport security, anti-communist, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Chelsea Manning, classic study, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, Fellow of the Royal Society, Francisco Pizarro, Google Earth, information security, invention of movable type, invention of the telegraph, Julian Assange, Khyber Pass, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, RAND corporation, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Skype, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, trade route, two and twenty, union organizing, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, WikiLeaks, éminence grise

Moran.27 A total of 329 of the Amarna letters in the Moran edition were sent by vassals in Canaan to the Pharaoh about a century earlier than the Israelite conquest of Canaan recorded in the Bible. Thirty-eight of the vassals’ letters contain what would nowadays be regarded as intelligence rather than open-source information, though at the time no clear distinction was made between the two.28 Ports on the Levant coast and caravanserai along trade routes also obtained news from far-flung parts of the Mediterranean and the Fertile Crescent. Through Canaan and its harbours, there passed troops, traders and messengers, both friendly and hostile.29 Egypt’s vassals were well placed to gather information from them and knew that they were expected to do so.

Instead of mounting an operation to capture or kill him (as both the Persians and Spartans were to do later in his career), the Athenian authorities had his name inscribed on a stele which was then ceremonially cursed by priests and priestesses.27 For the Spartans, Alcibiades’ defection presented an unexpected intelligence windfall. Though proof is lacking (unsurprisingly, given the shortage of sources), Alcibiades probably advised the Spartans on how to help Syracuse, the most powerful Sicilian city-state, resist Athenian forces and build a fort at Decelea in Attica to disrupt a major Athenian trade route.28 Spartan intervention sealed the fate of the Athenian expedition. The Athenians’ belief in the illusion of a Sicilian Midas was merely the most colourful example of their recurrent failure to grasp the need for basic military intelligence before mounting a major operation. Though their defeat was hastened by the mistakes and divisions of the Athenian generals, an accurate grasp of the problems facing the expedition might well have deterred them from attempting the conquest of Sicily in the first place.

., 411 Tinsley, Richard, 526 Tintoretto, Domenico, 130 Tirpitz, Alfred von, 513 Tisamenus of Elis, 31, 32 Tissaphernes (Persian satrap), 35–6 Tisza, István, 488 Tito, Marshal, 62, 63, 85, 680–82 Tittoni, Tommaso, 484 Tlaxcala confederacy, 134–5 TNT, 520–21 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 386 Todd, Janet, 235† Togo, Shigenori, 630, 670 Tojo, General Hideki, 630 Tolstoy, Sergei, 627 Tombs, Robert, 329 Tomkins, Nathaniel, 216 Tonge, Dr Israel, 239 Topbas, Osman Nuri: The Prophet of Mercy Muhammad, 3* Topographical and Statistical Department (T&S), British, 414, 415 Torcy, M de, 248, 264, 266, 267 Torquemada, Tomás de, 111 Torres, Juan Jose, 690 Torrijos, Omar, 690 torture, 4, 106, 116–17, 130, 137, 164, 174, 189 Totonac people, 134 Toulouse, 101, 102, 104, 742† Tourzel, marquise de, 316 Townsend, Robert, 305* Toye, Francis, 570–71 trade and commerce Anglo-Soviet trade negotiations (1920–21), 577–8 commercial intelligence and Renaissance Venice, 119, 121‡ and Phoenician Empire, 41 spice trade, 119, 121 trade routes in Old Testament times, 19–20, 41 transatlantic trade with New World, 121 Trafalgar, Battle of (1805), 338* Transitional Justice Working Group (TJWG), 751 Travis, Commander Edward, 642 Tresham, Francis, 193 Trevor-Roper, Hugh, 656 Triple Alliance, 479, 479†, 493 Triple Entente (1907), 470–71, 472 Trojan War, 2, 27–9 Trotsky, Leon, 556, 598–600, 621–3, 680, 743 assassination of (20 August 1940), 62–3, 624 first attack on (24 May 1940), 623–4, 681 Fourth International, 600, 622, 623 Troubetzkoi, Prince Vasili, 343* Trubnikov, Vyacheslav, 711, 715 Truman, Harry S., 8, 668, 671 disavowal of covert action, 677–8 dislike of peacetime HUMINT, 670, 676 Truman Doctrine, 676–7 VENONA secret kept from, 673 Trumbull, Sir William, 248, 257 Tschirsky, Heinrich von, 488 Tsushima, Battle of (1905), 466, 469 Tunisia, 746 Turberville, George, 151 Turenne, vicomte de, 246, 247 Turing, Alan, 518 Turkish War of Independence (1919–23), 576–7 Tutankhamun, Pharaoh, 20–21 Twain, Mark, 132 Twentieth-Century Fund (think tank), 717 Tyrconnell, Earl of, 252 U-2 (first high-altitude spy-plane), 683 Udney, John, 334 Ukraine, 708 Ulbricht, Walter, 680 Ulyanov, Alexander, 436 Umar ibn al-Khattab, 93, 95 Umberto I, King of Italy, 428, 430, 433, 447 Umm Al-Fadl, 88 United States 2000 presidential election campaign, 723, 724, 728 arrival of troops in Europe (1917–18), 561, 563, 565 Aspin–Brown Commission (1995–6), 713–14, 716–17, 727 assumption of national superiority, 713–14 Black Tom attack (July 1916), 527, 528, 604 Bureau of Investigation, 435, 521, 527–8, 568 challenges Europe’s lead in intelligence, 5–6 Coordinator of Information (COI) post, 609–10 Department of Homeland Security, 435 diplomatic relations with USSR (1933), 586 Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) role, 378, 676, 677, 702, 706, 707–8, 710 embassy security in Russia, 458, 592–3, 662, 674–5 expectation of surprise Japanese attack (late 1941), 630–31 and First World War, 515, 516, 519, 520, 527–8, 533–42 German sabotage in (First World War), 520, 521, 522, 527, 528, 542, 604 growth of intelligence agencies during First World War, 568–9 intelligence coordination problem, 568, 609–10, 611–12, 628–30, 631–3, 634, 637 intelligence special relationship with UK, 7, 8, 169, 516, 565–7, 608, 609, 641–4, 670–71, 673–4, 735 Iran–Contra scandal (1986), 691 MAGIC (Japanese) decrypts, 611–12, 628–30, 631–3, 634, 635, 637, 669–70 MI1b decrypts of diplomatic telegrams, 533–4, 535–6, 538–9, 566, 571, 760 National Security Act (26 July 1947), 677 policy in the Third World, 8 poor airport security in pre-9/11 years, 724–5 post-9/11 scares and false alarms, 727–8 post-First World War intelligence cuts, 573, 587, 588–9 publishing of diplomatic correspondence, 422–3 Second World War intelligence failures, 7 Secret Service, 435–6, 521–2, 527–8, 568 Secret Service Fund, 310 Soviet penetration of Roosevelt administration, 662–3, 669, 673 Truman Doctrine, 676–7 ‘Year of Intelligence’ (1975), 687–8, 731–2 see also Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Urban VII, Pope, 138* Uritsky, Moisei Solomonovich, 559 US Army Air Force (USAAF), 642 Ustinov, Jona ‘Klop’, 612, 613, 614 Utrecht, Treaty of (1713), 267, 269 Vaillant, Auguste, 429–30 Valens, Eastern emperor, 81, 82 Valentian, Roman emperor, 78 Valerius Probus, 46 Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, 304 Van Lew, Elizabeth, 413–14 Vansittart, Sir Robert, 612, 615 Varro, 50* Varus, Publius Quinctilius, 70–71 Vauban, Sébastien Le Prestre de, 243, 246 Vedic religion, 60 Velázquez, Diego, 208 Venanges (now Fort Franklin), 302 ‘Vengeur, Le’ (pre-First World War ‘French agent’), 465, 466 Venice, Renaissance Archivio Centrale, 119, 120 Bridge of Sighs, 132* and commercial intelligence, 119, 121‡ Council of Ten, 118, 122, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129–30, 131, 138–9 and cryptanalysis, 127, 128–9 end of mercantile supremacy, 121 informers in, 119, 131–2 and Italian Wars (1494–1559), 128, 129 lion’s mouth (bocca di leone) letterboxes, 131–2, 131† and masks, 130–31 military inferiority to Ottomans, 122, 132 obsession with secrets and secrecy, 118–19, 126, 129–30 Phelippes tests ciphers of, 205 political-intelligence collection, 119–20, 121, 122, 124, 125–31, 207 as printing capital, 122–3 state inquisitors, 130, 131 trading empire, 119–20, 132 Vergennes, comte de, 293, 294, 296, 298, 299, 301 Versailles, Palace of, 242 Versailles, Treaty of (1919), 573, 585 Vetrov, Vladimir, 714 Victoria, Queen, 391, 427, 434 Victoria, Queen of Spain, 429 Victorian-era Britain Chartist movement, 379–80, 385 debate on letter-opening (1844), 381–3 Deciphering Branch closure (1844), 6, 337, 383, 410, 421, 449, 747 Fenian ‘Dynamite War’ (1881–5), 427 Great Exhibition (London, 1851), 391–2 ‘Great Game’ with Russia on North-West Frontier, 406, 416–21 intelligence decline, 6, 414 Intelligence Department (ID) in War Office, 449, 450–51 lack of ‘political police’, 380 as safe haven for continental revolutionaries, 380, 388–9, 396, 400–401 Vienna, Congress of (1814–15), 363–6 Final Act (9 June 1815), 368–9 and Napoleon’s escape from Elba, 368 sexual liaisons/pillow talk at, 366–8 Viète, François, 137, 138–9, 140, 198 Vietnam War, 66, 687, 748 Viguié, Léopold, 432 Villars, Marshal Claude Louis Hector de, 265 Villiers, Edward, 224 Vincent, Professor E.


pages: 485 words: 126,597

Paper: A World History by Mark Kurlansky

Ada Lovelace, Charles Babbage, circular economy, clean water, computer age, Edward Snowden, Great Leap Forward, invention of the telephone, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, lone genius, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, moveable type in China, paper trading, planned obsolescence, trade route, Vannevar Bush

The two were world superpowers. The emperor Wudi sent an envoy to the West who traveled for twelve years and got as far as Turkestan, almost to the edges of the Roman Empire. He learned of the Romans and may even have had contact with them. Wudi’s expedition led to what became known as the Silk Road, a trade route from western China across Central Asia that would dominate commerce in the region for centuries. Once paper was somehow invented, it is easy to see how artisans would arrive at the idea of making it thinner and smoother, and coating it with wax to make it less absorbent and more suitable for ink.


pages: 367 words: 122,140

A Very Strange Way to Go to War: The Canberra in the Falklands by Andrew Vine

Boeing 747, clockwatching, old-boy network, Ronald Reagan, Suez crisis 1956, trade route

Canberra was tagged, ‘The ship that shapes the future’ in the press, and the company’s chairman, Sir Donald Forsyth Anderson, had every confidence that she would do exactly that, cutting a week off the month-long voyage to Australia and offering the potential to break into the profitable Pacific cruise market. P&O’s traditional trade route to Australia seemed secure, not least because of the number of emigrants leaving weary, near-bankrupt Britain in the years after the Second World War, tempted to new lives in a young country where hard work held out the prospect of prosperity, as well as better weather. These were the so-called ‘Ten Pound Poms’, ultimately almost a million of them in the 25 years after 1945, travelling on assisted passages paid for by the Australian government, keen to boost its population and economic growth, in return for that nominal contribution of £10.


pages: 421 words: 120,332

The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future by Laurence C. Smith

Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, clean water, climate change refugee, Climategate, colonial rule, data science, deglobalization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, electricity market, energy security, flex fuel, G4S, global supply chain, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, guest worker program, Hans Island, hydrogen economy, ice-free Arctic, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, land tenure, Martin Wolf, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Y2K

There are many other factors controlling the profitability of transnational shipping lanes besides a shorter geographic route, available for an uncertain few weeks to a few months out of the year. In imagining 2050, I do see many thousands of boats in the Arctic, but not humming through global trade routes as dreamed of in the fifteenth and early twenty-first centuries. Doubtless some international trade will be diverted through the region as the summer sea-ice retreats northward. It is happening now through the Aleutian Islands, Murmansk, Kirkenes, and Churchill. But few of the vessels I envision are giant container ships carrying goods between East and West.370 The thousands of ships I see are smaller, with diverse shapes, sizes, and functions.


pages: 419 words: 124,522

Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, Day of the Dead, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, failed state, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, invention of gunpowder, invention of the telescope, Lao Tzu, Pax Mongolica, South China Sea, trade route

Marco Polo, whether or not he came here, recorded asbestos somewhere in the mountains of Tartary, and said that Kublai Khan had sent the Pope a fireproof napkin to cover Christ’s face on the handkerchief of St Veronica. But to the early Chinese, asbestos was a mystery. It came to them from the west, and they thought it the wool of a white rat. At the other end of the trade route, meanwhile, the Romans were cremating their imperial dead in asbestos shrouds, and using it for tablecloths and napkins which they cleaned in fire. They realised too its threat to health–slaves who mined or wove it died of lung disease–but this knowledge was forgotten for two millennia. The miner opposite me had had enough.


pages: 481 words: 121,300

Why geography matters: three challenges facing America : climate change, the rise of China, and global terrorism by Harm J. De Blij

agricultural Revolution, airport security, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial exploitation, complexity theory, computer age, crony capitalism, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Internet Archive, John Snow's cholera map, Khyber Pass, manufacturing employment, megacity, megaproject, Mercator projection, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, UNCLOS, UNCLOS

The country alternately fragmented and reunified, absorbed and assimilated outsiders and conquered neighbors, but reached an apogee during the Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 220), when the Roman Empire thrived at the other end of Eurasia, when the city of Xian was RED STAR RISING 135 the "Rome of China," and when the Silk Road was a busy trade route. To this day, Chinese call themselves the "People of Han." The Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) was another formative dynasty, but China reached its greatest imperial dimensions during the final traditional dynasty, the Qing (Manchu), which commenced in 1644 and ended in chaos in 1911. The Qing rulers conquered much of Indochina, Myanmar, Tibet (Xizang), Xinjiang, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, eastern Siberia, the Korean Peninsula, and the islands of Sakhalin and Taiwan (Fig. 7-2).


pages: 497 words: 124,144

Red Moon Rising by Matthew Brzezinski

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Columbine, company town, cuban missile crisis, guns versus butter model, Kitchen Debate, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, skunkworks, trade route, Vanguard fund, walking around money, white picket fence

Few women of the era pursued higher education, and Maria, a dark-haired beauty with porcelain features, a wasp waist, and impressively plumed bonnets, juggled her dueling parental and academic responsibilities with a fiery determination she would pass on to her famously obstinate son. The two lived mostly apart. During the week Maria studied French and literature at the Ladies College in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, while nannies and tutors cared for Sergei. On weekends she made the two-hour trip home to Nezhin, a small town along the bustling trade route that linked the czarist and Hapsburg empires. Her parents were wealthy merchants; in a photograph, one of their two stores sits at the foot of a four-spire church, occupying a low, block-long structure that resembles a turn-of-the-century strip mall. As a side business, the family had a small but highly successful brine operation that had applied to receive the coveted imperial seal as the official purveyor of pickles to the court of Czar Nicholas II.


pages: 211 words: 22,862

Pastwatch The Redemption of Christopher Colombus by Orson Scott Card

clean water, trade route

“Of course,” said Hunahpu. “The Taino culture was actually an overlay by earlier raiders from the Yucatan. They brought the ball court with them, for instance, and established themselves as the ruling class. But they adopted the Arawak language and soon forgot their origins, and they certainly did not establish regular trade routes. Why should they? The boats didn’t carry enough to make trade profitable. Only raiding was worth the effort, and the Caribs were the raiders, not the Taino, and since they came out of the southeastern Caribbean, Mesoamerica was even further out of reach. The Taino knew about Mesoamerica as a fabled land of gold and wealth and mighty gods—that’s what they meant when they kept telling Columbus that the land of gold was to the west—but they had no regular contact.


pages: 402 words: 123,199

In the Company of Heroes by Michael J. Durant, Steven Hartov

Adam Curtis, back-to-the-land, friendly fire, job satisfaction, no-fly zone, placebo effect, Saturday Night Live, trade route, urban sprawl

And finally, as if to rub salt into the people’s wounds and thumb his nose at the world, Noriega invited Colombia’s Medellín drug cartels to sup at the table of his dictatorship. To say that the United States was “concerned” would be a gross understatement. We had built the canal that connected the Atlantic and Pacific oceans across Panama’s isthmus, and joint American-Panamanian military cooperation had kept that critical trade route open throughout many of the century’s upheavals. Still, over the years the people of Panama had eventually grown to resent our power and presence, so we had agreed to a timetable of gradual withdrawal. Yet even while we were preparing to relinquish many of our military bases, Noriega repeatedly fanned the flames of anti-Americanism.


pages: 432 words: 124,635

Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles Montgomery

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, agricultural Revolution, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, City Beautiful movement, clean water, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, data science, Donald Shoup, East Village, edge city, energy security, Enrique Peñalosa, experimental subject, food desert, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Google Earth, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, Induced demand, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, license plate recognition, McMansion, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, power law, rent control, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, science of happiness, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, starchitect, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, wage slave, white flight, World Values Survey, zero-sum game, Zipcar

In False Creek North, residents of upscale towers told surveyors that subsidized housing was the “best thing to happen” to their area because it drew families to the neighborhood, giving it a greater sense of community. *The Campo’s location, shape, and design did reflect the evolution of Siena. It began life as a meadow at the intersection of various trade routes and was used as a market hundreds of years before the nine families who dominated the city in the twelfth century paved it with brick and inlaid it with nine rays of travertine to symbolize their rule. Ever since, it has served as the stage for the Sienese clans’ cooperation and rivalries—exhibited most famously by the Palio, the annual spectacle in which horses from each clan race one another around the edges of the piazza.


pages: 407 words: 123,587

The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq by Rory Stewart

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, clean water, Etonian, full employment, Khartoum Gordon, lateral thinking, Masdar, microcredit, public intellectual, trade route, unemployed young men, urban planning

Around the smashed skull of a woman, called Queen Pu-abi, perhaps a relative of Sulgi, was a two-foot crown of golden leaves. “The upper part of the body,” Woolley wrote, “was entirely hidden by a mass of beads of gold, silver, lapis lazuli, cornelian, agate, and chalcedony.” The lapis was evidence that the Sumerians had a trade route stretching three thousand miles to the only source of lapis, the mines of eastern Afghanistan. In the porch was an inlaid lyre with a golden bull’s head. And curled round the lyre was the arm of the female musician who, along with six armored guards and nine other musicians, had been killed to serve the afterlife of their dead mistress.


pages: 456 words: 123,534

The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution by Charles R. Morris

air freight, American ideology, British Empire, business process, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, clean water, colonial exploitation, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, en.wikipedia.org, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, if you build it, they will come, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, lone genius, manufacturing employment, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, refrigerator car, Robert Gordon, scientific management, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, undersea cable

A captain could readily find a line on the same latitude as the mouth of the English Channel and ride it home. Without obvious landmarks, however, it was much harder to divine how far east or west you were. That was the longitude problem, and to a seafaring nation it was of first importance. Without accurate longitude readings, ships could lose all sense of location in open oceans. Even when familiar trade routes were known to harbor pirates, merchants dared not vary from them for fear of getting lost. Muddled positioning extended voyages far beyond expectations: men got scurvy; missing a small island with fresh water could be a death sentence. Almost all voyages home were by way of the Channel, so making the entrance was a routine but dangerous part of any sea captain’s job.


pages: 436 words: 124,373

Galactic North by Alastair Reynolds

back-to-the-land, Buckminster Fuller, hive mind, information retrieval, Kickstarter, risk/return, stem cell, time dilation, trade route

Three of the five dials were now showing orange, indicating that those settings were now outside what the Conjoiners deemed the recommended envelope of safe operation. If any of the dials were to show red, or if more than three showed orange, than we’d be in real danger of losing the Petronel. When Ultras meet on friendly terms, to exchange data or goods, the shipmasters will often trade stories of engine settings. On a busy trade route, a marginal increase in drive efficiency can make all the difference between one ship and its competitors. Occasionally you hear about ships that have been running on three orange, even four orange, for decades at a time. By the same token, you sometimes hear about ships that went nova when only two dials had been adjusted away from the safety envelope.


pages: 415 words: 125,089

Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk by Peter L. Bernstein

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, cognitive dissonance, computerized trading, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, endowment effect, experimental economics, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, Fermat's Last Theorem, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, full employment, Great Leap Forward, index fund, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, linear programming, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, mental accounting, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Norman Macrae, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Post-Keynesian economics, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, prudent man rule, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, spectrum auction, statistical model, stocks for the long run, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, trade route, transaction costs, tulip mania, Vanguard fund, zero-sum game

The 1500s and 1600s were a time of geographical exploration, confrontation with new lands and new societies, and experimentation in art, poetic forms, science, architecture, and mathematics. The new sense of opportunity led to a dramatic acceleration in the growth of trade and commerce, which served as a powerful stimulus to change and exploration. Columbus was not conducting a Caribbean cruise: he was seeking a new trade route to the Indies. The prospect of getting rich is highly motivating, and few people get rich without taking a gamble. There is more to that blunt statement than meets the eye. Trade is a mutually beneficial process, a transaction in which both parties perceive themselves as wealthier than they were before.


pages: 424 words: 122,350

Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life by George Monbiot

Chance favours the prepared mind, cognitive dissonance, en.wikipedia.org, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, land reform, Nelson Mandela, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, place-making, precautionary principle, rewilding, seminal paper, social intelligence, trade route

These were advanced agricultural civilizations, maintaining fish farms as well as arable fields and orchards.10 It appears that European diseases–smallpox, measles, diphtheria, the common cold–brought to the Caribbean coast of South America by explorers and early colonists, passed down indigenous trade routes into the heart of the continent, where they raged through densely peopled settlements before any other Europeans reached them. So ferocious is the vegetation of the Amazon that it would have obliterated all visible traces of the civilizations its people built within a few years of their dissolution.


pages: 419 words: 119,476

Posh Boys: How English Public Schools Ruin Britain by Robert Verkaik

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alistair Cooke, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Brixton riot, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, G4S, gender pay gap, God and Mammon, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Livingstone, I presume, loadsamoney, mega-rich, Neil Kinnock, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Piers Corbyn, place-making, plutocrats, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, school vouchers, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, Suez crisis 1956, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, trade route, traveling salesman, unpaid internship

While Dowding took all the plaudits, few heard of the work of state-educated Robert Watson-Watt, Edward George Bowen, John Randall and Bernard Lovell who helped to develop radar. Nor was proper recognition given to the Royal and Merchant navies, whose ships were captained by state-educated sailors. ‘The men who kept the convoys free in the Atlantic during the Second World War, starved Germany in the First, and kept the Empire’s maritime trading routes open for more than two centuries,’ says David Turner, ‘were rarely public schoolboys.’17 Even more decisive than the navy and radar in winning the war was the intervention of the Americans. The industrial weight of the United States of America kept Britain supplied with food and vital military equipment, including the Sherman tanks that were sent to help Montgomery chase Rommel out of the North African desert.


pages: 475 words: 127,389

Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live by Nicholas A. Christakis

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Atul Gawande, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, death of newspapers, disinformation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, helicopter parent, Henri Poincaré, high-speed rail, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, job satisfaction, lockdown, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, meta-analysis, New Journalism, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, school choice, security theater, social contagion, social distancing, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, trade route, Upton Sinclair, zoonotic diseases

Compared with Eurasia, the New World was thus a “microbial paradise,” devoid of major endemic infectious disease.13 Domesticating animals (and bringing their pathogens up close to humans in a sustained way) had some other untoward consequences. Animal husbandry, and agriculture more broadly, contributed to the invention of cities in the first place by providing a steady supply of food. And this, in turn, fed into the development of far-flung trade routes and high-density habitation (which was often coupled with poor sanitation). These developments paved the way for the epidemics that began to afflict the great ancient civilizations, including Greece and Rome (in the second century CE, the city of Rome had over a million inhabitants!). But these agglomerations of humans and their institutions were able to survive major outbreaks too, for reasons we saw in chapter 6.


pages: 521 words: 118,183

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, cable laying ship, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crisis actor, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, digital nomad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, geopolitical risk, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google bus, Google Chrome, GPT-3, green new deal, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, one-China policy, open economy, OpenAI, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, satellite internet, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, TSMC, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Valery Gerasimov, vertical integration, Wargames Reagan, Westphalian system, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

War and peace have never been binary and have always been a spectrum. With the global economy far more integrated than it was in 1950, governments have increasingly sought to advance their interests and weaken their adversaries in the ambiguous “gray zone” just between the conventional thresholds of war and peace, over trade routes and fiber-optic lines. Today, this has become a predominant and pervasive feature of international politics, which is why I have chosen to describe the systemic global rivalry between democracy and autocracy as a “Gray War.” But whether we call it a cold war, a Gray War, or a banana, the impact of China’s predatory policies on America speaks for itself.


pages: 1,773 words: 486,685

Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century by Geoffrey Parker

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, classic study, Climatic Research Unit, colonial rule, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Defenestration of Prague, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, friendly fire, Google Earth, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Khyber Pass, mass immigration, Mercator projection, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Republic of Letters, sexual politics, South China Sea, the market place, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, unemployed young men, University of East Anglia, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

More meaningful, perhaps, is to study the flow of money and goods in and out of the ‘shallow’ local markets from the viewpoint of local inhabitants, listening to their complaints about the destructive effects of external market conditions.34 In the seventeenth century such complaints multiplied whenever wars and rebellions closed down markets and trade routes. Thus in 1621 two simultaneous wars – between the Dutch Republic and Spain, and between Sweden and Poland – involved blockades specifically intended to halt the export of Baltic grain: the former because Dutch ships carried most of it, the latter because its profits sustained the Polish war effort.

On the eve of the Thirty Years War, villages in the area produced thousands of light woollen cloths (Zeuge or worsted), exporting them to Italy, Switzerland and Poland as well as other parts of the Holy Roman Empire. Spinning, weaving and dyeing cloth employed up to half the families in some villages; but hostile troops occupied Württemberg for much of the war, burning Calw to the ground in 1634, cutting trade routes, increasing risks and destroying several of its export markets. Once the war ended, the merchant-dyers formed an association and (supported by the local overlord) compelled the weavers' guilds to sign a permanent agreement with them which, they claimed, would guarantee a reasonable living for all.

Newton never left England (indeed, while working on the Mathematical Principles, he does not appear to have left Cambridge), but he received abundant data gathered by friends, and friends of friends, both Protestant and Catholic, from all the continents, which he used to form and support his hypotheses. The configuration of the principal trade routes of the 1680s explains the location of most of his data-gathering points. Like Newton, Halley combined observation with historical study and his close reading of the accounts of all previous apparitions convinced him that the comets that appeared in 1531, in 1607 and in 1682 were one and the same, and that it must therefore circle the sun in a 75- or 76-year cycle.


pages: 582 words: 136,780

Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded by Simon Winchester

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, cable laying ship, company town, Easter island, global village, God and Mammon, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, lateral thinking, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, seminal paper, South China Sea, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, trade route, undersea cable

The change began somewhat inauspiciously in late June of 1596, when a ragged flotilla of four Dutch vessels dropped anchor in the roads off the north-western Javanese pepper port of Banten and invited the Portuguese spice merchants, whose godowns had long lined the shore, to come aboard. The voyage had been sponsored by the nine merchant-adventurers of the Compagnie van Verre of Amsterdam – in translation simply ‘The Long Distance Company’ – who had been inspired by the idea of blazing a spice trade-route to the Indies. It had not gone at all well. Cornelis de Houtman, who commanded the venture, turned out to be both an inept navigator and a cantankerous martinet. Not that he had been wanting of preparation: along with his brother Frederik he had already spent two years in Lisbon gathering intelligence on the Portuguese operations in the East.* His expedition was grandly titled Eerste Scheepvart, ‘The First Ship Sailing’.


pages: 651 words: 135,818

China into Africa: trade, aid, and influence by Robert I. Rotberg

barriers to entry, BRICs, colonial rule, corporate governance, Deng Xiaoping, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, global supply chain, global value chain, income inequality, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, low interest rates, megacity, megaproject, microcredit, offshore financial centre, one-China policy, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Scramble for Africa, Shenzhen special economic zone , South China Sea, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, trade route, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

This view stems largely from images of China from the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. However, on a longer time scale, China can be seen as one of the greatest trading nations in the world. The Mongol Empire stretched halfway around the globe, and the Silk Road was one of the great trading routes. In the early fifteenth century, Emperor Zhu Di ordered the construction of what might have been the most impressive shipping fleet in the world. Commanded by Zheng He, Chinese ships reached Africa and established trading posts on the continent, decades before the Portuguese.15 For much of the last millennium China was a major global trader.


pages: 400 words: 129,841

Capitalism: the unknown ideal by Ayn Rand

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business cycle, data science, East Village, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, Isaac Newton, laissez-faire capitalism, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, profit motive, the market place, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, War on Poverty, yellow journalism

Such myths as “capitalistic imperialism,” “warprofiteering,” or the notion that capitalism has to win “markets” by military conquest are examples of the superficiality or the unscrupulousness of statist commentators and historians. The essence of capitalism’s foreign policy is free trade—i.e., the abolition of trade barriers, of protective tariffs, of special privileges—the opening of the world’s trade routes to free international exchange and competition among the private citizens of all countries dealing directly with one another. During the nineteenth century, it was free trade that liberated the world, undercutting and wrecking the remnants of feudalism and the statist tyranny of absolute monarchies.


pages: 436 words: 140,256

The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond

agricultural Revolution, assortative mating, Atahualpa, Boeing 747, Columbian Exchange, correlation coefficient, double helix, Drosophila, Easter island, European colonialism, Great Leap Forward, invention of gunpowder, invention of the wheel, invention of writing, language acquisition, longitudinal study, out of africa, phenotype, planned obsolescence, Scientific racism, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, the long tail, the scientific method, trade route

Peter O'Toole) blowing up that railway in widescreen technicolour, without realizing that we were watching the last act in the destruction of Petra's forests. Petra's ravaged landscape today is a metaphor for what happened to the rest of the cradle of Western civilization. The modern surrounds of Petra could no more feed a city that commanded the world's main trade routes than the modern surrounds of Persepolis could feed the capital of a superpower such as the Persian Empire once was. The ruins of those cities, and of Athens and Rome, are monuments to states that destroyed their means of survival. Nor are Western civilizations the only literate societies that committed ecological suicide.


pages: 872 words: 135,196

The Market for Force: The Consequences of Privatizing Security by Deborah D. Avant

barriers to entry, continuation of politics by other means, corporate social responsibility, failed state, Global Witness, hiring and firing, independent contractor, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, operational security, Peace of Westphalia, post-Fordism, principal–agent problem, private military company, profit motive, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, rolodex, Seymour Hersh, The Nature of the Firm, trade route, transaction costs

French companies were state enterprises forged by the king and designed to increase state power later in the game.70 Dutch companies were private wealth-seeking enterprises that were organized in a charter so as to enhance the Dutch profit relative to the English or (particularly) the Portuguese.71 The crown chartered the English Companies for similar reasons.72 These forces were both an army and a police force for establishing order and then protecting both trade routes and new territory. Also during the early period of the state, states rented out their forces to other friendly states. German states supplied troops to a number of other countries including the Netherlands, Venice, and France, in addition to Britain.73 The Dutch provided regiments to German princelings during the Seven Years War and to Britain in both the 1701 war with France and the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion within Britain.74 69 70 71 72 73 74 S.


To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland's Global Diaspora, 1750-2010 by T M Devine

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, classic study, deindustrialization, deskilling, full employment, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, railway mania, Red Clydeside, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce

It has been reckoned that over most of the eighteenth century, between 75 per cent and 80 per cent of annual government expenditure went on current military needs or to service debt accruing from previous wars. For Britain, far and away the biggest outlay was on the navy, the ‘senior service’, vital for the home defence of an island people and for the prosecution of a ‘blue water’ policy around the globe, safeguarding trade routes and establishing secure overseas bases for the protection of colonies. Sir Walter Raleigh’s dictum still rang true: ‘Whosoever commands the sea, commands the trade; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself.’5 The problem was, however, that navies were fearsomely expensive.


pages: 449 words: 129,511

The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester

Albert Einstein, ASML, British Empire, business climate, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, discovery of the americas, Easter island, Etonian, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, GPS: selective availability, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, John Harrison: Longitude, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, means of production, military-industrial complex, planetary scale, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, trade route, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Yet, before the chronological influence of railways, there was one other profession that above all others truly needed the most precise timekeeping. It was that which had been developing fast since the European discovery of the Americas in the fifteenth century and the subsequent consolidation of trade routes to the Orient: the shipping industry. Navigation across vast and trackless expanses of ocean was essential to maritime business. Getting lost at sea could be costly at best, fatal at worst. Also, because the exact determination of where a ship might be at any one moment was essential to the navigation of a route, and because one part of that determination depends, crucially, on knowing the exact time aboard the ship and, even more crucially, the exact time at some other stable reference point on the globe, maritime clockmakers were charged with making the most precise of clocks.* And none was more sedulously dedicated to achieving this degree of exactitude than the Yorkshire carpenter and joiner who later became England’s, perhaps the world’s, most revered horologist: John Harrison, the man who most famously gave mariners a sure means of determining a vessel’s longitude.


pages: 389 words: 131,688

The Impossible Climb: Alex Honnold, El Capitan, and the Climbing Life by Mark Synnott

blue-collar work, California gold rush, Google Earth, index fund, Nate Silver, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, technological singularity, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, trade route, Y2K

At this point, all they want to do is get down safely, and as a result, it’s common for the fixed lines to be left behind. By the time the next season rolls around, the ropes are often unusable, shredded from the wind or frozen into the slope, which means a new set must be laid. On popular 8,000-meter-peak trade routes like the Abruzzi Ridge on K2, there are so many old ropes in place that it’s virtually impossible to climb the mountain without stumbling over them. If you’re like Messner or House, and you want to climb these routes in their natural state, you’re out of luck. Expedition style is how most of the 8,000-meter peaks were first climbed, and for the most part, it’s how they are still climbed today.


pages: 473 words: 132,344

The Downfall of Money: Germany's Hyperinflation and the Destruction of the Middle Class by Frederick Taylor

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, falling living standards, fiat currency, fixed income, full employment, German hyperinflation, housing crisis, Internet Archive, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, mittelstand, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, quantitative easing, rent control, risk/return, strikebreaker, trade route, zero-sum game

On 1 August 1914, when Britain’s entry into the war was not yet certain, the German shipping journal Hansa had predicted that if she did join in on the side of Serbia, France and Russia, ‘economic life [would] suffer a collapse unprecedented in history’.1 The author of that judgement was proved right within a matter of months. Despite the huge sums that Germany had spent on building up its naval strength, the Reich did not have the surface ships to challenge the Royal Navy and thus to make the trading routes safe for German imports and exports during wartime. During the first months of the war, the British slowly tightened the screws on German trade by a series of restrictive measures, though these stopped short of a total, indiscriminate blockade. When, however, it became clear that the war was not going to be decided on the battlefield any time soon, the cabinet in London decided to step beyond the accepted rules of conflict.


pages: 572 words: 134,335

The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class by Kees Van der Pijl

anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, book value, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, collective bargaining, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, deskilling, diversified portfolio, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, imperial preference, Joseph Schumpeter, liberal capitalism, mass immigration, means of production, military-industrial complex, North Sea oil, plutocrats, profit maximization, RAND corporation, scientific management, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, trade liberalization, trade route, union organizing, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, War on Poverty

Along these original mail routes, new monopolies were quickly attached: the P & O line added extensive tea, coal, and jute interests in India to its route monopoly taken over from the East India Company in 1840; Cunard, operating the North Atlantic circuit, formed a base of the financial group to which the eventually foremost British insurance group in the United States, Royal Insurance, also belonged.3 British supremacy in shipping was absolute until the First World War, when the Wilson Administration embarked upon a crash shipbuilding programme that gave it approximate equality with the British merchant marine by 1921. The historical interconnection between British shipping, trade routes, and naval strategy, explains the paradoxical presence of both militant laissez-faire liberalism and intransigent colonialism (especially in regard to India) in the outlook of what we may accordingly call the maritime-colonial fraction of the liberal-internationalist bourgeoisie. With India, British capital possessed an invaluable market for textile manufactures, in part also for steel; a source of cash crop supplies like tea and jute; and a profitable bridgehead for the China trade, most of which consisted of opium.


pages: 466 words: 127,728

The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, complexity theory, computer age, credit crunch, currency peg, David Graeber, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, G4S, George Akerlof, global macro, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jitney, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market design, megaproject, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, operational security, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, risk-adjusted returns, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Stuxnet, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, working-age population, yield curve

The European monetary standard prior to Charlemagne was a gold sou, derived from solidus, a Byzantine Roman coin introduced by Emperor Constantine I in A.D. 312. Gold had been supplied to the Roman Empire since ancient times from sources near the Upper Nile and Anatolia. However, Islam’s rise in the seventh century, and losses in Italy to the Byzantine Empire, cut off trade routes between East and West. This resulted in a gold shortage and tight monetary conditions in Charlemagne’s western empire. He engaged in an early form of quantitative easing by switching to a silver standard, since silver was far more plentiful than gold in the West. He also created a single currency, the livre carolinienne, equal to a pound of silver, as a measure of weight and money, and the coin of the realm was the denire, equal to one-twentieth of a sou.


pages: 462 words: 142,240

Iron Sunrise by Stross, Charles

blood diamond, disinformation, dumpster diving, Future Shock, gravity well, hiring and firing, industrial robot, life extension, loose coupling, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, phenotype, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, quantum entanglement, RFID, side project, speech recognition, technological singularity, trade route, urban sprawl, zero-sum game

Everyone huddled together on the one station, thirty thousand souls drifting above the ecliptic of a gloomy red gas giant eight times the mass of Jupiter. They had fuel — that was what Old Newfoundland Four was in the business of selling — six hundred megatons of refined methane ice bunkered in a tank farm streaming kilometers behind the axle of the big wheel. And they were close enough to one of the regular trade routes between Septagon system and the core worlds to pick up passing trade, close enough to act as an interchange for local traffic bound for Moscow. They were still profitable and self-sufficient, had been even since before the disaster. But they couldn’t stay there — not with the iron sunrise coming.


pages: 469 words: 146,487

Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World by Niall Ferguson

British Empire, Cape to Cairo, colonial rule, Corn Laws, death from overwork, European colonialism, imperial preference, income per capita, information security, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Livingstone, I presume, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, night-watchman state, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, profit motive, Scramble for Africa, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, union organizing, zero-sum game

It was the economic gateway to the subcontinent. Today, a few crumbling buildings in the town of Chinsura, north of Calcutta, are all that remain of the first Indian outpost of one of the world’s greatest trading companies, the East India Company. For more than a hundred years it dominated the Asian trade routes, all but monopolizing trade in a whole range of commodities ranging from spices to silks. But this was the Dutch East India Company – the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie – not the English one. The dilapidated villas and warehouses of Chinsura were built not for Englishmen, but for merchants from Amsterdam, who were making money in Asia long before the English turned up.


pages: 411 words: 136,413

The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought by Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff, Peter Schwartz

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business process, cuban missile crisis, haute cuisine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, laissez-faire capitalism, means of production, medical malpractice, Neil Armstrong, Plato's cave, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, source of truth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, War on Poverty

The subject that day was: why does human history constantly change? This is an excellent question, which really belongs to the philosophy of history. What factors, the teacher was asking, move history and explain men’s past actions? Here are the answers he listed on the board: competition among classes for land, money, power, or trade routes; disasters and catastrophes (such as wars and plagues); the personality of leaders; innovations, technology, new discoveries (potatoes and coffee were included here); and developments in the rest of the world, which interacts with a given region. At this point, time ran out. But think of what else could qualify as causes in this kind of approach.


pages: 531 words: 139,948

The Lion's Gate: On the Front Lines of the Six Day War by Steven Pressfield

defense in depth, facts on the ground, Mount Scopus, New Journalism, rolling blackouts, Suez crisis 1956, systems thinking, trade route, Yom Kippur War

Who are we, paratroopers on this bus, to speak, or even to think, of such matters? But in many ways that is what Jerusalem means to us too, even if we seldom give it thought and cannot put it into words. Jerusalem is not a capital of wealth or empire. It is sited upon no river or harbor or overland trade route. It is not a hub of finance or commerce. Fashion or the arts have no place here. Jerusalem possesses no natural resources. Its location is of minimal strategic value. It is not London or Paris, Moscow or New York. Jerusalem is a city of the spirit, a capital of the soul. Let us make pilgrimage there, you and I, just once in our lifetimes.


pages: 464 words: 127,283

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend

1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Pattern Language, Adam Curtis, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Burning Man, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, charter city, chief data officer, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, company town, computer age, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Donald Davies, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Evgeny Morozov, food desert, game design, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, Haight Ashbury, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, jitney, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, load shedding, lolcat, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), openstreetmap, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, place-making, planetary scale, popular electronics, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social software, social web, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, working poor, working-age population, X Prize, Y2K, zero day, Zipcar

One study that tracked migration through mobile phones in Kenya uncovered an astonishingly high turnover rate for new arrivals—on average, newcomers during a year-long study period in 2008–2009 stayed in Kibera, the capital’s largest slum, just less than two months.26 Anthropologist Mirjam de Bruijn has documented Bedouin caravans in the southern Sahara that have altered their historic trade routes to periodically pass through areas of mobile phone service.27 Even indigenous peoples want to stay connected in a global economy. Development organizations are just beginning to wrap their thinking around the tremendous opportunity for development that mobile phones present. Richard Heeks, the professor of development informatics, sees a marked shift in the ICT4D movement from PCs to mobile devices.


pages: 537 words: 135,099

The Rough Guide to Amsterdam by Martin Dunford, Phil Lee, Karoline Thomas

banking crisis, gentrification, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, low cost airline, Nelson Mandela, place-making, plutocrats, spice trade, sustainable-tourism, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, young professional

At the back of the house lie the formal gardens, a neat pattern of miniature hedges graced by the occasional stone statue, and framed by the old coach house. The Grachtengordel | Grachtengordel south | The Amstel and the Magere Brug Just east of Willet-Holthuysen, Herengracht comes to an abrupt halt beside the wide and windy River Amstel, which was long the main trade route into the Dutch interior – goods arriving by barge and boat were traded for the imported materials held in Amsterdam’s many warehouses. To the left is the Blauwbrug (Blue Bridge) and the Old Jewish Quarter, whilst in the opposite direction is the Magere Brug (Skinny Bridge), the most famous and arguably the cutest of the city’s many swing bridges.


pages: 270 words: 132,960

Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks

centre right, double helix, driverless car, gravity well, job satisfaction, oil shale / tar sands, trade route

Chosen, he said to himself. Chosen, Chosen, Chosen. A long way to a strange place. Taking the Chosen one through the scorching dust and the mad tribes of the badlands to the lush meadows and gleaming spires of the Perfumed Palace on the cliff. Now he reaped a little reward. The tent sits between the trade routes, outside turned in for the season, and in the tent sits a man, a soldier, back from uncounted wars, scarred and seared and broken and healed and broken and healed and repaired and made good again... and for once he was unwary, guard down, committing his mind to a wild, affecting drug, and his body to the care and protec-tion of a young girl.


pages: 598 words: 140,612

Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier by Edward L. Glaeser

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, declining real wages, desegregation, different worldview, diversified portfolio, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, endowment effect, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, global village, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, job-hopping, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, RFID, Richard Florida, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, strikebreaker, Thales and the olive presses, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Sugar producers, like the Roosevelt family, operated in a big port city, because urban scale enabled them to cover the fixed costs of big, expensive refineries and to be close enough to consumers so that refined sugar crystals wouldn’t coalesce during a long, hot water voyage. The garment industry similarly owed its concentration in New York to the vast cargoes of cotton and textiles that came through the city and sailors’ need for ready-made clothes. Even New York’s publishing preeminence ultimately reflected the city’s central place on transatlantic trade routes, as the big money in nineteenth-century books came from being the first printer out with pirated copies of English novels. The Harper brothers really arrived as publishers when they beat their Philadelphia competitors by printing the third volume of Walter Scott’s Peveril of the Peak twenty-one hours after it arrived in New York by packet ship.


pages: 372 words: 152

The End of Work by Jeremy Rifkin

banking crisis, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, blue-collar work, cashless society, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, deskilling, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, general-purpose programming language, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kaizen: continuous improvement, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land reform, low interest rates, low skilled workers, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, Paul Samuelson, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, prudent man rule, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, strikebreaker, technoutopianism, Thorstein Veblen, Toyota Production System, trade route, trickle-down economics, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

Solar flow, climate, and ecological succession conditioned every economy on the earth. The pace of economic activity was set by harnessing the energy of wind, water, animal, and human power. Several developments in the late Medieval Era set the basis for the wholesale conversion of economic life to machine power. In England, the opening up of new trade routes, a growing population, the emergence of cities, and a market economy increased the flow of economic activity, placing strains on the country's ecological carrying capacity. The cutting down of large swaths of trees to build ships for the royal navy and to provide potash, building materials, and heat for a growing population left forests bare, hastening an energy crisis for all of England.


pages: 495 words: 138,188

The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time by Karl Polanyi

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, borderless world, business cycle, central bank independence, Corn Laws, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, inflation targeting, joint-stock company, Kula ring, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, manufacturing employment, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, price mechanism, profit motive, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Even more evident was the need for interventionist methods, if the region in question happened to be rich in raw materials required for European manufactures, while no pre-established harmony ensured the emergence of a craving after European manufactures on the part of the natives whose natural wants had previously taken an entirely different direction. Of course, none of these difficulties was supposed to arise under an allegedly self-regulating system. But the more often repayments were made only under the threat of armed intervention, the more often trade routes were kept open only with the help of gunboats, the more often trade followed the flag, while the flag followed the need of invading governments, the more patent it became that political instruments had to be used in order to maintain equilibrium in world economy. * Penrose, E. F., op. cit.


pages: 544 words: 134,483

The Human Cosmos: A Secret History of the Stars by Jo Marchant

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, British Empire, complexity theory, Dava Sobel, Drosophila, Easter island, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, founder crops, game design, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Nicholas Carr, out of africa, overview effect, Plato's cave, polynesian navigation, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, Skype, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, technological singularity, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, trade route

Meanwhile, Portuguese explorers were joined by the Spanish—who sponsored the transatlantic expeditions of Columbus from 1492 and the first expedition to circumnavigate the globe in 1521—and later the English, French and Dutch. From the sixteenth century, goods such as sugar, spices, silk—and slaves—were carried on a web of trade routes across the Atlantic and Pacific. All of this, of course, was achieved without being able to determine longitude, the distance traveled east or west. Whereas the night sky easily reveals north-south differences, the Earth’s rotation means that when traveling east or west, there’s no fixed point in the sky to use as a guide.


pages: 461 words: 139,924

The Habsburgs: To Rule the World by Martyn Rady

Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, night-watchman state, Peace of Westphalia, Potemkin village, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, the market place, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, éminence grise

As much as plunder, the Dutch purpose was to cut Spain off from its wealth and so, in the words of one informed observer, ‘to divert the king of Spain’s arms from our throats and sever the sinews with which he sustains the wars in Europe.’ For the Habsburgs, however, Dutch activities not only imperilled their trade routes but also threatened dynastic catastrophe. According to a favourite theory in the Spanish court, the Habsburg possessions were so enmeshed that defeat in any one place could bring down the whole edifice. The global interlocking of Habsburg power made the Thirty Years War a global contest.2 The Dutch were after 1625 assisted by their British allies and by enterprisers or privateers who pursued their own material interests while sailing under the British flag (or, indeed, any flag save the red or black standard of the pirate).


pages: 476 words: 139,761

Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World by Tom Burgis

active measures, Anton Chekhov, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, collapse of Lehman Brothers, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, disinformation, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, energy security, Etonian, failed state, fake news, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Julian Assange, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, trade route, WikiLeaks

It would carry a railway to connect northern and southern Europe. When the work was completed, the Swiss president declared that ‘the world market is open’. The Italian-speaking Swiss city of Lugano lay on the new railway’s route. It was there that BSI’s founders opened a bank in 1873, to capitalise on the new trade route. They did well, expanding in Switzerland and sending bankers abroad. The bank came through one world war. In the second, BSI’s bankers did what many Swiss bankers did: they collaborated with the Nazis. At the same time, they did what they would start to do for their rich clients: they spun a story that reversed the truth.


pages: 643 words: 131,673

How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler by Ryan North

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, George Santayana, germ theory of disease, GPS: selective availability, Great Leap Forward, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, megastructure, minimum viable product, moveable type in China, placebo effect, safety bicycle, sugar pill, the scientific method, time dilation, trade route, wikimedia commons, zoonotic diseases

Brown, Henry T. 2005 CE. 507 Mechanical Movements: Mechanisms and Devices. Dover Publications. Bunch, Bryan, and Alexander Hellemans. 1993 CE. The Timetables of Technology: A Chronology of the Most Important People and Events in the History of Technology. Simon & Schuster. Bunney, Sarah. 1985 CE. “Ancient Trade Routes for Obsidian.” New Scientist 26. Burdock Group. 2007 CE. “Safety Assessment of Castoreum Extract as a Food Ingredient.” International Journal of Toxicology 26 (1): 51–55. doi:10.1080/10915810601120145. Cegłowski, Maciej. 2010 CE. “Scott and Scurvy.” Idle Words. March. http://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm.


pages: 509 words: 142,456

Empire of the Scalpel: The History of Surgery by Ira Rutkow

augmented reality, Charles Lindbergh, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, New Journalism, Stephen Hawking, trade route, unbiased observer, white picket fence, wikimedia commons, yellow journalism

The Crimean War (1853–1856) was contested on the Crimean Peninsula, a landmass jutting south from present-day Ukraine and almost completely surrounded by the Black Sea. The political background of the conflict concerned the decline of the Ottoman Empire, which led France and Great Britain to fear that Russia would pursue an expansionist policy and seek to control the Black Sea and its trade routes. Combat ensued when the English and French attacked Russia’s stronghold naval base at Sevastopol, a city on the southern fringe of Crimea. Following a year-long siege, including a major battle at Balaklava (commemorated by Alfred Lord Tennyson, the English poet, in “The Charge of the Light Brigade”), the Russians abandoned Sevastopol.


pages: 413 words: 134,755

Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide by Robert Michael Pyle

back-to-the-land, clean water, D. B. Cooper, dark pattern, Donald Trump, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the High Line, the scientific method, trade route

Hood River, Washougal, White Salmon, and The Dalles; Stevenson, Underwood, and Carson; Morton, Randle, and Packwood; Woodland, Cougar, Toledo, and many other settlements grew into more or less permanent towns along the lower flanks of the southern range. Several new types of anthropoid apes began to roam the old Indian trade route and the high valleys springing from it: the logger, the miner, the grazier, the homesteader, the hiker. And then a great power, the United States Forest Service, dedicated but confused, began to divvy up the Dark Divide among them. Camping on a line between the land as it was and as it had become, I dreamed strange sagas of knives, trees tumbling among shaggy black rocks, and a land with a brain of its own. −− I awoke to see Dark Mountain above me.


pages: 601 words: 135,202

Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis by Jeanna Smialek

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Henri Poincaré, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, junk bonds, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, meme stock, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, short squeeze, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, working-age population, yield curve

Everything from semiconductor chips to bicycle tire tubes and cabinet handles had suddenly become hard to source. Shipping costs had shot up as global ports and container ships became overburdened by unusually high demand for goods like couches, cars, and televisions—a situation that had been made worse when a ship called the Ever Given became lodged in the Suez Canal, jamming a major trade route for days. As companies paid more for imported parts transported by sea or were forced to ship them by air, an expensive option, they began to charge more for fishing rods and ladies’ dresses. They could pull it off. Repeated relief checks from the government and expanded unemployment insurance had left many consumers with more cash on hand than usual, and a winter of dormancy had left them ready for a spending spree.


Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, anti-communist, anti-globalists, autism spectrum disorder, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, ChatGPT, citizen journalism, Climategate, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, dark matter, deep learning, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hive mind, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lab leak, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, neurotypical, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, profit motive, QAnon, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Rosa Parks, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, shared worldview, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce

Honks Heard Around the World Perhaps you remember it from the winter of 2022. International media couldn’t get enough of the images of burly Canadians, their big rigs festooned with FUCK TRUDEAU signs, shutting down the center of Ottawa, our capital city, for the better part of a month. Or of the blockades on bridges that turned key trade routes between Canada and the United States into parking lots. This second convoy was sparked by a new requirement that truckers show proof of Covid vaccination in order to cross the border, though it quickly grew into a more generalized call for an end to “the mandates,” including mask mandates and any other public health restrictions.


pages: 1,087 words: 325,295

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

anthropic principle, cellular automata, Danny Hillis, double helix, information security, interchangeable parts, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, phenotype, selection bias, Snow Crash, Stewart Brand, trade route

They had trekked across forests and mountains to build this thing more or less out in the middle of nowhere, on an oxbow lake a few miles from the main course of a river. A trade route from the east crossed the river not far away—close enough to give them access to commerce when they needed it, not so close as to be a distraction or a menace. Centuries later, a rough winter followed by a stormy spring caused some trouble involving ice dams that altered the course of the river and turned the oxbow lake back into an active channel. The trade route adapted, choosing Elkhazg as the best place to make a crossing—since one of the side-effects of the math had been the development of a relatively stable and prosperous Saecular community around its walls.


The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Benoit Mandelbrot, Boeing 747, British Empire, colonial exploitation, complexity theory, cuban missile crisis, demand response, disinformation, false flag, financial independence, flag carrier, Herman Kahn, index card, mandelbrot fractal, operational security, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, uranium enrichment

The son of a noble could hardly take up farming, and those not eliminated by childhood disease had to go somewhere. And when Pope Urban II had sent out his message that the infidels had overrun the land of Christ, it became possible for men to launch a war of aggression to reclaim land of religious importance and to find themselves fiefdoms to rule, peasants to oppress, and trade routes to the Orient on which to sit and charge their tolls. Whichever objective might have been the more important probably differed from one heart to another, but they all had known of both. Jack wondered how many different kinds of feet had trodden on these streets, and how they had reconciled their personal-political-commercial objectives with their putatively holy cause.

"That'll change in about five hours." Riyadh was a clean city, though quite different from Western metropolises. The contrast with Israeli towns was remarkable. Nearly everything was new. Only two hours away, but that was by air. This place had never been the crossroads Palestine had been. The ancient trading routes had given the brutal heat of Arabia a wide berth, and though the coastal fishing and trading towns had known prosperity for millennia, the nomadic people of the interior had lived a stark existence, held together only by their Islamic faith, which was in turn anchored by the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.


The Rough Guide to Ireland by Clements, Paul

Berlin Wall, bike sharing, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, Columbine, country house hotel, digital map, East Village, haute couture, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kickstarter, Murano, Venice glass, plutocrats, Ronald Reagan, sustainable-tourism, the market place, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl

Known locally as “the ass in the pass”, artist Maurice Harron’s work marks the site of the Battle of the Curleius between Irish and English forces in 1599. Brief history Boyle’s origins lie in the establishment of a Cistercian monastery in 1161, but as it was situated on an important trading route, the abbey became embroiled in numerous internecine and Irish–English skirmishes and was sacked on a number of occasions. It lingered on for several decades after the Dissolution – its last abbot was executed in 1584 for refusing to disavow allegiance to Rome – and from 1599 until the end of the eighteenth century it was used as a barracks by the English and known as Boyle Castle.

By the eighth and ninth centuries monasteries such as Clonmacnois in County Offaly and Lismore in County Waterford had risen to become major seats of learning in an increasingly church-focused Europe. Extant evidence of such prowess exists in the form of illuminated manuscripts, such as the Book of Durrow and the renowned Book of Kells, on show in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin. At this time, using well-established trading routes, the Irish also began to send forth their own missionaries, including St Columba, who founded various monasteries in mainland Europe before his death in 615. The Vikings and the Normans The Vikings reached Ireland towards the end of the eighth century and conducted sporadic raids on coastal areas, usually on monasteries – the defensive round tower dates from this period – before embarking on a more coordinated assault in 914.


The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community by David C. Korten

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, banks create money, big-box store, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, death of newspapers, declining real wages, different worldview, digital divide, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, God and Mammon, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, joint-stock company, land reform, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Monroe Doctrine, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, peak oil, planetary scale, plutocrats, Project for a New American Century, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sexual politics, shared worldview, social intelligence, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, stem cell, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, trade route, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, World Values Survey

A lack of rainfall during the main growing season, Ancient Empire 111 however, made large-scale irrigation a necessity, which led to a further centralization of administration. A lack of basic natural resources, including stone, minerals, and even trees, made long-distance trade a necessity and created the need for an organized military to secure trade routes that linked rival cities competing for distant resources. The need to maintain both irrigation and an organized military created the need to increase tax collections from free farmers and local artisans while exposing them to competition from subsidized imports. These dynamics contributed to a gradual consolidation of power under powerful kings and a displacement of the feminine by the masculine.


pages: 498 words: 153,927

The River at the Centre of the World by Simon Winchester

British Empire, Deng Xiaoping, Great Leap Forward, Khartoum Gordon, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, out of africa, placebo effect, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, trade route

‘The Travancore sailed out with the mails but was unable to cross the bar, and spent a whole day unloading her cargo into lighters to lessen her load…’ ‘I beg to report that the Australia was detained for five days at Woosung…’ ‘The French mail-steamer Provence was unable to reach Shanghae at all…’ It made a nonsense of the river as a trading route. The great artery of China, as barkers had already long been advertising the Yangtze, suddenly had a bad case of sclerosis. By the mid-1870s merchants, weary of having their ships pinned by sand, began to lose their tempers. They wrote angry letters: the State of the Woosung Bar, which sounds today like a Gilbert and Sullivan ditty, became a heated talking point in the coffeehouses of Cheapside and the bars on the Fulton Street waterfront.


pages: 486 words: 148,485

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, car-free, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, cosmological constant, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, David Sedaris, desegregation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lake wobegon effect, longitudinal study, mandatory minimum, mirror neurons, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ronald Reagan, six sigma, stem cell, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, Tenerife airport disaster, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route

Parry, meanwhile, garnered (and deserved) a reputation as an outstanding Arctic explorer, but he never achieved the imagined wealth and glory of discovering the Northwest Passage. Nor, for that matter, did anyone else, although the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen finally navigated a complete passage in 1906. But that waterway and the others that were eventually discovered in the far north proved too distant and dangerous to rely on as trade routes—and at any rate, by then, the invention of the railroad had yielded an altogether different solution to the problem of transporting goods across North America. (John Ross, Narrative of a Second Voyage in Search of a North-West Passage, and of a Residence in the Arctic Regions During the Years 1829, 1830, 1831, 1832, 1833 (A.


pages: 497 words: 153,755

The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession by Peter L. Bernstein

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Atahualpa, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, California gold rush, central bank independence, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Glaeser, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, falling living standards, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, Francisco Pizarro, German hyperinflation, Hernando de Soto, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, large denomination, liquidity trap, long peace, low interest rates, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, price stability, profit motive, proprietary trading, random walk, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route

Between the Dollar-Sterling Gold Points. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Officer, Lawrence, 1996b. Monetary Standards in History. London: Routledge. O'Leary, Paul M., 1960. "The Scene of the Crime of 1873 Revisited: A Note." Journal of Political Economy, 68, August, pp. 398-392. Parry, J. H., 1967. "Transport and Trade Routes." In Rich and Wilson, 1967. Phillips, Carla Rahn, 1986. Six Galleons for the King of Spain: Imperial Defense in the Early Seventeenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Pindar, 1927. The Odes of Pindar Including the Principal Fragments. Sir John Sandys. Ploetz, Carl, 1883. Epitome of Ancient, Medieval, and Modern History.


pages: 535 words: 151,217

Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers by Simon Winchester

9 dash line, Albert Einstein, Boeing 747, BRICs, British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, colonial rule, company town, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Easter island, Frank Gehry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Kwajalein Atoll, land tenure, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, Maui Hawaii, Monroe Doctrine, ocean acidification, oil shock, polynesian navigation, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, The Day the Music Died, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transcontinental railway, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, uranium enrichment

The unyielding American belief is that its dominance of the maritime domain has been central to the success of the various economies of the region. Naval officers at Pacific Command headquarters in Hawaii are keen to show off slides of the glittering skylines of Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Seoul—and yes, of Shanghai and Guangzhou, too—and then to assert that only by dint of the U.S. Navy’s keeping the trade routes free and the sea-lanes open has such prosperity become achievable. American protection of trade, American suppression of menace, American export of its values—these are key, they say, to the recent wild success of Asia’s tiger economies. Abandon America’s sovereign care of the Pacific, the message continues—dare to surrender the care of the ocean to another hegemonic state, to a state capable of such excesses as the events of Tiananmen Square, and you risk allowing Asia to sink, deflate, decline, decay, and die.


A Voyage Long and Strange: On the Trail of Vikings, Conquistadors, Lost Colonists, and Other Adventurers in Early America by Tony Horwitz

airport security, Atahualpa, back-to-the-land, Bartolomé de las Casas, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, dematerialisation, diversified portfolio, Francisco Pizarro, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, joint-stock company, out of africa, Ralph Waldo Emerson, trade route, urban renewal

But it was the wrong place to peddle his vision of a westward sail to Asia. Portugal was already charting a sea route to the Indies, via Africa, which Bartholomew Dias rounded in 1488. By then, Columbus had decamped to Spain—another timely arrival. The country was just emerging as a unified power, eager to compete with Portugal and to open its own trade routes. Spain was also completing its triumphant Reconquista of lands held by Muslims since the eighth century. Queen Isabel and King Ferdinand’s eventual decision to back Columbus, in April 1492, came just months after the fall of Granada, the last Muslim outpost in Europe, and within weeks of their decree (drafted by the Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada) commanding all Jews to convert or leave Spain.


pages: 497 words: 146,551

Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals by Robert M. Pirsig

Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, feminist movement, gentrification, index card, John von Neumann, luminiferous ether, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trade route

Some of the Hudson valley architecture had a Currier-and-Ives feeling of the early 1800s, a feeling of slow, decent, orderly life that preceded the Industrial Revolution. Minnesota, where Phædrus came from, never shared that. It was mostly forests and Indians and log cabins back then. Traveling across America by water was like going back in time and seeing how it must have been long ago. He was following old trade routes that were used before railways became dominant. It was amazing how parts of this river still looked the same as the old Hudson River school of painting showed it, with beautiful forests, and mountains in the distance. As the boat moved south he’d seen a growing aura of social structure, particularly in the mansions that had become more numerous.


pages: 399 words: 155,913

The Right to Earn a Living: Economic Freedom and the Law by Timothy Sandefur

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Alan Greenspan, American ideology, barriers to entry, big-box store, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Edward Glaeser, housing crisis, independent contractor, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, minimum wage unemployment, positional goods, price stability, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, Robert Bork, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, wealth creators

Carolene Products68 in 1938, which slightly restricted the rational basis rule—but not in the area of economic freedom. Munn, one of the so-called Granger Cases, involved an Illinois law that limited the prices that owners of grain silos could charge farmers who wished to store grain. The silos were located in Chicago, one of the most important stops on the trade route by which farmers sent their products to markets throughout the country. After farmers complained that silo owners charged exorbitant rates, agrarian activists associated with the Grange movement persuaded the state legislature to enact a price limitation. The owners of the silos brought suit, arguing that this regulation violated the due process clause because it benefited farmers’ interests at their expense, not for the public welfare but simply because the farmers had greater political influence.


pages: 790 words: 150,875

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, guns versus butter model, Hans Lippershey, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Pearl River Delta, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey

H. 263 taxation 38, 44, 106, 107, 117, 210–11, 288 Taylor, James Hudson 280, 282 technology see Industrial Revolution; science/technology Teller, Edward 235 Tennyson, Alfred Lord xiv terrorism see violence/terrorism textile industry/trade 28, 198–9, 200, 203, 218–19, 239–40 cotton 201, 202–3, 204, 218 in India 224–5 in Japan 223–4 Thatcher, Margaret 252 Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) 37 Thuillier, Louis 169 Tigris river/valley 17 tobacco 46, 131 Todd, John L. 169 Tolstoy, Leo 270 Toqué, Emile 165 Touška, Ivan 247 Toussaint ‘Louverture’, François-Dominique 160 Townsend, Pete 274n Toynbee, Arnold: The Study of History 297 trade/trade routes 9, 22, 29, 31, 161 with China 29, 31, 35, 47, 48 comparative advantage doctrine 202, 202n competition in 33–6, 48 development of 33–6 free markets 7, 17 in Great Depression 229–30 importance of 20, 46, 47, 48 ocean freight 218–19 in slaves 97, 129–36, 161; see also slavery in spices 33, 34, 36 in sugar 129, 131–2, 160 in textiles see textile industry/trade transatlantic 106, 115, 218–19 trade monopolies 38 trade tariffs 202–3, 229–30 trade unions 238–9, 245 trading companies 36, 38, 83, 161, 201, 278 Trafalgar, battle of (1805) 160 Trevithick, Richard 200 Trotha, General Adrian Dietrich Lothar von 178–9, 181 Troup, Bobby 274 Tull, Jethro 27 Turgenev, Ivan: Fathers and Sons 228 Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques, on civilization 2 Turkey under Kemal Atatürk 90–93, 228 Dolmabahçe palace 88, 90 founding of 91 as Islamist 253–5 linguistic issues 90, 91–2 as a secular state 92, 253 see also Ottoman empire Twain, Mark, on imperialism 144 Tyndale, Matthew 62 Uganda 170 Ulugh Beg 69 unemployment 230–31, 232, 265, 265n see also labour market United Kingdom see Britain United Provinces 39, 104 see also Low Countries United States (US) xvi, 5, 15, 16 Christianity in 267, 270, 273–7 colonial expansion 144 economic growth/output xvi, 218, 307–12 in First World War 182–3 Great Depression 229–31 Gullah Coast 135–6 Japan and 221; in Second World War 233–5 migrants to 219; South Americans 138–9 population figures 218 property rights 124 racial issues 129, 133, 134–6, 137–9; Civil Rights movement 245; segregation 137–8, 177 Russia and 236; Cold War 236–9 St Louis World Fair (1904) 260–61 in Second World War 233–5 slavery in 129, 130, 132–3, 134–6 student unrest 245 trade with 218–19 Max Weber in 260–61 as a world power xvi–xvii, 97, 218, 257, 307–12 see also America, North, British colonies; American … United States Army 234–5 university education 7, 17–18, 92, 175, 244–5 urbanization see cities Vaquette de Gribeauval, General 84 Veblen, Thorstein 205 Venezuela 119, 128, 139 Caracas 129 Catholicism in 120, 120n under Chávez 128 property rights 119, 124, 128 revolution in 119–22 Verdun, battle of (1916) 183 Vermeer, Jan xxiv Vesalius, Andreas 65 Vespucci, Amerigo 96 Vico, Giambattista: Scienza nuova 296 Vienna, siege of (1683) 52, 53, 55, 57 Vietnam 167 see also Indo-China Vietnam War (1965–73) 245, 246 violence/terrorism 246–7, 254n, 258, 288–9, 291 homicide rates 24, 25, 105 Voltaire (François Marie Arouet) 67, 70–71, 78, 79 on China 46 Diatribe du Docteur Akakia … 80 Vordman, Adolphe 170 Voulet, Paul 166 wages 203, 210–11, 238 Wagner, Richard 162, 162n, 206, 208 Waldseemüller, Martin: Universalis cosmographia 96 Wales, England and 24, 39 see also Britain Wallace, George 137 Wang Zhen: Treatise on Agriculture 28 Wappers, Egide: Episode of the Belgian Revolution 162n Warburg, Siegmund 94 warfare/weapons 4, 23, 24, 57, 82 armed forces 215–16, 229, 233, 234, 236; colonial troops 164, 181–9; see also individual armies atomic weapons 235–6 casualty figures 301–2 Clausewitz on 157–8 communications in 55, 181–2 definition 157–8 financing of 161 gunpowder 28 imperialism as conquest 99–102 military technology 37, 41, 57, 65n; ballistics 83–5 military uniforms 215–16, 229, 233, 234, 237 naval 37, 160 religious 9, 12, 38–9 Lewis Fry Richardson on 301–2, 301n siege warfare 52, 54–7 strategy/tactics 84, 85, 133; Inca 100 see also individual battles/conflicts Washington, George 116, 116n, 117 water supplies 145, 145n Waterloo, battle of (1815) 160 Watt, James 70, 200, 201, 202, 204, 206n Waugh, Evelyn, on Catholicism 269–70 Weber, Max 259–60, 270 on China 21, 264 on the Jews 262 on Protestantism 259, 260–64, 276, 283 in US 260–61 on Western ascendancy 11 Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel 94 Wenzel von Liechtenstein, Prince Joseph 84 the West definition 14–16; by Samuel Huntington 15, 16 Islam and 39, 50–57, 63, 85–90, 255 loss of confidence by 17–18 Ottoman empire and 52, 53, 63, 86–90 Roman Empire in 16–17 Western ascendancy competition and 12, 13, 19–49 consumerism and 12, 13, 195, 196–255 Jared Diamond on 11–12 health issues and 12, 13, 146–8, 168–75, 191 Samuel Johnson on 10 David Landes on 11 legal systems and 8, 12, 13; see also property rights reasons for xv–xvi, xxvi, 1–8, 96–7, 195 science/technology and 10–11, 13, 50–95 threats to 17–18, 255, 256–94, 295–325; economic crises 257, 258, 259, 260–64, 276, 283 Max Weber on 11 work ethic and 12, 13, 259–94 see also individual countries Whittington, Richard (Dick) 22, 23 Wilde, Oscar 208–9 William II, Kaiser 178 William of Orange, as King of England 104–5, 107 Willoughby, Hugh 36 Wilson, Paul 248 Wilson, President Woodrow 227 witch doctors 171, 172 witches/witchcraft 63–4, 114 Wittfogel, Karl, on Oriental despotism 42 Wolle, Stefan 244 women in Japan 222 measurements, scientific study of 237 as missionaries 282 women workers 224 women’s education 94, 244 women’s fashion/clothing 216, 220, 246 Islamic 253–5, 253n Woodruff, Robert W. 243 Woolwich Academy of Engineering and Artillery 85 work ethic 12, 17, 259–94 definition 13 working hours 265, 277 World Values Survey 266, 267 Wren, Christopher 69–70 Wu, Y.


pages: 205 words: 18,208

The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? by David Brin

affirmative action, airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, data acquisition, death of newspapers, Extropian, Garrett Hardin, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, Iridium satellite, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, packet switching, pattern recognition, pirate software, placebo effect, plutocrats, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Robert Bork, Saturday Night Live, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, telepresence, The Turner Diaries, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UUNET, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, workplace surveillance , Yogi Berra, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

This notion proposed using patents to increase openness, encouraging all commercial activity to come out of the shadows and stimulating the fastest possible sharing of technical advances for the benefit of all society. How would such a miracle be achieved? Until this time, patents were synonymous with monopoly, forcing others who wanted to use the forbidden thing (an invention, or a trade route) to do so surreptitiously. In response, to prevent cheaters from stealing their techniques, inventors often went to great lengths to keep their innovations secret. But now reformers suggested turning the whole process on its head. They would return the word patent to its original meaning (having to do with something being open or apparent, as in “patently obvious”).


pages: 501 words: 145,943

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, congestion pricing, corporate governance, Crossrail, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, digital divide, digital Maoism, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global pandemic, global village, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, informal economy, information retrieval, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Lewis Mumford, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, megacity, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Tony Hsieh, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, unpaid internship, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

Yet the polis was born to grow, and grow it did from polis to town, and town to fortified market; from rural market center to expansive trading crossroads, increasingly outgrowing the walls that protected it against invaders as it reached out to a smaller world ever more connected by highways and rivers, trading routes, and navigable seas. Nearly 90 percent of the world’s population lives on or near oceans and seas and the rivers flowing into them—waterways that invite mobility and communication but whose tides, storms, and floods also invite disaster. Even in the West in the pre-Christian era, the Mediterranean had become a watery crossroads around which networked towns and ports constituted themselves as an interdependent regional market.


pages: 498 words: 145,708

Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, addicted to oil, AltaVista, American ideology, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bread and circuses, business cycle, Celebration, Florida, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, G4S, game design, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, informal economy, invisible hand, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, McJob, microcredit, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, presumed consent, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, SimCity, spice trade, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

Time and again, in the manner of American exceptionalism, they have conceived their mission as holy—“I am larger, better than I thought; / I did not know I held so much goodness,” Whitman exalted, adding the assurance that “Whoever accepts me, he or she shall be blessed, and shall bless me.”47 It was Whitmanesque adventurers who helped open the trade routes, made the contacts that led to exchange, prepared the roadbeds and laid the rails, mined for the gold and silver and drilled for the oil on which others would found prudent fortunes. Without the brash rogues who came before them, Weber’s calculating actuaries who founded the trading firms and investment banks and in time the cartels and monopolies that made nations such as England, Germany, and the United States both prosperous and great would not have been possible.


pages: 585 words: 151,239

Capitalism in America: A History by Adrian Wooldridge, Alan Greenspan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Blitzscaling, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land bank, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, price stability, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, savings glut, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, War on Poverty, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, white flight, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, young professional

His tiny country has broken with a corrupt and ossified continent and is developing dynamic new institutions: a powerful Parliament, a mighty navy (backed up by a few pirates), and a new species of organization, the chartered corporation, which can trade all over the world. In all of the arguing in Davos, one region goes unmentioned: North America. The region is nothing more than an empty space on the map—a vast wilderness sitting above Latin America, with its precious metals, and between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, with their trading routes and treasure troves of fish. The wilderness is populated by aboriginal peoples who have had no contact with the Davos crowd. There are a few Europeans in New England and Virginia—but they report that the life is hard and civilization nonexistent. The entire North American continent produces less wealth than the smallest German principality.


pages: 488 words: 145,950

The Ice at the End of the World: An Epic Journey Into Greenland's Buried Past and Our Perilous Future by Jon Gertner

American ideology, Anthropocene, Charles Lindbergh, fear of failure, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), mass immigration, move 37, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, three-masted sailing ship, trade route

A visitor today can only try to imagine their isolation, as well as the winter nights of wracking, subzero cold. The Greenlanders’ physical distance from Europe constituted thousands of miles of ice-jammed waters during an era when a letter carried by ship might arrive a year or two after a sender had sealed it closed with wax. Still, they remained.9 In the late 1300s, the trade routes to Greenland’s Norse began to break down.10 As Scandinavian merchants became more focused on ivory from Russia and Africa, and as increasingly icy and stormy conditions in the North Atlantic made navigation more hazardous, fewer ships made the journey to Greenland.11 There is little in the way of diaries from this period.


pages: 517 words: 147,591

Small Wars, Big Data: The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict by Eli Berman, Joseph H. Felter, Jacob N. Shapiro, Vestal Mcintyre

basic income, call centre, centre right, classic study, clean water, confounding variable, crowdsourcing, data science, demand response, drone strike, experimental economics, failed state, George Akerlof, Google Earth, guns versus butter model, HESCO bastion, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, Internet of things, iterative process, land reform, mandatory minimum, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, natural language processing, operational security, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, statistical model, the scientific method, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, unemployed young men, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey

First, although this small province of lush valleys and high mountain passes had a pro-American governor and a relatively secure capital, its remote areas still served as strongholds for the Taliban—and CERP money was intended to be used as a “nonlethal weapon,”3 spreading goodwill among citizens so that they would turn against local insurgents.4 Second, the province was underdeveloped even by Afghanistan’s standards. Laghman’s adult literacy rate was 26 percent to the nation’s 32, and the infant mortality rate was 190 per 1,000 live births to the nation’s 84.5 Third, since Laghman contains the trade route between Kabul and Jalalabad (and on to Pakistan), repairing its roads was critical to the economy. Those roads were in dire need of repair: a 2002 New York Times report on Afghanistan’s “diabolical roads … with potholes large enough to topple even the largest trucks” quoted a man whose job was to ferry goods between Laghman and Kabul: “If we could have roads that are even 100 times worse than America’s, we would be the happiest of men.”6 Repairing roads is expensive, and CERP spending reflected this.


pages: 344 words: 161,076

The Rough Guide to Barcelona 8 by Jules Brown, Rough Guides

active transport: walking or cycling, bike sharing, centre right, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Kickstarter, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal

Their energies were devoted to the reconquest and unification of Spain: they finally took back Granada from the Moors in 1492, and initiated a wave of Christian fervour at whose heart was the Inquisition. Also in 1492, the final shift in Catalunya’s outlook occurred with the triumphal return of Christopher Columbus from the New World, to be received in Barcelona by Ferdinand and Isabel. As trade routes shifted away from the Mediterranean, this was no longer such a profitable market. Castile, like Portugal, looked to the Americas for trade and conquest, and the exploration and exploitation of the New World was spearheaded by the Andalucían city of Seville. Meanwhile, Ferdinand gave the Supreme Council of Aragón control over Catalan affairs in 1494.


pages: 523 words: 159,884

The Great Railroad Revolution by Christian Wolmar

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, accounting loophole / creative accounting, banking crisis, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, California high-speed rail, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cross-subsidies, Ford Model T, high-speed rail, intermodal, James Watt: steam engine, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Silicon Valley, streetcar suburb, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, urban sprawl, vertical integration

It was the apparently interminable nature of his journey across the Indian and Atlantic Oceans—for this was the era before the construction of the Suez Canal—that attracted Whitney to the idea of a transcontinental. He believed the railroad would become the corridor of exchange between Europe and Asia, placing America at the center of the world’s trade routes. Whitney was also an idealist who, like many early railroad promoters, saw the project as an opportunity for human improvement. As he told Congress, it would bring the dispersed population of the United States “together as one family, with but one interest—the general good of all.” In 1845, after presenting the plan in Washington, he toured the country with a group of enthusiastic young acolytes, extolling the virtues of the project and exploring a rail route that went west from Milwaukee, Wisconsin—which would, indeed, be chosen by one of the later transcontinentals.


pages: 650 words: 155,108

A Man and His Ship: America's Greatest Naval Architect and His Quest to Build the S.S. United States by Steven Ujifusa

8-hour work day, big-box store, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, company town, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, interchangeable parts, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Mercator projection, Ronald Reagan, the built environment, trade route

“Some of these were sunk or badly damaged, and many others were so drastically altered for war use that their complete reconversion to peacetime needs is not economically justified.”10 That the merchant fleet was not “well balanced” had never been more evident. Because of the enormous output of cargo vessels during the war, freight divisions of the major shipping lines now had hundreds of high-speed Victory ships and tankers perfectly suited to be operated on peacetime trade routes. Passenger liners were a different story. Attacks and accidents had reduced the passenger fleet from 127 ships with berths for 40,000 before the war to 36 ships with berths for less than 9,000 passengers.11 By then the United States Lines had put its remaining passenger and cargo fleet back into commercial service, with America making her maiden transatlantic voyage in late 1946.


pages: 589 words: 147,053

The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth by Robin Hanson

8-hour work day, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, brain emulation, business cycle, business process, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, deep learning, demographic transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental subject, fault tolerance, financial intermediation, Flynn Effect, Future Shock, Herman Kahn, hindsight bias, information asymmetry, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, lone genius, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, market design, megaproject, meta-analysis, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Nick Bostrom, pneumatic tube, power law, prediction markets, quantum cryptography, rent control, rent-seeking, reversible computing, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Vernor Vinge, William MacAskill

This is also the process we use today to study starships, nanocomputers, and the consequences of global warming (Pindyck 2013). Historians also use this self-consistent scenario approach. For example, a historian estimating Roman Empire copper trade will typically rely on the best estimates of other historians regarding related factors such as nearby population, copper mine locations, trade routes, travel time, crime rates, lifespans, climate, wages, copper use in jewelry, etc. Although historians usually acknowledge some uncertainty, and for small sets of variables they sometimes identify more than one coherent set of possible values, historians mostly just construct best estimates to match other historians’ best estimates.


pages: 475 words: 155,554

The Default Line: The Inside Story of People, Banks and Entire Nations on the Edge by Faisal Islam

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, British Empire, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Crossrail, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, energy security, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Eyjafjallajökull, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, forensic accounting, forward guidance, full employment, G4S, ghettoisation, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, inflation targeting, Irish property bubble, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market clearing, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, sovereign wealth fund, tail risk, The Chicago School, the payments system, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two tier labour market, unorthodox policies, uranium enrichment, urban planning, value at risk, WikiLeaks, working-age population, zero-sum game

In the end Iceland got the IMF loan, but needed bilateral help too. The US strategic position was spelt out in a leaked State Department cable from the ambassador in Reykjavik. Until 2006, the USA had had a base near the airport, which was now used by NATO. The Chinese and the Russians were sniffing around oil reserves and new maritime trade routes opening up in the High North. ‘Assistance from the USA at this crucial time would be a prudent investment in our own national security and economic wellbeing,’ wrote the ambassador. In the March 2010 referendum Iceland rejected the terms of the Icesave debt, risking international financial isolation, causing problems with the IMF, and jeopardising its negotiations to join the European Union.


pages: 564 words: 153,720

Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World by Mark Pendergrast

business climate, business cycle, commoditize, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Honoré de Balzac, it's over 9,000, land reform, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, open economy, out of africa, profit motive, Ray Oldenburg, Ronald Reagan, Suez canal 1869, The Great Good Place, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, vertical integration, women in the workforce

Smugglers, New Cultivation, and Arrival in the Western World The Ottoman Turks occupied Yemen in 1536, and soon afterward the coffee bean became an important export throughout the Turkish Empire. The beans generally were exported from the Yemeni port of Mocha, so the coffee from that region took on the name of the port. The trade route involved shipping the coffee to Suez and transporting it by camel to Alexandrian warehouses, where it was picked up by French and Venetian merchants. Because the coffee trade had become a major source of income, the Turks jealously guarded their monopoly over the trees’ cultivation in Yemen. No berries were allowed to leave the country unless they first had been steeped in boiling water or partially roasted to prevent germination.


pages: 311 words: 168,705

The Rough Guide to Vienna by Humphreys, Rob

centre right, ghettoisation, Peace of Westphalia, strikebreaker, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban sprawl

Mon–Wed 9.30am–6.30pm, Thurs & Fri 9.30am–7pm, Sat 9.30am–6pm. 239 Contexts 241 Contexts History ...........................................................................................243 Books ............................................................................................268 242 History The Romans P CONTE XTS | History eople have lived in the area of modern-day Vienna for many thousands of years, due to its geographical position at the point where the ancient trade route or amber route crossed the Danube. Following on from early Bronze and Iron Age settlements, a Celtic tribe known as the Boii occupied the hills above Vienna, probably from as early as 500 BC, but were driven from the area around 50 BC by the short-lived Dacian kingdom. Vienna was then swallowed up by the neighbouring Celtic kingdom of Noricum.


The Cigarette: A Political History by Sarah Milov

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist lawyer, affirmative action, airline deregulation, American Legislative Exchange Council, barriers to entry, British Empire, business logic, collective bargaining, corporate personhood, deindustrialization, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, G4S, global supply chain, Herbert Marcuse, imperial preference, Indoor air pollution, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Kitchen Debate, land tenure, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Journalism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, scientific management, Silicon Valley, structural adjustment programs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, Torches of Freedom, trade route, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, War on Poverty, women in the workforce

The West German magazine Der Spiegel deemed American tobacco an “unnecessary thing” that Americans were “quite glad to get rid of”—a succinct synopsis of the U.S. congressional debates in 1947 and 1948 about the incentive value of surplus tobacco. Der Spiegel’s commentator also observed that the influx of flue-cured tobacco was changing what Germans had historically considered a good smoke. These new preferences could not be satisfied through the old trade routes that linked Germany to Greece and Turkey, where darker smoking tobaccos were grown.58 Other critics objected that American flue-cured imports were undermining the very economies that the Marshall Plan was supposed to reconstruct. Should not Greece and Turkey, which were recipients of Marshall Plan aid, have been encouraged to redevelop tobacco as an important part of their agriculture sector?


pages: 665 words: 146,542

Money: 5,000 Years of Debt and Power by Michel Aglietta

accelerated depreciation, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, circular economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, David Graeber, debt deflation, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, energy transition, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, German hyperinflation, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, margin call, means of production, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shock, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, price stability, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, secular stagnation, seigniorage, shareholder value, special drawing rights, special economic zone, stochastic process, Suez crisis 1956, the payments system, the scientific method, tontine, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, Washington Consensus

The abundance of metal reduced seigniorage, prompting a fall in the price of bills of exchange on all foreign trade centres. Spain profited, however, as it imported masses of commodities financed by foreign metal exports. The result was a rise in the price of bills of exchange, and metal shortages in Spain … until the next cargo of silver arrived. Thus, the movement of metal along the intra-European trade routes brought Spain a structural trade deficit and a similarly structural trade surplus in Northern Europe. Bills of exchange headed in the opposite direction, towards Spain, to finance the imports necessary for the fleet’s next departure. Financial crises grafted themselves onto this alternating monetary circulation.


Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre by Kim Wagner

British Empire, colonial rule, European colonialism, Mahatma Gandhi, sparse data, trade route, Wall-E

It was designed, should the need arise again, to be turned into a defensive position, to guard the lines of transport and communication so crucial to the security and maintenance of colonial power. Amritsar was a strategically important railway junction and entrepôt, straddling the Grand Trunk Road: the century-old trade route described as the ‘backbone of all Hind’, linking New Delhi, the newly built capital of British India, with Lahore, the administrative centre of Punjab just 30 miles to the west.2 Pushed and shoved in the busy cram of travellers and over-eager porters, one would head for the exit through the main hall, dutifully producing a ticket to show the officious collector at the gate.


The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell

affirmative action, Columbine, game design, Lao Tzu, Maui Hawaii, music of the spheres, place-making, the scientific method, trade route

The story is told, for example, of the great Minos, king of the island empire of Crete in the period of its commercial supremacy: how he hired the celebrated artist-craftsman Daedalus to invent and construct for him a labyrinth, in which to hide something of which the palace was at once ashamed and afraid. For there was a monster on the premises—which had been born to Pasiphae, the queen. Minos, the king, had been busy, it is said, with important wars to protect the trade routes; and meanwhile Pasiphae had been seduced by a magnificent, snow-white, seaborn bull. It had been nothing worse, really, than what Minos' own mother had allowed to happen: Minos1 mother was Europa, and it is well known that she was carried by a bull to Crete. The bull had been the god Zeus, and the honored son of that sacred union was Minos himself—now everywhere respected and gladly served.


The Rough Guide to Brussels 4 (Rough Guide Travel Guides) by Dunford, Martin.; Lee, Phil; Summer, Suzy.; Dal Molin, Loik

Berlin Wall, bike sharing, British Empire, car-free, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentrification, glass ceiling, low cost airline, Peace of Westphalia, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban planning

A tiny and insignificant part of Charlemagne’s empire at the end of the eighth century, it was subsequently inherited by the dukes of Lower Lorraine (or Lotharingia – roughly Wallonia and northeast France), who constructed a fortress here in 979; the first city walls were added a few decades later. Its inhabitants protected, the village began to benefit from its position on the trade route between Cologne and the burgeoning cloth towns of Bruges and Ghent, and soon became a significant trading centre in its own right. The surrounding marshes were drained to allow for further expansion, and by the end of the twelfth century Brussels had a population of around thirty thousand. In 1229 the city was granted its first charter by the dukes of Brabant, the new feudal overlords who controlled things here, on and off, for around two hundred years, governing through seven échevins, or aldermen, each of whom represented one of the patrician families that monopolized the administration.


pages: 668 words: 159,523

Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug by Augustine Sedgewick

affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, business cycle, California gold rush, classic study, collective bargaining, Day of the Dead, European colonialism, export processing zone, family office, Fellow of the Royal Society, Food sovereignty, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Honoré de Balzac, imperial preference, Joan Didion, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, land reform, land tenure, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Philip Mirowski, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, scientific management, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, vertical integration, wage slave, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Early programs for multilateral international economic and social development were undertaken through the Inter-American Development Commission, chaired by Nelson Rockefeller.13 The premise for this good neighborliness was increased trade in the hemisphere, and coffee was the obvious “bargaining device” for making that happen.14 The effective outsourcing of coffee production from the new U.S. colonies to Latin America after the Spanish-American War in 1898 had cemented coffee’s status as the prototypical “good-neighbor product”—the most important commodity that Latin America had to sell and the U.S. had to buy.15 In 1934, the Roosevelt administration began working to rebuild America’s international commerce along the coffee trade routes, for that “was the path of least resistance and most profit,” and the path on which the U.S. was shadowing Germany.16 While Germany’s trade deals with Latin America offered barter, not cash, and the Third Reich’s ability to consume coffee was limited by revenue-generating taxes levied on imports, the U.S. turned in the other direction.


pages: 529 words: 150,263

The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris by Mark Honigsbaum

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, biofilm, Black Swan, Boeing 747, clean water, coronavirus, disinformation, Donald Trump, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, indoor plumbing, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, moral panic, Pearl River Delta, Ronald Reagan, Skype, the built environment, the long tail, trade route, urban renewal, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

The first plague pandemic that began during the reign of the Byzantine emperor, Justinian I, and which is estimated to have killed some 25 million people throughout the Mediterranean basin between 541 and 750, is thought to have been largely bubonic. However, the second pandemic appears to have been a mixed outbreak. Colloquially known as the Black Death, the pandemic began in 1334 in China before spreading along the great trade routes to Constantinople, Florence, and other European capitals in the middle decades of the fourteenth century, reducing Europe’s population by approximately one-quarter to one-half between 1347 and 1353 and killing at least 20 million people, possibly as many as 50 million. To judge by contemporary accounts, buboes and swellings, called gavocciolo by Italian chroniclers, were ubiquitous.


Lonely Planet Cancun, Cozumel & the Yucatan (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, John Hecht, Lucas Vidgen

Bartolomé de las Casas, carbon footprint, colonial rule, Day of the Dead, illegal immigration, low cost airline, mass immigration, off-the-grid, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, traffic fines

Exploring Tulum's surrounding areas pays big rewards: there's the massive Reserva de la Biosfera Sian Ka’an, the secluded fishing village of Punta Allen and the ruins of Cobá. History Most archaeologists believe that Tulum was occupied during the late post-Classic period (AD 1200–1521) and that it was an important port town during its heyday. The Maya sailed up and down this coast, maintaining trading routes all the way down into Belize. When Juan de Grijalva sailed past in 1518, he was amazed by the sight of the walled city, its buildings painted a gleaming red, blue and yellow and a ceremonial fire flaming atop its seaside watchtower. The ramparts that surround three sides of Tulum (the fourth side being the sea) leave little question as to its strategic function as a fortress.


pages: 539 words: 151,425

Lords of the Desert: The Battle Between the US and Great Britain for Supremacy in the Modern Middle East by James Barr

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, false flag, illegal immigration, imperial preference, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Suez crisis 1956, trade route

‘The veil, the fez, the sickness, the filth, the lack of education and modern industrial development, the arbitrariness of government’ that he had witnessed across the Middle East were symptoms of a failure resulting from ‘a combination of forces within their own society and the self-interest of foreign domination’.12 Willkie was alarmed that the colonial powers’ dependence on the United States meant that he and his fellow countrymen were seen across the Middle East as complicit in a situation over which, in reality, they had no control. ‘Again and again’, he recalled later, he had been asked if America intended ‘to support a system by which our politics are controlled by foreigners, however politely, our lives dominated by foreigners, however indirectly, because we happen to be strategic points on the military roads and trade routes of the world.’ His answer to that question was always going to be ‘No’. Days later it would be Winston Churchill who needled him into stating it.13 * * * The third and final episode of Willkie’s fraught relationship with Churchill began when Willkie, under heavy pressure from Joseph Stalin from the moment he arrived in Moscow, called for the opening of a second front in Western Europe to take the pressure off the Russians as soon as possible.


A World Beneath the Sands by Toby Wilkinson

Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, battle of ideas, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, conceptual framework, distributed generation, financial independence, invention of writing, New Journalism, public intellectual, Right to Buy, Suez canal 1869, trade route, traveling salesman

In 1501, the Portuguese navy sank an Egyptian fleet moored at Calicut (modern Kozhikode), on the west coast of India; seven years later, it attacked and destroyed the entire Egyptian Red Sea fleet, dealing a fatal blow to the importance of Suez as a trading and trans-shipment centre, and forcing merchant ships to sail around the Cape of Good Hope, which the Portuguese controlled. It was an early indication both of Egypt’s strategic potential and of the European desire to dominate trade routes. These two factors, one way or another, would determine the relationship between Europe and Egypt for the next four and a half centuries. With its fleet destroyed and its economy weakened, Egypt was in a vulnerable position, and in 1517 the Turks invaded and added the Nile Valley to their expanding territory, beginning four hundred years of suzerainty.


pages: 559 words: 155,777

The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece by Kevin Birmingham

banking crisis, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, death of newspapers, full employment, income inequality, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, new economy, New Journalism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Singer: altruism, trade route, traveling salesman

One of the paradoxes of Russian imperialism is that the empire’s expansion depended on a motley people averse to hierarchy and nationhood: the Cossacks. They originated as a loose array of deserters, schismatics, outlaws, and runaway serfs who gathered on the southern steppe for lives of banditry—qazaq. Cossacks organized into self-governing communities of mercenaries securing trade routes, quashing rebellions, and collecting sable pelts. Their tradition of dividing spoils equally made their leaders difficult to bribe, so the tsars influenced them with hereditary titles and elaborate regalia. This strategy had limits. Cossacks often adopted non-Russian ways—living in yurts, eating raw fish and meat, practicing shamanism.


Fodor's Essential Belgium by Fodor's Travel Guides

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, bike sharing, blood diamond, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, Easter island, Ford Model T, gentrification, haute cuisine, index card, Kickstarter, low cost airline, New Urbanism, out of africa, QR code, retail therapy, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, starchitect, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, urban renewal, urban sprawl, young professional

Antwerp’s Brilliant Industry b Knowing that 80% of rough diamonds pass through Antwerp and 50% are sold in the city, it’s hard to imagine that India dominated the diamond trade from the 4th century BC to the 18th century. In the 13th century, Venice was a shipping point for Indian goods (including diamonds) to the West. Strategic cities in Northern Europe maintained trading routes with Venice during the Middle Ages, and eventually diamond traders made their way to Bruges. In fact, it was Lodewijck van Bercken, a Bruges resident, who invented the technique of polishing diamonds with diamonds. The silting up of Bruges’s harbor meant the gradual relocation of the diamond industry to Antwerp in the 15th century, and Antwerp’s liberal and welcoming atmosphere encouraged immigrants to settle here.


Costa Rica by Matthew Firestone, Carolina Miranda, César G. Soriano

airport security, Berlin Wall, centre right, desegregation, illegal immigration, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, off-the-grid, Pepto Bismol, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Skype, sustainable-tourism, the payments system, trade route, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, young professional

Villanueva de la Boca del Monte del Valle de Abra – as San José was first known – was not founded until 1737, when the Catholic Church issued an edict that forced the populace to settle near churches (attendance was down). The city remained a backwater for decades, though it did experience some growth as a stop in the tobacco trading route during the late 18th century. Following independence in 1821, rival factions in Cartago and San José each attempted to assert regional supremacy. The struggle ended in 1823 when the two sides faced off at the Battle of Ochomongo. San José emerged the victor and subsequently declared itself capital.

To the north, the area is home to two important sites: the majestic Volcán Turrialba and the archeological site of Guayabo (Click here). Return to beginning of chapter TURRIALBA pop 27,000 When the railway shut down in 1991, Turrialba ceased to be an important commercial pit-stop in the San José–Limón trade route. Commerce slowed down, but the town nonetheless remained a regional agricultural center, where local coffee planters could bring their crops to market. Things didn’t remain quiet for long, however. With tourism on the rise in the 1990s, it wasn’t long before this modest mountain town became known for having access to some of the best white-water rafting on the planet.


pages: 522 words: 162,310

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History by Kurt Andersen

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, Celebration, Florida, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, corporate governance, cotton gin, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Downton Abbey, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herman Kahn, high net worth, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, large denomination, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, placebo effect, post-truth, pre–internet, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, young professional

That was the dream of Captain John Smith at the beginning of the 1600s when he sailed to the New World, funded by English investors. Imagining that the Potomac River led all the way to the Pacific Ocean, Smith got only as far as Bethesda, Maryland. Passage to Asia was also the dream in 1609 of the Englishman Henry Hudson, who got only as far as Albany. A year later English investors who wanted to believe the Arctic-trade-route dream financed Hudson to try again. This time instead of China, he made it to Ontario; when Hudson wanted to keep going west, his crew, not as enraptured by the fantasy, mutinied; Captain Hudson was never seen again. But the Spaniards who followed Columbus, instead of searching in vain for a Northwest Passage to Asia, headed southwest.


pages: 559 words: 174,054

The World of Caffeine: The Science and Culture of the World's Most Popular Drug by Bennett Alan Weinberg, Bonnie K. Bealer

British Empire, clean water, confounding variable, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, gentrification, Haight Ashbury, Honoré de Balzac, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lao Tzu, placebo effect, Plato's cave, spice trade, trade route, traveling salesman

When the Maya were defeated by their rivals, the Aztecs, sacks of cacao beans were among the items of tribute exacted from them.1 In their onslaught, the Maya appropriated Teotihuacan, the New World’s greatest pre-Columbian city of the age, which dominated the Valley of Mexico and much of Central America. The Maya warrior merchants assumed control of Teotihuacan’s lucrative trade routes, which they maintained until the late seventh century when the Toltecs moved into the Valley of Mexico, gaining the ascendancy that they maintained from the tenth century until the middle of the twelfth. Toltec acolytes carried cacao branches and culminated their rites by sacrificing dogs the color of cacao paste.


pages: 1,181 words: 163,692

Lonely Planet Wales (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, back-to-the-land, Brexit referendum, car-free, carbon footprint, country house hotel, Downton Abbey, gentrification, global village, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, land reform, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, period drama, sensible shoes, trade route, urban renewal

Preseli HillsAREA (Mynydd Preseli) The only upland area in Pembrokeshire Coast National Park, these hills rise to a height of 536m at Foel Cwmcerwyn. They encompass a fascinating prehistoric landscape, scattered with hill forts, standing stones and burial chambers, and are famous as the source of the mysterious bluestones of Stonehenge. The ancient Golden Road track, once part of a 5000-year-old trade route between Wessex and Ireland, runs along the crest of the hills, passing prehistoric cairns and the stone circle of Bedd Arthur. oCastell HenllysHISTORIC SITE (%01239-891319; www.castellhenllys.com; Meline; adult/child £5/3.50; h10am-5pm Apr-Oct, reduced hours Nov-Mar) If you've ever wondered what a Celtic village looked, felt and smelt like, take a trip back in time to this Iron Age fort, 4 miles east of Newport.


pages: 596 words: 163,682

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind by Raghuram Rajan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computer vision, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, data acquisition, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial repression, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

By 1900, these were down to twenty-five or so.29 The expansion in the size of the political state also meant an expansion in the size of its domestic market. Monarchs increasingly obtained monopoly control over violence within their country by controlling the powerful landed magnates, a subject we will explore in greater detail in the next chapter. They also suppressed the entrepreneurial robber barons and pirates, making trade routes safe. This meant that producers could sell in the entire national market. Moreover, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, aids to navigation like the dry compass and the astrolabe, coupled with new technologies in ships such as multiple masts with lateen sails and the sternpost-mounted rudder, which improved ship maneuverability and stability, meant ships no longer had to hug the coast, and could venture much farther out at lower risk.


pages: 670 words: 169,815

Ghosts of Empire: Britain's Legacies in the Modern World by Kwasi Kwarteng

Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of penicillin, Etonian, illegal immigration, imperial preference, invisible hand, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, sceptred isle, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, urban planning, Yom Kippur War

The Maharaja was worried about his independence, whereas Mayo was fantasizing about establishing ‘for the first time a secure and duty free route from Central Asia to India’ within twelve months.25 Kashmir was a classic case of extending the empire by franchise, a way of allowing local rulers the freedom to do what they wanted so long as everything was quiet externally and trade routes remained safe and secure. The family of Gulab Singh, in the meantime, were becoming very rich. They had a policy of making ‘every product of the Valley a state monopoly’. Even prostitutes were taxed, for which they were divided into three classes, ‘according to their gratifications’, which were taxed at 40, 20 and 10 rupees a year respectively.26 According to Walter Lawrence, a British official in the Indian Civil Service (ICS) writing in the 1890s, ‘everything except air and water was under taxation’.


pages: 407

Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces, and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy by Rory Cormac

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Etonian, fake news, false flag, illegal immigration, land reform, Malacca Straits, Mikhail Gorbachev, operational security, precautionary principle, private military company, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, union organizing, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

The era after the Second World War imposed myriad challenges on Whitehall’s impecunious elite. Cold War soon emerged, characterized by Soviet subversion and intrigue; nationalist uprisings, unable to be quashed by military force alone, swept across the empire; a new generation of charismatic leaders threatened Britain’s trade routes, defence commitments, and economic resources in places such as Iran, Egypt, and Indonesia; more and more colonies became independent, providing openings for hostile regimes to replace longstanding British influence; and terrorist groups attacked targets from Latin America to Northern Ireland to Iraq.


pages: 649 words: 172,080

Hunting in the Shadows: The Pursuit of Al Qa'ida Since 9/11: The Pursuit of Al Qa'ida Since 9/11 by Seth G. Jones

airport security, battle of ideas, defense in depth, drone strike, Google Earth, index card, it's over 9,000, Khyber Pass, medical residency, Murray Gell-Mann, operational security, RAND corporation, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, WikiLeaks

“Each person must assume an unprecedented degree of personal responsibility.”1 U.S. and Pakistani intelligence agents had mapped out a network of contacts close to Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, yet they still lacked enough information to capture him. The situation changed early in 2003. The hunt centered on Rawalpindi, a bustling Pakistani city of nearly 1.7 million located on the Potwar Plateau, 9 miles southwest of Islamabad, the nation’s capital. Rawalpindi lies along the ancient trade routes that connected Persia and the Central Asian steppes to India. Sikhs settled the area in 1765 and invited nearby traders to take up residence as well. It became a strategic military outpost after the British occupied the Punjab in 1849. The old parts of Rawalpindi boast densely packed houses decorated with intricate woodwork and cut brick corbels, with narrow streets that open up into a series of bazaars.


pages: 626 words: 167,836

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation by Carl Benedikt Frey

3D printing, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shock, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, pink-collar, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, safety bicycle, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Turing test, union organizing, universal basic income, warehouse automation, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

In particular, advances in shipbuilding and navigation—including the three-master ship, the development of the movable rudder to replace the steering oar, and the invention of the mariner’s compass—constituted enabling technologies for the age of discovery and the surge in international trade associated with it. What’s more, so-called caravel construction culminated in the Portuguese caravel ship in the fifteenth century, the type of ship that was used by Vasco da Gama, Christopher Columbus, and Ferdinand Magellan, to discover new trade routes. By that time, Europe had gone some way toward catching up with previously more advanced Islamic and Oriental civilizations. And while Europe was still an imitator of foreign technologies, despite some sparks of technological brilliance, it was soon to turn from imitator to innovator.65 Inspiration without Perspiration Between 1500 and 1700, the technological gap between the West and the rest widened.


pages: 769 words: 169,096

Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities by Alain Bertaud

autonomous vehicles, call centre, colonial rule, congestion charging, congestion pricing, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, garden city movement, gentrification, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land tenure, manufacturing employment, market design, market fragmentation, megacity, microapartment, new economy, New Urbanism, openstreetmap, Pearl River Delta, price mechanism, rent control, Right to Buy, Ronald Coase, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, the built environment, trade route, transaction costs, transit-oriented development, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban sprawl, zero-sum game

In 1050, Cordoba, in the south of Spain, was the largest city in Europe with 450,000 inhabitants, followed by Palermo, Sicily, with a population of 350,000. By the middle of the fourteenth century, the population of both cities had shrunk to 60,000 and 50,000, respectively, because their respective locations had become less important to eastbound trade routes. In the eleventh century, Kaifeng in China was probably the largest city in the world, with 700,000 people, while Shenzhen was not even on the map. Today, Shenzhen has 10 million people, and over the past 10 centuries, Kaifeng’s population has barely increased to 800,000 people—a stasis determined by the economic center and political capital having moved to other cities in later dynasties.


pages: 564 words: 168,696

Horizons: The Global Origins of Modern Science by James Poskett

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clockwork universe, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, complexity theory, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, double helix, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, German hyperinflation, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, lone genius, mass immigration, megacity, Mount Scopus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, personalized medicine, polynesian navigation, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Virgin Galactic

Inspired by this observatory, which featured its own enormous stone quadrant, Ulugh Beg ordered the construction of a similar institution back in Samarkand. This was part of a broader programme of works initiated by Ulugh Beg when he became governor of the city. From colleges and public baths to mosques and ornamental gardens, Ulugh Beg transformed Samarkand into a vibrant cultural hub, right at the heart of the Silk Road – a long-distance trading route which stretched from Africa through Europe and Central Asia all the way to China.2 For Ulugh Beg, the astronomical observatory was a site of religious devotion as much as scientific enquiry. In the Islamic world, science and faith had always gone hand in hand. From the times of the five daily prayers to the start and end of Ramadan, Islam is a religion which, perhaps more than any other, relies on accurate astronomical information.


The Rough Guide to Devon & Cornwall by Robert Andrews

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Charles Babbage, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, land tenure, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, urban sprawl

The extensive grounds include the bear’s hut, a summerhouse named after a pet bear once housed within, and the ice house, constructed in 1808 and capable of storing up to three years’ worth of ice. Open-air drama productions are staged in the gardens in summer. < Back to Exeter and mid-Devon Crediton At the precise geographical centre of Devon, CREDITON was established as an important settlement and market town in Saxon times, serving as the meeting point of trade routes from Okehampton, Exeter, Tiverton and Barnstaple. Today the only item of note in what is now a mere village is its splendid, red, collegiate parish church. Once you’ve taken in the church, there’s little reason to hang around unless you’re looking for refreshments or stuck for a bed for the night.


Parks Directory of the United States by Darren L. Smith, Kay Gill

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, Asilomar, British Empire, California gold rush, clean water, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donner party, El Camino Real, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hernando de Soto, indoor plumbing, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Southern State Parkway, Torches of Freedom, trade route, transcontinental railway, Works Progress Administration

American Indian groups dating back into prehistoric times, especially the Pueblo Indians of the Rio Grande River Valley, also used the area and trail along the Rio Grande long before Europeans arrived. After Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821, El Camino Real expanded its importance as a trade route and linked with the Santa Fe Trail. In 1846, it played an important part in the Mexican-American War and was also utilized during the U.S. Civil War, when three battles were fought in New Mexico. The historical period of the trail ended in 1882, when railroad connections replaced wagon trails across the West.

★1075★ TRAIL OF TEARS NATIONAL HISTORIC TRAIL Trail of Tears Association c/o American Indian Center of Arkansas 1100 N University, Suite 143 Little Rock, AR 72207 501-666-9032 - Phone 501-666-5875 - Fax Web: www.nationaltota.org ★1073★ SANTA FE NATIONAL HISTORIC TRAIL Santa Fe Trail Association Santa Fe Trail Center RR 3 Larned, KS 67550 620-285-2054 - Phone Web: www.santafetrail.org Trail Administrator - National Park Service NPS National Trails System Office, Santa Fe PO Box 728 Santa Fe, NM 87504 505-988-6888 - Phone 505-986-5214 - Fax Web: www.nps.gov/safe Trail Administrator - National Park Service NPS National Trails System Office, Santa Fe PO Box 728 Santa Fe, NM 87504 505-988-6888 - Phone 505-986-5214 - Fax Web: www.nps.gov/trte Length: 1,203 miles. Established: May 8, 1987. Description: After Mexican independence in 1821, U.S. and Mexican traders developed the Santa Fe Trail, using American Indian travel and trade routes. It quickly became a commercial and cultural link between the two countries and also became a road of conquest during the Mexican and Civil wars. With the building of the Length: 2,200 miles. Established: 1987. Description: Two trail routes were used for the forced removal of more than 15,000 Cherokee Indians by the U.S.

PARKS DIRECTORY OF THE UNITED STATES—5th EDITION The 34-mile Phantom Canyon Road runs from Florence to Victor, the 26-mile Shelf Road runs from Cañon City to Cripple Creek, and the High Park Road segment connects Florence and Cañon City with Teller Road 1 and Teller Road 11. Time to Allow: 6 hours (including loops or backtracking) Designation/Year: National Scenic Byway (1998). Description: One of America’s first great trade routes, the Santa Fe Trail (1821-1880) was also critical to the westward expansion of the United States. The section of the trail located in presentday Colorado traverses one of the last strongholds of the nomadic Plains Indians and one of the first toeholds of Anglo-American pioneers who began homesteading along the Arkansas River in the 1860s.


Great Britain by David Else, Fionn Davenport

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, Beeching cuts, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, Columbine, congestion charging, country house hotel, credit crunch, Crossrail, David Attenborough, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mega-rich, negative equity, new economy, North Ronaldsay sheep, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, period drama, place-making, retail therapy, Skype, Sloane Ranger, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Hawking, the market place, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent

Yorkshire Coastliner bus 840 (40 minutes from York, one daily) links Leeds, York, Castle Howard, Pickering and Whitby. Return to beginning of chapter THIRSK pop 9100 Monday and Saturday are market days in handsome Thirsk, which has been trading on its tidy, attractive streets and cobbled square since the Middle Ages. Thirsk’s brisk business was always helped by its key position on two medieval trading routes: the old drove road between Scotland and York, and the route linking the Yorkshire Dales with the coast. That’s all in the past, though: today, the town is all about the legacy of James Herriot, the wry Yorkshire vet adored by millions of fans of All Creatures Great and Small. Thirsk does a good job as the real-life Darrowby of the books and TV series, and it should, as the real-life Herriot was in fact local vet Alf Wight, whose house and surgery has been dipped in 1940s aspic and turned into the incredibly popular World of James Herriot ( 01845-524234; www.worldofjamesherriot.org; 23 Kirkgate; adult/child £5.50/3.90; 10am-5pm Easter-Oct, 11am-4pm Nov-Easter), an excellent museum full of Wight-related artefacts, a video documentary of his life and a re-creation of the TV-show sets.

* * * THRILLS & HILLS Craggy coast and shimmering sands dominate Pembrokeshire, but turn away from the sea and follow the national park inland from Newport to the ancient Preseli Hills and a whole new landscape reveals itself. It’s littered with prehistoric forts, standing stones and burial chambers, and ancient trade routes crossed these spiritual hills. From here, around 1500 BC, came the bluestone megaliths of Stonehenge in England, almost 250 miles away. This is excellent walking and mountain-biking country, where quiet country lanes lead through the Gwam Valley to the highest peak in the Preseli Hills, Cwmcerwyn (536m).

The interior is even more extravagant than the exterior, and the building has been used as a movie location, standing in for the Vatican (in Heavenly Pursuits) and the British Embassy in Moscow (in An Englishman Abroad). Guided tours are held at 10.30am and 2.30pm Monday to Friday. MERCHANT CITY The prosperity of Glasgow’s 18th-century ‘tobacco lords’, who made vast profits importing tobacco, rum and sugar via lucrative transatlantic trade routes, is reflected in the grand buildings they erected in the area east and southeast of George Sq, now known as the Merchant City; many have been renewed as stylish apartments, bars and restaurants. The grandiose neoclassical exterior of the Royal Exchange, which now houses the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA; 0141-229 1996; www.glasgowmuseums.com; Queen St; admission free; 10am-5pm Mon-Wed & Sat, 10am-8pm Thu, 11am-5pm Fri & Sun), contrasts with the contemporary paintings and sculpture within.


pages: 641 words: 182,927

In Pursuit of Privilege: A History of New York City's Upper Class and the Making of a Metropolis by Clifton Hood

affirmative action, British Empire, Carl Icahn, coherent worldview, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Brooks, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, family office, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, jitney, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, P = NP, plutocrats, Ray Oldenburg, ride hailing / ride sharing, Scientific racism, selection bias, Steven Levy, streetcar suburb, The Great Good Place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban planning, We are the 99%, white flight

That raises an obvious question: How could a seaport that would become a commercial giant in the nineteenth century have been so inconsequential a century earlier? The answer is that its geographical advantages were latent rather than immediate. Despite Livingston’s boast that the Hudson River afforded an unparalleled trade route into the interior, the Hudson River valley and the regions to the west of it (which the Iroquois League controlled) were more sparsely populated and produced less than did the hinterlands of Boston and Philadelphia. The Hudson River was indeed a promising commercial route, and the regions it tapped were very promising, but the current reality was modest.


pages: 666 words: 181,495

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business process, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, discounted cash flows, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, El Camino Real, Evgeny Morozov, fault tolerance, Firefox, General Magic , Gerard Salton, Gerard Salton, Google bus, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, high-speed rail, HyperCard, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, large language model, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, one-China policy, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Potemkin village, prediction markets, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, search inside the book, second-price auction, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, social graph, social software, social web, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, the long tail, trade route, traveling salesman, turn-by-turn navigation, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, web application, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

So one day in 1999, Doerr took Googlers into a conference room and did a PowerPoint presentation on how OKRs worked. The idea was not just to identify what one wants to do but to break down the task into measurable bites (“key results”). In his book High Output Management, Grove imagined the OKR system applied to Christopher Columbus. The explorer fell short of his objective of finding a trade route to India, but he did carry out some subsidiary OKRs: he gathered a crew; he bought supplies; he avoided pirates; and by discovering the New World, he brought riches to Spain. Doerr had Google at metrics. “Google did more than adopt it,” says Doerr. “They embraced it.” OKRs became an essential component of Google culture.


pages: 603 words: 182,826

Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership by Andro Linklater

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, business cycle, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, electricity market, facts on the ground, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, light touch regulation, market clearing, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mortgage debt, Northern Rock, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, ultimatum game, wage slave, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor

Once the regulatory barriers were removed in the private property economies, the investment strategies adopted on Wall Street and in the City of London meshed directly with the economy of the industrial home. The growth of lending, from $500 million in 1990 to $2.6 trillion in 2007, drove property values up, powering the phenomenal expansion of the consumer economy and creating an apparently unquenchable appetite for automobiles, electronics, toys, clothes, and furniture. To meet its demand, trade routes spread outwards to suppliers around the world, but especially in the Far East. In reciprocal fashion, American debt was sold everywhere from Oslo to Sydney, but the most significant buyers turned out to be the city and provincial as well as central governments in the coastal crescent from Shanghai to Beijing.


Lonely Planet Andalucia: Chapter From Spain Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

bike sharing, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, credit crunch, discovery of the americas, Francisco Pizarro, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, Skype, trade route, urban renewal

The moriscos were then deported to western Andalucía and more northerly parts of Spain, before being expelled altogether from Spain by Felipe III between 1609 and 1614. Seville & the Americas: Boom & Bust In April 1492 the Catholic Monarchs granted the Genoese sailor Christopher Columbus (Cristóbal Colón to Spaniards) funds for a voyage across the Atlantic in search of a new trade route to the Orient. Columbus instead found the Americas and opened up a whole new hemisphere of opportunity for Spain, especially for the river port of Seville. The epic naval Battle of Trafalgar (1805) is named after a small headland in the town of Los Caños de Meca. A plaque commemorating those who died in the battle was finally erected there on the bicentenary in 2005.


pages: 3,002 words: 177,561

Lonely Planet Switzerland by Lonely Planet

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, bike sharing, car-free, carbon footprint, Eyjafjallajökull, Frank Gehry, G4S, Guggenheim Bilbao, Higgs boson, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, low cost airline, messenger bag, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, smart cities, starchitect, trade route

Cafe terraces, restaurants and hotels abound on central square Hauptplatz and Alte Simplonstrasse. For a lovely drive, head 22km south of town to Simplon Pass ( GOOGLE MAP ), which links Brig with Domodossola, Italy. Kaspar von Stockalper (1609–91), a shrewd businessman who dominated the Simplon Pass trade routes, built Stockalper Palace ( GOOGLE MAP ; %027 921 60 30; www.facebook.com/stockalperschloss; Alte Simplonstrasse 28; adult/child Sfr8/free; h9.30am-4.30pm Tue-Sun) and dubbed himself the ‘Great Stockalper’. Locals didn’t like his bloated ego and sent him packing to Italy. Wander for free the main court and beautiful baroque gardens with quintessential parterres, fountains and clipped hedges. 8Information Tourist Office ( GOOGLE MAP ; %027 921 60 30; www.brig-tourismus.ch; Bahnhofplatz 2; h8am-noon & 1.30-5pm Mon-Fri) Over the road from the train station. 8Getting There & Away Brig is 211km east of Geneva and 80km east of Martigny on the E62.


Germany Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, bank run, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, capitalist realism, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, company town, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, low cost airline, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Eisenman, post-work, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, sensible shoes, Skype, starchitect, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, V2 rocket, white picket fence

Later, in the 17th century, a large swath of this land would become part of Brandenburg-Prussia. THE HANSEATIC LEAGUE The origins of the Hanseatic League go back to various guilds and associations established from about the mid-12th century by out-of-town merchants to protect their interests. After Hamburg and Lübeck signed an agreement in 1241 to protect their ships and trading routes, they were joined in their league by Lüneburg, Kiel and a string of Baltic Sea cities east to Greifswald. By 1356 this had grown into the Hanseatic League, encompassing half a dozen other large alliances of cities, with Lübeck playing the lead role. At its zenith, the league had about 200 member cities.

In return he is crowned Kaiser by the pope. 919–1125 Saxon and Salian emperors rule Germany, creating the Holy Roman Empire in 962 when Otto I is crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the pope, reaffirming the precedent established by Charlemagne. 1165 Friedrich I Barbarossa is crowned in Aachen. He canonises Charlemagne and later drowns while bathing in a river in present-day Turkey while co-leading the Third Crusade. 1241 Hamburg and Lübeck sign an agreement to protect one another’s ships and trading routes, creating the basis for the powerful Hanseatic League, which dominates politics and trade across much of Europe. 1245 The Great Interregnum begins when Pope Innocent IV deposes Friedrich II and a string of anti-kings are elected; it ends in 1273 when the House of Habsburg takes the reins, rising to become Europe’s most powerful dynasty. 1348–50 The plague wipes out 25% of Europe’s population and pogroms are launched against Jews.


pages: 677 words: 206,548

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

DPR was the mastermind behind Silk Road, a massive online criminal marketplace painstakingly hidden from public view where any and all manner of illicit goods were for sale in a secret Web: “If you can smoke it, inject it, or snort it, there’s a good chance Silk Road has it.” Named after the ancient Asian trading route, Silk Road was a place where buyer and seller could anonymously come together to exchange goods and services in a dizzyingly large emporium of contraband. Known as the “eBay of drugs and vice,” Silk Road offered every possible illicit product imaginable, neatly organized by category such as drugs or weapons, each with accompanying photographs and descriptions.


pages: 416 words: 204,183

The Rough Guide to Florence & the Best of Tuscany by Tim Jepson, Jonathan Buckley, Rough Guides

air freight, Bonfire of the Vanities, car-free, classic study, housing crisis, land reform, Nelson Mandela, plutocrats, sustainable-tourism, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning

Siena also makes a good base for much of the territory covered in the following two chapters, with numerous bus services to most towns and villages, including Montalcino and San Gimignano, while to the north, the wine heartland of Chianti is also within reach. 257 SIENA | Some history Though myth attributes its origins to Senius and Acius, sons of Remus (hence the she-wolf emblem of the city), Siena was in fact founded by the Etruscans and refounded as a Roman colony – Saena Julia – by Augustus in the first century BC. Over the course of the next millennium it grew to be an independent republic, and in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was one of the major cities of Europe. It was almost the size of Paris, controlled most of southern Tuscany and its flourishing wool industry, dominated the trade routes from France to Rome, and maintained Italy’s richest banks. The city also developed a highly sophisticated civic life, with its own written constitution and a quasi-democratic council – the comune. It was in this great period that the city was shaped, and in which most of its art and monuments are rooted.


pages: 650 words: 204,878

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefèvre, William J. O'Neil

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, bank run, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, British Empire, business process, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy the rumour, sell the news, clean water, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Credit Default Swap, Donald Trump, fiat currency, Ford Model T, gentleman farmer, Glass-Steagall Act, Hernando de Soto, margin call, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, price stability, refrigerator car, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, short selling, short squeeze, technology bubble, tontine, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, yellow journalism

I made the remark that nobody could beat the game on account of the rotten execution he got from his brokers, especially when he traded at the market, as I did. 4.1 From this casual introduction to cotton, an entirely new phase of Livermore’s trading career would later unfold as the budding trader soon became disenchanted with stock exchanges and infatuated instead with the fast action and ample margin of commodity exchanges. The New York Cotton Exchange was a commodity futures exchange founded in 1870 by a group of leading cotton merchants and brokers. The exchange initially helped market the southern U.S. cotton crop in the volatile years following the Civil War as trade routes reopened and prices fluctuated wildly. Later its auctions mainly offered a way for farmers and manufacturers to hedge price uncertainty and reduce risk. In time, its price quotes became the standard for all business conducted between textile mills and farmers.1 You can see the benefits of the exchange in the adjacent chart, which illustrates annual cotton price volatility from 1830 to 1909.


Lonely Planet London by Lonely Planet

Boris Johnson, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Babbage, congestion charging, Crossrail, death from overwork, discovery of the americas, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Etonian, financial independence, gentrification, haute couture, haute cuisine, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, market design, place-making, post-work, Russell Brand, Skype, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, urban renewal, Winter of Discontent

Brixton Village Great dining and shopping converge in South London’s most famous multicultural neighbourhood (Click here). Kingsland Road If Vietnamese cuisine is on your list, you can’t go wrong (Click here). Whitechapel Road Lively, vibrant and cacophonous tangle of cultures and languages (Click here). Rivers and Canals Regent’s Canal Amble along the historic trade route and take a shortcut across North London at the same time (Click here). Richmond Home to some spectacular views of the Thames with enchanting pastoral shade in Petersham Meadows (Click here). Greenwich Pop into a riverside pub and toast the fine views of the river with a pint (Click here). South Bank Hop on our South Bank Walk and walk from County Hall to City Hall past some outstanding waterside sights (Click here).


pages: 703 words: 196,052

Cage of Souls by Adrian Tchaikovsky

machine translation, means of production, trade route

Occasionally one can make out the ruins of buildings out there, if the sun is not too bright. When the sun is bright then there is nothing to be seen but glare. In some old maps, those lands are picked out as grassland. Some ancient charts suggest that there might have been a sister city, a thriving trade route. The lesson is easily learned. The deserts are spreading. There remains one compass point left. North is the sea, which I have not mentioned before, and will not again. Expeditions cross into the desert, and the jungles house the Island and its inmates, but the sea is no place for human life, even for a moment.


pages: 1,429 words: 189,336

Mauritius, Réunion & Seychelles Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

call centre, carbon footprint, Google Earth, haute cuisine, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, place-making, restrictive zoning, spice trade, trade route, urban sprawl

Like Mauritius, Réunion immediately experienced a labour crisis and, like the British in Mauritius, the French 'solved' the problem by importing contract labourers from India, most of them Hindus, to work the sugar cane. Réunion's golden age of trade and development lasted until 1870, with the country flourishing on the trade route between Europe, India and the Far East. Competition from Cuba and the European sugar-beet industry, combined with the opening of the Suez Canal (which short-circuited the journey around the Cape of Good Hope), resulted in an economic slump: shipping decreased, the sugar industry declined, and land and capital were further concentrated in the hands of a small French elite.


pages: 801 words: 209,348

Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

The idea of limited liability, a legal invention that does not exist automatically or organically in free markets, allowed investors to have unlimited upside potential while limiting the downside, thereby making speculation in exploratory voyages more attractive. Not all concerned settlements. Sovereignties often granted exclusive fishing rights, exploration rights, and trade routes to be exploited by private entities. Governments, by granting the charters, hoped to create internal economic benefits by encouraging private capital to be deployed in risky ventures overseas. For all of these purposes, limited liability was vital to encourage investment. By the nature of the business, investors in England were often absent from exercising any voice in the affairs of remote ships and trading missions months or years away.


pages: 789 words: 213,716

The uplift war by David Brin

Great Leap Forward, machine translation, mass immigration, mutually assured destruction, out of africa, space junk, trade route

Perhaps this was one more sign that the political situation in the Five Galaxies had worsened. Word had come from the homeworld Roost Masters telling of serious setbacks out between the spiral arms. Battles had gone badly. Allies had proven unreliable. Tandu and Soro fleets dominated once profitable trade routes and now monopolized the siege of Earth. These were trying times for the great and powerful clan of the Gooksyu-Gubru. All now depended on certain important neutralist patron-lines. Should something happen to draw one or two of them into an alliance, triumph might yet be attained for the righteous.


pages: 767 words: 208,933

Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist by Alex Zevin

"there is no alternative" (TINA), activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, Columbine, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, desegregation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, imperial preference, income inequality, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, post-war consensus, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, Socratic dialogue, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War, young professional

In the House of Commons, Cobden aimed to cut defence budgets; outside, he became an active member of the Peace Society. Free trade, peace and goodwill was his motto – the first naturally fostering the second, and vice versa. The idea that one country might force another to trade freely, let alone be free, never appealed to Cobden. Calling on the Royal Navy to pry open foreign markets or protect trade routes and lines of communication struck him as outrageous and hypocritical; now, though, the very liberals with whom he had fought against the Corn Laws were taking up this call. That Wilson was among them, formerly the most rigid expositor of laissez-faire principles imaginable, was a shock. For Cobden the language used by the Economist and the rest of the hawkish press – ‘integrity of the Turkish Empire, balance of power’ – were ‘words without meaning, mere echoes of the past, suited for the mouths of senile Whiggery’.109 Wilson was a ‘Whig valet’, his defection symptomatic of a general desertion of wealthy Leaguers.110 Asked if he had read the latest Economist, which had backed a belligerent ultimatum to Russia, in December 1855, Cobden replied, ‘I never see the Economist though I have it on my conscience that I was mainly concerned in starting it.


pages: 723 words: 211,892

Cuba: An American History by Ada Ferrer

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, company town, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Joan Didion, land reform, land tenure, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, rent control, Ronald Reagan, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, yellow journalism, young professional

He understood—as had the Greeks and Muslims long before and most Europeans in his own time—that the world was not flat. And he used that knowledge and experience to make a deceptively simple argument. From Europe, the best way to reach the East was to sail west. In an age when every European explorer was racing to find new trade routes to Asia, Columbus approached several European monarchs to propose his westerly route. The king of Portugal said no. King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain twice rejected the proposal. Eventually, after his third attempt, they decided to let him try. The year was 1492. The Spanish monarchs had just waged the final, victorious campaign of the Christian Reconquest, ending seven hundred years of Muslim control on the Iberian Peninsula.


Americana by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

The idea of limited liability, a legal invention that does not exist automatically or organically in free markets, allowed investors to have unlimited upside potential while limiting the downside, thereby making speculation in exploratory voyages more attractive. Not all concerned settlements. Sovereignties often granted exclusive fishing rights, exploration rights, and trade routes to be exploited by private entities. Governments, by granting the charters, hoped to create internal economic benefits by encouraging private capital to be deployed in risky ventures overseas. For all of these purposes, limited liability was vital to encourage investment. By the nature of the business, investors in England were often absent from exercising any voice in the affairs of remote ships and trading missions months or years away.


pages: 828 words: 232,188

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy by Francis Fukuyama

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, British Empire, centre right, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, crony capitalism, Day of the Dead, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, household responsibility system, income inequality, information asymmetry, invention of the printing press, iterative process, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labour management system, land reform, land tenure, life extension, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, open economy, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, Port of Oakland, post-industrial society, post-materialism, price discrimination, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, stem cell, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey, zero-sum game

But these had begun to break down in internecine warfare by the time the British arrived in force late in the nineteenth century. Northern Nigeria had larger political structures, primarily due to the influence of Islam as an organizing ideology. The North had long been linked to the Middle East through trans-Saharan trade routes, leading to the conversion of the Hausa polities and Borno to Islam late in the eleventh century. The Caliphate of Sokoto was formed early in the nineteenth century when the Fulani people under a charismatic leader named Usman dan Fodio launched a jihad and conquered the Hausa dynasties. As Atul Kohli has pointed out, even though the Sokoto Caliphate was one of the largest political units in West Africa, it remained far less developed than states in other parts of the world.


pages: 740 words: 227,963

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, California gold rush, card file, cotton gin, desegregation, Ford Model T, Gunnar Myrdal, index card, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, labor-force participation, Mason jar, mass immigration, medical residency, Rosa Parks, strikebreaker, trade route, traveling salesman, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, Works Progress Administration

“Yeah, which one of you boys is that nigger boy called Starling? You George Starling?” “No, sir, I ain’t no George Starling.” “Why, by God, where is he?” “Well, he’s not on here.” “Well, by God, we gonna find him. He done got Captain Wills put in the street for sixty days, and we gonna teach him a lesson.” When the car attendant who traded routes with George got back from that first run to Tampa, he went to George and told him what had happened. “Boy,” he said, “I don’t know what you did down there, but they mad with you down there. Don’t you go back down there.” “Why you think I switched with you?” George asked. “You tell them, don’t worry, I’m not coming back down there no time soon.”


The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (Hardback) - Common by Alan Greenspan

addicted to oil, air freight, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset-backed security, bank run, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, currency risk, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, double entry bookkeeping, equity premium, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial intermediation, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, information security, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, new economy, North Sea oil, oil shock, open economy, open immigration, Pearl River Delta, pets.com, Potemkin village, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, Suez crisis 1956, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tipper Gore, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population, Y2K, zero-sum game

And while that doesn't really happen when you are traveling with a security detail, we came close. We ate at open-air cafes, went shopping, and toured churches and the old Jewish ghetto. For centuries, the Venetian city-state was the center of world trade, linking Western Europe with the Byzantine Empire and the rest of the known world. After the Renaissance, trade routes shifted to the Atlantic, and Venice declined as a sea power. Yet throughout the 1700s, it remained Europe's most graceful city, a center of literature, architecture, and art. "What news on the Rialto?" the famous line from The Merchant of Venice referring to the commercial heart of the city, still strikes a vibrant cosmopolitan note.


pages: 778 words: 239,744

Gnomon by Nick Harkaway

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Burning Man, choice architecture, clean water, cognitive dissonance, false flag, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Future Shock, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Khartoum Gordon, lifelogging, neurotypical, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, place-making, post-industrial society, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, Richard Feynman, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, the market place, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban sprawl

The Scroll is a ghost book, a summoner of phantasms and dreams. It is a dream itself, that I should never have written down. They explain the flaws away. The leaf, we are now told, has been peeled off and replaced with dross in a time of need; the ink has been overwritten to preserve the manuscript; the vellum reveals the existence of a new trade route of which we were previously unaware; the writing evidently belongs to a young scribe perhaps fleeing some destruction, and this is his personal record of a story his masters told; he left spaces for the illustrations and copied them later, when he had access to different materials from those used in contemporary works; he came back subsequently and added text to give himself the appearance of foresight.


pages: 1,057 words: 239,915

The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931 by Adam Tooze

anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, British Empire, centre right, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, credit crunch, failed state, fear of failure, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, German hyperinflation, imperial preference, labour mobility, liberal world order, low interest rates, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, price stability, reserve currency, Right to Buy, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the payments system, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, zero-sum game

Of the ships requisitioned by the Federal government, only a fraction were actually allocated to troop transport. As the Germans advanced to within artillery range of Paris in April 1918, Wilson was still insisting that America must maintain its growing presence on the profitable Brazil and Japan trading routes. The burden was placed instead on the British and French fleets. Already in January the British had imposed a stomach-churning shift in priorities. To free enough capacity to transport 150,000 American soldiers per month, food imports were slashed.18 When the German offensive tore into the Allied lines on 21 March, even more drastic measures were required.


pages: 829 words: 229,566

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, big-box store, bilateral investment treaty, Blockadia, Boeing 747, British Empire, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, equal pay for equal work, extractivism, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, financial deregulation, food miles, Food sovereignty, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, green transition, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, ice-free Arctic, immigration reform, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jones Act, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, light touch regulation, man camp, managed futures, market fundamentalism, Medieval Warm Period, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-oil, precautionary principle, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, remunicipalization, renewable energy transition, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, scientific management, smart grid, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wages for housework, walkable city, Washington Consensus, Wayback Machine, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Those involved feel free to engage in these high-stakes gambles because they believe that they and theirs will be protected from the ravages in question, at least for another generation or so. On a large scale, many regional climate models do predict that wealthy countries—most of which are located at higher latitudes—may experience some economic benefits from a slightly warmer climate, from longer growing seasons to access to shorter trade routes through the melting Arctic ice. At the same time, the wealthy in these regions are already finding ever more elaborate ways to protect themselves from the coming weather extremes. Sparked by events like Superstorm Sandy, new luxury real estate developments are marketing their gold-plated private disaster infrastructure to would-be residents—everything from emergency lighting to natural-gas-powered pumps and generators to thirteen-foot floodgates and watertight rooms sealed “submarine-style,” in the case of a new Manhattan condominium.


pages: 869 words: 239,167

The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind by Jan Lucassen

3D printing, 8-hour work day, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-work, antiwork, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, demographic transition, deskilling, discovery of the americas, domestication of the camel, Easter island, European colonialism, factory automation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, Ford Model T, founder crops, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, labour mobility, land tenure, long peace, mass immigration, means of production, megastructure, minimum wage unemployment, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, pension reform, phenotype, post-work, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, reshoring, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, stakhanovite, tacit knowledge, Thales of Miletus, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, two and twenty, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

We are talking primarily in this period about the transport of exotics as a consequence of group mobility rather than trade in our sense of the word, which only developed late in the Neolithic.87 We can turn again to the Ngarrindjeri of south-eastern Australia and their well-developed material culture for an example of this type of ‘exchange’.88 They practised a greater degree of specialization in economic activities than elsewhere on the continent, linked to both seasonal preservation of vegetables, fish and meat and to regional variations in resource availability, and sometimes associated with particular clans. There was no full-time specialization, but key roles included those of song composer, sorcerer, healer, fur and cloak preparer and basket maker. Well-established trade routes brought red ochre and native tobacco from afar. No wonder that a lively exchange system operated within and beyond Ngarrindjeri territory, featuring cloaks, rugs, nets, lines and animal and fish oils. This involved trading expeditions and barter and more formalized, enduring, culturally important ritual exchange partnerships between individuals and their families.


France (Lonely Planet, 8th Edition) by Nicola Williams

active transport: walking or cycling, back-to-the-land, bike sharing, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, company town, double helix, flag carrier, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information trail, Jacquard loom, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Louis Blériot, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Murano, Venice glass, pension reform, post-work, QWERTY keyboard, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, Sloane Ranger, Suez canal 1869, supervolcano, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, urban renewal, urban sprawl, V2 rocket

Hôtel Le Richemont ( 02 97 47 17 24; www.hotel-richemont-vannes.com; 26 place de la Gare; d €58-65) If the heavy wood beams and arched stonework of the mock-medieval breakfast room aren’t your cup of tea, you can have a laden tray brought to your very comfortable, soundproofed and much more contemporary room. Breakfast costs €7; private parking’s €6. Hôtel Villa Kerasy ( 02 97 68 36 83; www.villakerasy.com; 20 av Favrel-et-Lincy; d €125-190; closed mid-Nov–Dec) Each of the 12 elegant rooms in this grand villa is themed on historic ports of the East India trading route. In summer enjoy the tranquil garden, designed by a Japanese landscape artist. In winter relax in the cosy tearoom, where you can sip Earl Grey from fine Limoges china by the log fire. Eating & Drinking Rue des Halles and its offshoots are lined with tempting eateries; classical and contemporary brasseries arc around the port.

The city boasts one of the country’s largest foreign-student populations and an innovative spirit, most obvious in its hip buzzing bars and historic quarters such as the Battant (originally the winemakers’ district). First settled in Gallo-Roman times, Besançon became an important stop on the early trade routes between Italy, the Alps and the Rhine. This historical transport role is about to come full circle with the opening of a new TGV station outside Besançon (in the village of Auxon, 10km north) in December 2011 on the new Rhine-to-Rhône TGV line (allowing connections from Germany all the way to the south of France without going through Paris).


Lonely Planet France by Lonely Planet Publications

banking crisis, bike sharing, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, David Sedaris, double helix, Frank Gehry, G4S, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute couture, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, Jacquard loom, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Louis Blériot, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Murano, Venice glass, ride hailing / ride sharing, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Suez canal 1869, supervolcano, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, urban renewal, urban sprawl, V2 rocket

Straddling seven hills and hugging the banks of the River Doubs, the cultured capital of Franche-Comté remains refreshingly modest and untouristy, despite charms such as its graceful 18th-century old town, first-rate restaurants and happening bars pepped up by the city’s students. It wasn’t always that way. In Gallo-Roman times, Besançon was an important stop on the trade routes between Italy, the Alps and the Rhine. This role came full circle in December 2011 when the new TGV station opened in the village of Auxon, 12km north of the centre, putting Besançon firmly back on the global map where it belongs. VISI’PASS Besançon’s top sights and museums, including the citadel and the Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie, can be visited with a good-value Visi’Pass (adult/child €13/10) .

Built in the 17th century and classified as a World Heritage Site since 1996, the canal links the Étang de Thau in the south with the Garonne River in Toulouse. Along with the Canal de Garonne, it forms part of the ‘Canal des Deux Mers’ (Canal of the Two Seas), which enables boats to travel all the way from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. The canal was essentially a commercial enterprise, designed to open up trading routes and facilitate merchant traffic between major French ports. It was commissioned by Louis XIV in 1666, who delegated the task of the canal’s construction to Pierre-Paul Riquet, a farmer turned engineer. It was a formidable enterprise. To overcome the difficult terrain and the ever-present risk of flooding, Riquet designed an elaborate system of dams, bridges, aqueducts and locks, as well as the first canal tunnel ever constructed in France.


Spain by Lonely Planet Publications, Damien Simonis

Atahualpa, business process, call centre, centre right, Colonization of Mars, discovery of the americas, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, G4S, gentrification, glass ceiling, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, intermodal, Islamic Golden Age, land reform, large denomination, low cost airline, megaproject, place-making, Skype, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent, young professional

Most (around 300,000) underwent baptism and stayed, becoming known as moriscos (converted Muslims), but their conversion was barely skin-deep and they never assimilated. The moriscos were finally expelled between 1609 and 1614. Hello America In April 1492 the Catholic Monarchs granted the Genoese sailor Christopher Columbus (Cristóbal Colón to Spaniards) funds for his long-desired voyage across the Atlantic in search of a new trade route to the Orient. Columbus set off from the Andalucian port of Palos de la Frontera (Click here) on 3 August 1492, with three small ships and 120 men. After a near mutiny as the crew despaired of sighting land, they finally arrived on the island of Guanahaní, in the Bahamas, and went on to find Cuba and Hispaniola.

* * * The word ‘compostela’ comes from either ‘campus stellae’ meaning starry field or ‘compostium’ meaning burial ground. * * * HISTORY Before people could fly or drive to Santiago, millions of pilgrims from across Europe simply walked out their doors and headed for Santiago de Compostela along a vast network of trade routes, royal roads and trails that eventually came together in Spain. Goethe’s comment that ‘Europe was born on the pilgrim road to Santiago’ thus makes sense. But what originally set Europe’s feet moving? Tradition tells us that in AD 813 Pelayo, a religious hermit living in the boondocks of northwestern Iberia, followed a shining star and angelic voices to a Roman mausoleum hidden under briars


pages: 1,909 words: 531,728

The Rough Guide to South America on a Budget (Travel Guide eBook) by Rough Guides

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Atahualpa, banking crisis, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, centre right, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, company town, Day of the Dead, discovery of the americas, Easter island, Francisco Pizarro, garden city movement, gentrification, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, it's over 9,000, Kickstarter, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, off grid, openstreetmap, place-making, restrictive zoning, side project, Skype, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, trade route, urban sprawl, walkable city

No other northern destination can compete with the sheer number of natural attractions in the surrounding area: the stunning altiplano scenery draws hundreds of travellers year-round, while volcanoes, sand dunes, geysers and lagoons will keep any nature lover busy. One of the oldest settlements in Chile, San Pedro was originally a stop on a pre-Columbian trade route between the highland and coastal communities; in 1547, the Spanish established their first mission here and subjugated the locals. The town later became an important rest stop for cattle drives from Salta, Argentina, when the nitrate industry took off in Chile and fresh meat was needed for the workers.

Tierra del Fuego The remotest and least visited of Chile’s land territories, at the southern tip of the continent, TIERRA DEL FUEGO was named “Land of Fire” by Fernando Magellan, who sailed through the strait that now bears his name in 1520, and saw a multitude of cooking fires lit by the indigenous hunter-gatherers. From then on until the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914, the frigid waters around Cape Horn – the largest ship graveyard in the Americas – formed a link in the perilous yet lucrative trade route from Europe to the west coast of the Americas. Tierra del Fuego’s Isla Grande is split between Chile and Argentina; the Chilean half features the nondescript town of Porvenir, settled by a mixture of Chilote and Croatian immigrants in the late nineteenth century. The Argentine half includes the lively city of Ushuaia, the base for Antarctic voyages.


pages: 782 words: 245,875

The Power Makers by Maury Klein

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, animal electricity, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, book value, British Empire, business climate, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, industrial research laboratory, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, margin call, Menlo Park, price stability, railway mania, Right to Buy, the scientific method, trade route, transcontinental railway, working poor

It was the first steam engine to travel on rails in the nation, but it went nowhere and served only to amuse his friends.13 Despite the lack of working models or examples, the new technology especially intrigued merchants in cities on the eastern seaboard who grew concerned at the decline in their influence. The spectacular success of the Erie Canal, which opened in 1825, marked a shift in trade routes that launched a frenzy of canal building by states, cities, and private interests in an attempt to recapture lost trade or build business where none had existed before. Despite the craze for canals, not everyone regarded them as the best way to reach hinterland markets. As early as 1826–27 Baltimore merchants began talking seriously about building a railroad to protect and extend their commercial interests.


pages: 904 words: 246,845

A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book by John Barton

classic study, complexity theory, feminist movement, invention of the printing press, Johannes Kepler, lateral thinking, liberation theology, Republic of Letters, source of truth, the market place, trade route

Before modern times, Israel had a genuinely independent existence for only a few centuries, from perhaps the tenth to the seventh century BCE, and was otherwise subject to the main regional powers – Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia or the Hellenistic kingdoms that controlled the Middle East after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE. Israel was itself a geopolitically unimportant state, but it lay at the heart of various trade routes in the Middle East and so was open to influences from its larger and more significant neighbours. If we are to understand the development of its national literature, it is necessary to have in mind an outline history of Israel within the wider ancient Near Eastern world. But the history as reconstructed by modern historians differs markedly from the story the Old Testament itself tells.


pages: 898 words: 253,177

Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, California gold rush, clean water, Dr. Strangelove, Garrett Hardin, Golden Gate Park, hacker house, jitney, Joan Didion, Maui Hawaii, megaproject, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, trade route, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

As a result, the Times acquired a new circulation manager and guiding light, whose name was Harry Chandler, and in 1894 Harry Chandler acquired a new father-in-law, whose name was Harrison Gray Otis. William Mulholland came to Los Angeles more or less for the hell of it. He was born in 1855 in Dublin, Ireland, where his father was a postal clerk. At fifteen, he signed on as an apprentice seaman aboard a merchant ship that carried him back and forth along the Atlantic trade routes. By 1874 he had had enough, and spent a couple of years hacking about the lumber camps in Michigan and the dry-goods business in Pittsburgh, where his uncle owned a store. It was in Pittsburgh that Mulholland first read about California. He had just enough money to get to Panama by ship, and after landing in Colón, he traversed the isthmus on foot and worked his way north aboard another ship, arriving in San Francisco in the summer of 1877.


Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World by Margaret Macmillan; Richard Holbrooke; Casey Hampton

Albert Einstein, Bolshevik threat, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, facts on the ground, financial independence, Ida Tarbell, land reform, Monroe Doctrine, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, trade route, traveling salesman, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois

“A map—a pencil— tracing paper. Yet my courage fails at the thought of the people whom our errant lines enclose or exclude, the happiness of several thousands of people.” 17 The Supreme Council did not explain what made a just settlement. Did it mean providing defensible borders? Railway networks? Trade routes? In the end the experts agreed only that they would try to draw boundaries along lines of nationality. The Banat, the piece of land that triggered the process, also gave warning as to its difficulties. It held a rich mix of Serbs, Hungarians, Germans, Russians, Slovaks, Gypsies, Jews, even some scattered French and Italians.


pages: 1,006 words: 243,928

Lonely Planet Washington, Oregon & the Pacific Northwest by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, British Empire, Burning Man, butterfly effect, car-free, carbon footprint, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Day of the Dead, Frank Gehry, G4S, gentrification, glass ceiling, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, intermodal, Kickstarter, Lyft, Murano, Venice glass, New Urbanism, remote working, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, trade route, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

Once there, you’ll find a homestead cabin built in 1889, along with several other buildings, old farm equipment and hundred-year-old apple trees whose fruit is still harvested each year. HIKING IN STEHEKIN: THE WAY THROUGH To Native Americans, Stehekin at the head of Lake Chelan was ‘the way through,’ a vital trade route that linked the rainy coast with the dry interior. For adventurous modern hikers, nothing much has changed. Eschewing the motor car and most other 21st-century comforts, Stehekin is reachable only by boat or on foot. For hikers there are three main entry points – all from the north. The quickest and most popular hiking route to Stehekin is via spectacular 5392ft Cascade Pass, reached via a steep 3.7-mile path that starts at the parking lot at the end of the Cascade River Rd, 23 miles southeast of Marblemount.


The Rough Guide to Chile by Melissa Graham, Andrew Benson

Atahualpa, California gold rush, call centre, centre right, company town, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, feminist movement, Francisco Pizarro, it's over 9,000, Murano, Venice glass, sensible shoes, sustainable-tourism, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, union organizing, women in the workforce

Along with all of Chile’s large-scale copper mines, or “grandes minerías” as they’re called, Chuquicamata belongs to Codelco, the government-owned The little oasis village of SAN PEDRO DE ATACAMA (100km southeast of Calama), with its narrow dirt streets and attractive adobe houses, has transformed itself, since the 1990s, into the tourism centre of Chile. Sitting at an altitude of 2400m between the desert and the altiplano, or puna (the high basin connecting the two branches of the cordillera), this has been an important settlement since pre-Hispanic times, originally as a major stop on the trading route connecting the llama herders of these highlands with the fishing communities of the Pacific. Later, during the nitrate era, it was the main rest stop on the cattle trail from Salta in Argentina to the nitrate oficinas, where the cattle were driven to supply the workers with fresh meat. The large numbers of Chilean tourists and hordes of gringos here can come as quite a shock if you have just arrived from more remote parts of northern Chile.


pages: 492 words: 70,082

Immigration worldwide: policies, practices, and trends by Uma Anand Segal, Doreen Elliott, Nazneen S. Mayadas

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, borderless world, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, centre right, conceptual framework, credit crunch, demographic transition, deskilling, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, full employment, global village, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, it's over 9,000, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, labour mobility, language acquisition, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mass immigration, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, phenotype, scientific management, South China Sea, structural adjustment programs, Suez canal 1869, trade route, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, urban planning, women in the workforce

Fundamental to this conception of ‘‘Europe’’ is the notion of countries that historically were part of ‘‘Christendom,’’ whether they were part of Catholic (and later Protestant) or Orthodox (Greek or Russian) traditions. While the Mediterranean Sea has for centuries provided a natural border separating European countries from those of North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia Minor, it also provided an important trade route and more recently it has assumed significance as a sea route for entry to the European Union (notably via Italy and Spain), for instance, by undocumented migrants. 437 438 Regional Movements Geographically, therefore, in 2007 Europe consisted of 48 countries, 47 of which (with a combined population of 800 million) are members of the Council of Europe (the exception being Belarus).


Scandinavia by Andy Symington

call centre, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, connected car, edge city, Eyjafjallajökull, full employment, glass ceiling, Kickstarter, low cost airline, mass immigration, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, out of africa, period drama, retail therapy, Skype, the built environment, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, urban sprawl, walkable city, work culture , young professional

A side trip from Stockholm on a Baltic ferry could take you to Helsinki (Click here ) or picturesque Tallinn (Click here ). » Other stops could include Göteborg (Click here ) or Kalmar (Click here ); more fjord-y Norwegian experiences at Fjærland (Click here ) and Geiranger (Click here ); or extra Danish time at Odense (Click here ) FINLAND AND THE BALTIC Two to Three Weeks Starting in Stockholm, this itinerary follows the old trading routes around the Baltic and covers plenty of Finland, including the capital, Helsinki, and beautiful Lakeland, also taking in the sumptuous Baltic cities of Tallinn and St Petersburg. » Kick things off in Stockholm (Click here ), for centuries a Baltic trading powerhouse. » From here, take advantage of the cheap, luxurious overnight ferries to Finland.


pages: 918 words: 260,504

Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West by William Cronon

active transport: walking or cycling, book value, British Empire, business cycle, City Beautiful movement, classic study, conceptual framework, credit crunch, gentleman farmer, it's over 9,000, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, New Urbanism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Robert Gordon, short selling, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Starting its existence as “a very small, dead place, consisting of about one dozen log huts,” Abilene began its brief time of glory in 1867 when an Illinois livestock dealer named Joseph G. McCoy purchased 250 acres and established a stockyard near the rail depot there.42 Texas cattlemen had already learned of the railroad’s westward extension but had been uncertain about where best to meet it. McCoy gave them their answer. He developed and promoted an old trading route, the Chisholm Trail, as the best corridor for bringing livestock north. It ended in Abilene. Cattle began to arrive there by August, and the first twenty-car shipment of animals left the city on September 5. Their destination, predictably enough, was Chicago.43 The great cattle drives of the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s are among the best known and most romantic of American frontier icons.


pages: 879 words: 309,222

Nobody's Perfect: Writings From the New Yorker by Anthony Lane

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Apollo 13, classic study, colonial rule, dark matter, Frank Gehry, General Magic , Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, Index librorum prohibitorum, junk bonds, Mahatma Gandhi, Maui Hawaii, moral hazard, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Strategic Defense Initiative, The Great Good Place, trade route, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, urban planning

Lucas groupies—of whom one hears so much, but of whose acquaintance one never actually seems to have the pleasure—contend that Star Wars is all about good and evil, or the search for a father figure, or the struggle to find significance in the universe at large. This being so, the same admirers may be troubled by the surprising revelation that The Phantom Menace is all about taxes. Why Lucas didn’t release it on April 15th is beyond my comprehension. The opening credits tell us that “The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute.” There are young Americans whose hearts will leap like deer at this news; if so, they will be the first creatures to be inspired, as the direct consequence of an aesthetic experience, to plan a career in the IRS. But that, after all, is the Lucas way. Geographically, the Star Wars series may be the most outlandish of sagas; in terms of its emotional politics, however, it remains the most shrinkingly conservative.


Northern California Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, bike sharing, Burning Man, buy and hold, California gold rush, California high-speed rail, call centre, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, dark matter, Day of the Dead, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Frank Gehry, friendly fire, gentrification, gigafactory, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, McMansion, means of production, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, Peoples Temple, Port of Oakland, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, the built environment, trade route, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Independence This sleepy highway town has been a county seat since 1866, but it's on the map because of its proximity to the Manzanar National Historic Site south of town and to wilderness trails in the Sierra Nevada. West of town via Onion Valley Rd (Market St in town), pretty Onion Valley harbors the trailhead for the Kearsage Pass (9.4 miles round-trip), an old Paiute trade route. This is also the quickest east-side access to the Pacific Crest Trail and Kings Canyon National Park. Fans of Mary Austin (1868–1934), renowned author of The Land of Little Rain and vocal foe of the desertification of the Owens Valley, can follow signs leading to her former house at 253 Market St. 1Sights oManzanar National Historic SiteHISTORIC SITE ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %760-878-2194; www.nps.gov/manz; 5001 Hwy 395; h9am-5:30pm Apr–mid-Oct, 10am-4:30pm mid-Oct–Mar; pc)SF A stark wooden guard tower alerts drivers to one of US history's darkest chapters, which unfolded on a barren, windy sweep of land some 5 miles south of Independence.


pages: 950 words: 297,713

Crucible: The Long End of the Great War and the Birth of a New World, 1917-1924 by Charles Emmerson

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, British Empire, continuation of politics by other means, currency peg, disinformation, Eddington experiment, Etonian, European colonialism, Ford Model T, ghettoisation, Isaac Newton, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Monroe Doctrine, Mount Scopus, new economy, plutocrats, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, trade route, W. E. B. Du Bois

‘Alarmist suggestions’ of a pandemic are dismissed. But the new strain is certainly virulent. By early summer it has shown up in all the armies of Europe, from American troops training near Bordeaux to soldiers from French Indochina being taught how to drive. It has spread out along the world’s trade routes to Bombay and Shanghai. But it is not yet a cause for undue alarm. People fall ill. They recover. The world does not stop. PARIS: Early June. A city under attack, still just within range of the most powerful guns of the German artillery, seventy-odd miles away. Two Americans turn up at the Gare du Nord and accost a taxi driver, asking him to take them to where the shells are bursting.


pages: 1,373 words: 300,577

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World by Daniel Yergin

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, book value, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, clean tech, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial innovation, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, index fund, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, John Deuss, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, market design, means of production, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, new economy, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Piper Alpha, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technology bubble, the built environment, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, trade route, transaction costs, unemployed young men, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

The Internet and reliance on complex information-technology systems have created a whole new set of vulnerabilities for energy and electric power infrastructure around the world by creating entry paths for those who wish to disrupt those systems. THE DIMENSIONS The usual definition of energy security is pretty straightforward: the availability of sufficient supplies at affordable prices. Yet there are several dimensions. First is physical security—protecting the assets, infrastructure, supply chains, and trade routes, and making provision for quick replacements and substitution, when need be. Second, access to energy is critical. This means the ability to develop and acquire energy supplies—physically, contractually, and commercially. Third, energy security is also a system—composed of the national policies and international institutions that are designed to respond in a coordinated way to disruptions, dislocations, and emergencies, as well as helping to maintain the steady flow of supplies.


The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 by John Darwin

anti-communist, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, classic study, cognitive bias, colonial rule, Corn Laws, disinformation, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, imperial preference, Joseph Schumpeter, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, labour mobility, land tenure, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, Mahatma Gandhi, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, New Urbanism, open economy, railway mania, reserve currency, Right to Buy, rising living standards, scientific management, Scientific racism, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, tacit knowledge, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, undersea cable

Fear of French, Russian and (later) German competition coincided with a great widening of maritime horizons towards East Asia (as a commercial jackpot) and the Pacific (as a sea and cable route). Naval ‘scares’ became a recurrent feature, and rival experts fumed and quarrelled. But there was no mystery about the entrenchment of seapower in the late-Victorian and Edwardian imagination. As the barrier to invasion from Europe, the guarantor of trade routes and food supply and the guardian of possessions and spheres more far-flung than before, the Navy seemed the key to Britain's place and prosperity in the new and uncertain ‘globe-wide world’. ‘It is the Navy’, intoned a Liberal minister in 1894, ‘which delivers us…from the curse of militarism.’121 This was all the more so with the rise of other world-states.


USA Travel Guide by Lonely, Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big-box store, bike sharing, Biosphere 2, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, edge city, El Camino Real, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, intermodal, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mars Rover, Mason jar, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, off grid, off-the-grid, Quicken Loans, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, supervolcano, the built environment, The Chicago School, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

Fourteen miles northeast of Farmington, the 27-acre Aztec Ruins National Monument (www.nps.gov/azru; adult/under 16yr $5/free; 8am-5pm Sep-May, 8am-6pm Jun-Aug) features the largest reconstructed kiva in the country, with an internal diameter of almost 50ft. A few steps away, let your imagination wander as you stoop through low doorways and dark rooms inside the West Ruin. In summer, rangers give early-afternoon talks at the c-1100 site about ancient architecture, trade routes and astronomy. About 35 miles south of Farmington along Hwy 371, the undeveloped Bisti Badlands & De-Na-Zin Wilderness is a trippy, surreal landscape of strange, colorful rock formations, especially spectacular in the hours before sunset; desert enthusiasts shouldn’t miss it. The Farmington BLM office ( 505-599-8900; www.nm.blm.gov; 1235 La Plata Hwy; 8am-4:30pm Mon-Fri) has information.

It’s a vivid contrast to the valley, with wildflower fields, azure lakes, ragged granite peaks and domes, and cooler temperatures. Hikers and climbers will find a paradise of options; swimming and picnicking by lakes are also popular. Access is via scenic Tioga Rd (Hwy 120), which follows a 19th-century wagon road and older Native American trading route. West of the meadows and Tenaya Lake , stop at Olmsted Point for epic vistas of Half Dome. IMPASSABLE TIOGA PASS Hwy 120 is the only road connecting Yosemite National Park with the Eastern Sierra, climbing through Tioga Pass (9945ft). Most California maps mark this road ‘closed in winter,’ which, while literally true, is also misleading.


Central Europe Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Defenestration of Prague, Fall of the Berlin Wall, flag carrier, Frank Gehry, Gregor Mendel, Guggenheim Bilbao, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, low cost airline, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Peter Eisenman, place-making, Prenzlauer Berg, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rubik’s Cube, Skype, trade route, urban renewal, white picket fence, young professional

Buses run less frequently to Žilina (€2.50, 1½ hours, five daily). Another alternative is to transfer by train from the main line to a trunk line in Kraľovany (€1.50, 55 minutes, six daily). Žilina 041 / POP 85,300 A Slavic tribe in the 6th century was the first to recognise Žilina’s advantageous location at the intersection of several important trade routes on the Váh River. Today it’s still a transit point for exploring Malá Fatra National Park, surrounding fortresses and folksy villages. It’s a pleasant little city, but there isn’t much to see besides the old palace-like castle on the outskirts. From the train station in the northeast, a walk along Národná takes you through Nám A Hlinku up to Mariánské nám, the main pedestrian square.


pages: 1,157 words: 379,558

Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris by Richard Kluger

air freight, Albert Einstein, book value, California gold rush, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, corporate raider, desegregation, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, family office, feminist movement, full employment, ghettoisation, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, junk bonds, medical malpractice, Mikhail Gorbachev, plutocrats, power law, publication bias, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, trade route, transaction costs, traveling salesman, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty

Within a century and a quarter, for better or worse, tobacco was spread throughout the globe, eventually recognized along with coffee, chocolate, and cane sugar as one of the treasured and unanticipated gifts of the New World to the Old. The Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian sailors who manned the early transatlantic voyages were eager bearers of the exotic leaf to their home ports, where its use took hold in the demimonde as a notorious heathen import, then followed the trade routes east to the Levant and on to Araby, Persia, and India. Dutch and Portuguese mariners are credited with extending the leafs sway to China, Japan, and the East Indies, where it took root. Turkish soil was also soon found hospitable, and a regional variant won ready consumers despite the strictures of Islam against its use as a denier of body and soul.


pages: 1,234 words: 356,472

Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton

Apollo 11, carbon-based life, clean water, corporate governance, disinformation, Magellanic Cloud, megacity, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, operational security, plutocrats, random walk, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, stem cell, the scientific method, trade route, urban sprawl

Because the only physical damage the Guardians cause is on Far Away, where nobody ever goes, and certainly nobody cares about apart from the Halgarths, and they can afford it anyway. Except, the pirates were actually the most bloodthirsty psychopaths, who slaughtered the crews of entire ships and wrecked economies because of the trade routes they closed down. You see the parallel here? It took decisive naval action to eliminate piracy. Now I gave you an entire department, with unlimited government resources, tasked to do one thing. I gave you that in good faith, because you are the Paula Myo, and everyone believes you are the one person in the Commonwealth who can run down Bradley Johansson for me.”


pages: 1,386 words: 379,115

Judas Unchained by Peter F. Hamilton

car-free, complexity theory, disinformation, forensic accounting, gravity well, megacity, megastructure, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, planetary scale, restrictive zoning, trade route, trickle-down economics, VTOL

‘Are you suggesting we commit genocide against them?’ Ramon DB asked lightly. ‘Are you suggesting we become the victims of genocide?’ Wilson countered. ‘This is not a war as we have fought them before. This is not a strategic struggle over key resources, we’re not fighting for control over tribal lands, or trade routes to the new colonies. Both us and the Primes are intersolar, there is no shortage of anything in the galaxy. They came here with one purpose, to kill us and to capture our worlds.’ ‘In that case we have experienced an analogous war in our history,’ Hans Brant said. ‘It would seem as if they are waging a religious crusade against us.’


pages: 1,178 words: 388,227

Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson

Danny Hillis, dark matter, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Free Software Foundation, gentleman farmer, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Neal Stephenson, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, retrograde motion, short selling, short squeeze, Snow Crash, the scientific method, trade route, urban planning

Remote islands and continents splayed on the parchment like stomped brains, the interiors blank, the coastlines trailing off into nowhere and simply ending in mid-ocean because no one had ever sailed farther than that, and the boasts and phant’sies of seafarers disagreed. Houses of Welf and Hohenzollern One of those maps had been of trade-routes: straight lines joining city to city. Jack could not read the labels. He could identify London and a few other cities by their positions, and Eliza helped him read the names of the others. But one city had no label, and its position along the Dutch coast was impossible to read: so many lines had converged on it that the city itself, and its whole vicinity, were a prickly ink-lake, a black sun.


pages: 1,199 words: 384,780

The system of the world by Neal Stephenson

bank run, British Empire, cellular automata, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, high net worth, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, land bank, large denomination, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, place-making, Snow Crash, the market place, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

In the first few days’ travel he had bobbled such bait before Daniel, but his angling had been in vain. Since then, Daniel had kept busy reading in his books and Mr. Threader writing in his. Both men were of an age when they were in no great hurry to make friends and share confidences. Starting friendships, like opening up new overseas trade routes, was a mad venture best left to the young. Still, from time to time, Mr. Threader would lob dry conversation-starters in Daniel’s direction. Just to be a good sport, Daniel would do the same. But neither man could accept the loss of face that attended curiosity. Daniel could not bring himself to come out and ask what Mr.


pages: 1,540 words: 400,759

Fodor's California 2014 by Fodor's

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, affirmative action, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, Blue Bottle Coffee, California gold rush, car-free, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Donner party, Downton Abbey, East Village, El Camino Real, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Kickstarter, Maui Hawaii, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, young professional

This collection of restored and replica ships affords a fascinating glimpse of San Diego during its heyday as a commercial seaport. The jewel of the collection, the Star of India, is often considered a symbol of the city. An iron windjammer built in 1863, the Star of India made 21 trips around the world in the late 1800s, when it traveled the East Indian trade route, shuttled immigrants from England to New Zealand, and served the Alaskan salmon trade. Saved from the scrap yard and painstakingly restored, the Star of India is the oldest active iron sailing ship in the world. The popular HMS Surprise, purchased in 2004, is a replica of an 18th-century British Royal Navy frigate and was used in the Academy Award–winning Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.


pages: 1,222 words: 385,226

Shantaram: A Novel by Gregory David Roberts

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, Burning Man, clean water, colonial rule, financial independence, friendly fire, invisible hand, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, trade route, unemployed young men, Yom Kippur War

‘When I was studying, in New York,’ he went on at last, ‘I was working on a thesis … well, I wrote a thesis, on un-organised trade in the ancient world. It’s an area that my mother was researching, before the ‘67 war. When I was a kid, she got me interested in the black markets of Assyria, Akkad, and Sumer, and how they related to trade routes, and taxes, and the empires that built up around them. When I started to write it myself, I called it Black Babylon.’ ‘It’s a catchy title.’ He fired a glance at me to reassure himself that I wasn’t mocking him. ‘I mean it,’ I said quickly, wanting to put him at ease because I was beginning to like him.


Executive Orders by Tom Clancy

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, card file, defense in depth, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, experimental subject, financial independence, flag carrier, friendly fire, Great Leap Forward, lateral thinking, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, one-China policy, operational security, out of africa, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, power law, rolodex, South China Sea, the long tail, trade route

They lack the necessary amphibious assets to move large numbers of troops for a forced-entry assault. So what happens if things blow up anyway? Most likely scenario is a nasty air and sea battle, but one that leads to no resolution, since neither side can finish off the other. That also means a shooting war astride one of the world's most important trade routes, with all sorts of adverse diplomatic consequences for all the players. I can't see the purpose in doing this intentionally. Just too destructive to be deliberate policy I think.” He shrugged. It didn't make sense, but neither did a deliberate attack on a harmless airliner-and he'd just told his audience that had probably been deliberate.


England by David Else

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, colonial rule, Columbine, company town, congestion charging, country house hotel, Crossrail, David Attenborough, David Brooks, Edward Jenner, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, period drama, place-making, retail therapy, sceptred isle, Skype, Sloane Ranger, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Hawking, the market place, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, unbiased observer, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent

Yorkshire Coastliner bus 840 (40 minutes from York, one daily) links Leeds, York, Castle Howard, Pickering and Whitby. THIRSK pop 9100 Monday and Saturday are market days in handsome Thirsk, which has been trading on its tidy, attractive streets and cobbled square since the Middle Ages. Thirsk’s brisk business was always helped by its key position on two medieval trading routes: the old drove road between Scotland and York, and the route linking the Yorkshire Dales with the coast. That’s all in the past, though: today, the town is all about the legacy of James Herriot, the wry Yorkshire vet adored by millions of fans of All Creatures Great and Small. Thirsk does a good job as the real-life Darrowby of the books and TV series, and it should, as the real-life Herriot was in fact local vet Alf Wight, whose house and surgery has been dipped in 1940s aspic and turned into the incredibly popular World of James Herriot ( 01845-524234; www.worldofjamesherriot.org; 23 Kirkgate; adult/child £5.50/3.90; 10am-5pm Easter-Oct, 11am-4pm Nov-Easter), an excellent museum full of Wight-related artefacts, a video documentary of his life and a re-creation of the TV show sets.


pages: 1,799 words: 532,462

The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication From Ancient Times to the Internet by David Kahn

anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, end-to-end encryption, Fellow of the Royal Society, heat death of the universe, Honoré de Balzac, index card, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Louis Daguerre, machine translation, Maui Hawaii, Norbert Wiener, out of africa, pattern recognition, place-making, planned obsolescence, Plato's cave, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, positional goods, Republic of Letters, Searching for Interstellar Communications, stochastic process, Suez canal 1869, the scientific method, trade route, Turing machine, union organizing, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

This was to inform their own forces of their locations, but FRUPAC solved the messages, and Jasper Holmes, an ex-submariner himself, relayed them to Voge, who broadcast them to the American submarines. This fattened their kill. Vice Admiral Charles A. Lockwood, Jr., who was COMSUBPAC during most of the war, estimated that cryptanalytic information stepped up American sinkings by about one third on the trade routes to the Philippines and the Marianas. Eventually the submarine commanders received it so regularly that they complained if a convoy reached its noon position half an hour late! The pigboats accounted for nearly two thirds of Japanese merchant tonnage sunk during the war. Their torpedoing of 110 tankers from the East Indies resulted in oil shortages in the homeland that prevented the training of badly needed pilots and forced a split-up of Japan’s Navy, with serious tactical results.