pA sweeping narrative history of world trade--from Sumer in 3000 BC to the firestorm over globalization today--that brilliantly explores trade's colorful and contentious past and provides fresh insights into social, political, cultural, and economic history, as well as a timely assessment of trade's future.p pAdam Smith wrote that man has an intrinsic propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another. But how did trade evolve to the point where we don't think twice about biting into an apple from the other side of the worldp pIn emA Splendid Exchangeem, William J. Bernstein tells the extraordinary story of global commerce from its prehistoric origins to the myriad controversies surrounding it today. He transports readers from ancient sailing ships that brought the silk trade from China to Rome in the second century to the rise and fall of the Portuguese monopoly in spices in the sixteenth from the rush for sugar that brought the British to Jamaica in 1655 to the American