The story inside
Part 1From Feudalism to Capitalism
The story opens with the Black Death. It killed roughly a third of Europeans, and then serfdom faded in the West while it hardened in Poland, Russia, and Prussia. Why would the same plague do opposite things? By 1600 the silver city of Potosí was bigger than Seville, and in 1812 Parliament made breaking a machine a capital crime.
Part 2Crises and Transformations
Then the crashes. In 1907, with no central bank, J. P. Morgan locked the leading financiers in his private library and would not let them out. In October 1929, Irving Fisher announced that stock prices had reached “what looks like a permanently high plateau.” In 1973 a barrel of oil went from about $3 to nearly $12 in three months, and soon inflation and unemployment were rising together, which the dominant theory said could not happen.
Part 3Trade and Globalization
And the oldest business of all. According to Herodotus, Arabian traders said cinnamon came from birds’ nests on cliffs no one could climb: why would a seller tell fairy tales about his own product? Vasco da Gama lost half his crew and brought back spices worth sixty times the cost of the voyage. From there, the ships and the trade routes lead all the way to the T-shirt you are wearing.