Greg Clydesdale's Waves of Prosperity: India, China, and the West: How Global Trade Transformed the World is only the latest in a rather long line of popular press titles exploring the history and trends of international trade and globalization. (Borderless Economies, The Ascent of Money, and A Splendid Exchange are just some of the others that come to mind, for those who want to explore the genre further.)
Clydesdale uses the shipping industry as a proxy for globalization and explores its evolution over the last thousand years. In particular, he explores the ways in which a country exploits its natural advantages - whether geographic, demographic, resources, or so on - to take a definitive economic lead, only to then rest on its laurels while other countries catch up through a process of imitation and innovation until the trailing country(ies) takes the lead. In this way, he travels from Gujarat and China to Malacca and on to the Spanish and Portuguese, the Dutch, the British, the Americans and Japanese and back again to China.
Clydesdale also explores the ways in which culture shapes government actions and, ultimately, trade itself. These forces are educational, but also as inherently ingrained as the populace's attitudes toward individualism and free markets. As shown time and again, social structures impact economies, sometimes subtly and sometimes starkly. Nowhere is this illustrated more clearly than when Clydesdale sets out to compare the Japanese and American approaches to trade in the late twentieth century: amalgamation vs. anti-trust; cooperation vs. competition; MITI vs. free markets.
Unfortunately, I imagine Clydesdale is largely preaching to the choir here. The globalists, who surely comprise the overwhelming number of readers, won't find much new here, while the isolationists are unlikely to crack the cover. Which is too bad, because there's a lesson on innovation and economic decline here as much as absolute and comparative advantage.
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