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27 Apr 08
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26 Apr 08
orientalistA Splendid Exchange is a history of material goods that, in their relevant centuries, were deemed extremely desirable by societies that did not possess them -- tin, grain, iron, spices, textiles, steam engines, armaments, rubber, oil -- of the merchants a
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The Distant Horizon By Paul Kennedy From Foreign Affairs , May/June 2008 A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World . William J. Bernstein . Atlantic Monthly , 2008 , 384 30 Summary: William Bernstein's A Splendid Exchange, Strobe Talbott's The Great Experiment, and Amy Chua's Day of Empire take up the challenge of "Big History" -- and in the process shed light on the real choices policymakers face. PAUL KENNEDY is Dilworth Professor of History and Director of International Security Studies at Yale University and the author of 19 books, including The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. He is currently writing an operational history of World War II. Twenty years ago, the distinguished economic historian David Landes wrote an article in The New Republic about what he called "Big History." It was a review of William McNeill's extraordinary The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society Since A.D. 1000 and of my own more modest work The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. By the term "Big History," he did not have in mind such multivolume works as Arnold Toynbee's 12-volume A Study of History, or Samuel Morison's 15-volume History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, or Joseph Needham's impossible to count how many volumes of Science and Civilisation in China. Nor did Landes mean to imply by the use of "big" that this mode of inquiry was superior to that of the history-from-below school that had emerged, spectacularly, in the 1960s. He had no quarrel with accounts of life in Proven�al villages, of northern Italian millers, or of trade unionists in Lancashire. He was simply calling readers' attention to a different category or, if you like, a different level of historical writing. What Landes had in mind were single-volume books whose authors took hold of a vast topic and then wrestled it to the ground, comprehended it, and explained it
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25 Apr 08
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24 Apr 08
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