The Debt We Owe to Trade
It was the year 1600, and coffee had become wildly popular all over Europe, just as it
had been popular all over the Muslim world since its discovery 900 years earlier.
The sitting pope was Clement VIII.
His advisors urged him to do something to stop the coffee mania then spreading across
Christendom.
He tasted the coffee, reflected on its properties, and then, to the astonishment of his advisors,
blessed it as a Christian beverage.
Long live the Pope!
Matters weren't so simple in the Protestant world.
The beverage was still a raging controversy in parts of Germany in the eighteenth century,
as J.S. Bach's hilarious Coffee Cantata demonstrates.
The story, which is apparently true from all the checking I've done, appears on page
247 of a marvellous book that covers not only the expansion of the coffee trade, but trade
of all goods and services from the Stone Age to the present day, and does so in a marvellously
intriguing way.
The book is A Splendid Exchange How Trade Shaped the World by William J. Bernstein.
The book is long, 494 pages, but engaging on every page.
After finishing the book, I found myself thinking about its contents constantly.
Its subject is so ubiquitous that it is hardly ever closely analyzed.
The time period stretches from age to age.
The geography covers the planet, and the items covered include spices, coffee, silk, pigs
and pork, precious metals, oil, and really just about everything else.
Bernstein demonstrates thousands of times that the world as we know it would be unrecognizable
without trade, and shows that trade has shaped who we are in ways that none of us fully recognize.
The historical detail is amazing.
The writing is scholarly but clear and fascinating on every page.
Try to imagine Italian cuisine without the tomato, the highlands around Targiling without
tea plants, an American table without wheat bread or beef, German cooking without the
and a potato, or a cafe anywhere in the world beyond coffee's birthplace in Yemen without
coffee.
Such was the world prior to 1492, before billions of acres of farmland were taken over with
species from remote lands.
It is not part of natural law – it was a result of deliberation and work.
Fantastic economic and physical risks were involved.
It is one of the ways in which the garden of this world has been tilled and kept by
mankind inch by square inch.
The Bernstein book helps keep all the controversy about globalization in context.
There is absolutely nothing new about globalization – nothing.
The progress of globalization has been on its current trajectory for the whole of recorded
history.
This trade has made the world ever more prosperous, and why?
Because trade has permitted populations across the globe to cooperate to their mutual betterment.
Without trade, the human population would shrink, and most of us would die.
Even a slight curtailment of trade can bring on economic depression and dramatically shrink
our standards of living.
It is one of the great failings of the human race that we tend to regard the wealth that
surrounds us as a given, something that is just part of the world that will last forever
and requires no work to acquire.
Part of the reason we commit this error is our general tendency to contemplate only what
we experience in our lifetimes.
But the wealth that surrounds us is the fruit of the whole of history, the accumulated capital
of the Human Race from all time.
We are born into it, it grows while we live, and then we die.
Appreciating the bigger picture entails transcending one's own brief interval of experience.
This is precisely what Bernstein's book does.
It takes us outside the here and now and helps us understand the big picture.
And he does this by looking at the details of goods traded and lands far away during
all times.
This book is beautifully written and wonderfully interesting on every page.
I can't recommend it enough.
My only complaints are minor ones.
Bernstein doesn't seem to have a solid theory of trade that goes beyond neoclassical economic
conventions.
Had he put one up front, he would have been able to go beyond the very good chronicle
It is another example of how Smith's propensity to truck and barter has misled, instead of
seeing trade as an extension of human rationality, a mutually beneficial exchange that extends
from the desire to better one's lot in life.
He treats the entire subject as if it were an instinct of some sort.
But that is a regrettable oversight that in no way diminishes the contribution here.
My second complaint concerns the final chapter, which conforms to a rule often cited by the
late Murray Rothbard, that all final chapters of books should just be removed.
Bernstein spends the entire book showing us how trade can take place without any government
Management, and then uses the last chapter to argue for government-managed trade in the
form of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the World Trade Organization.
You just want to shout, read your own book, Mr. Bernstein!
In general, I would have appreciated a less tentative conclusion, something along the
lines of pointing out that trade is what makes it possible for all great and glorious things
is to take shape in this world, and without which only a few people would be alive, living
in caves and eating whatever they could hunt or gather.
The book is even more important than the author knows.