SEDUCTION BECOMES HER

by Shirlee Busbee

“We wanted to scream we had reached our goal,” wrote one, who in 1862 along with two companions had succeeded in gaining access to the court. A pile of books was brought out for them to see, including six manuscripts from the fabled library. In the end the quest was a failure; there was no hidden treasure trove. But some of the books had indeed survived for more than 300 years in Constantinople, others were found elsewhere and Marcus Tanner has written a lively account of the search.

Matthias, known as the “Raven King”, reigned from 1458 to 1490. He was born a commoner, albeit into a wealthy Transylvanian family. By the time he died, he had stemmed the relentless Ottoman advance through Europe and himself ruled over an empire that stretched from the Black Sea to Dalmatia and from Moravia to Bosnia. Within decades all of this was gone and for some 150 years Hungary was under Ottoman domination.

Hungarians came to regard Matthias’s rule as a golden age, the apogee of Hungarian power. Golden age in more senses than one: Matthias assembled one of Europe’s finest libraries, second in size only to the Vatican’s. Given that almost all of the books were copied by hand and richly illuminated, and that most of them came from Florence and had then to be transported to Hungary, this was an amazing, and amazingly expensive, achievement. After all, when Matthias settled on Beatrice, a Neapolitan, to be his bride, it took her three months to get to him along roads infested with highwaymen and Turkish raiders.

Though many of the books commissioned by Matthias were religious, a large proportion were not. Indeed, says Mr Tanner, his taste was decidedly “alpha male”. What he wanted were “war stories, lives of great rulers and books about inventions, geography, medicine, natural wonders and the stars”. When Hungary fell to the Turks and the library was lost, its size in the minds of men grew exponentially. Figures of up to 50,000 books were bandied about. In fact there were probably never more than 2,500.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Few historical enquiries tell us as much about the world we live in today as the search for the origins of world trade. As Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations, man has an intrinsic ‘propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another’.

A Splendid Exchange tells the epic story of global commerce from its prehistoric origins to the myriad controversies surrounding it today. It transports readers from the sugar rush that brought the British to Jamaica in 1655 to the firestorm over globalization today, moving from the silk route between China and Rome in the second century to the rise and fall of the Portuguese monopoly in spices in the sixteenth. Along the way, William Bernstein examines how our age-old dependency on trade has contributed to our planet’s agricultural bounty, stimulated intellectual and industrial progress and made us both prosperous and vulnerable.

Lively, authoritative, and astonishing in scope, A Splendid Exchange is a riveting narrative that views trade and globalization not in political terms, but rather as an evolutionary process that will continue to foster the growth of intellectual capital, shrink the world and propel the trajectory of the human species.

RECENT PRESS

The greatest journey

Jul 17th 2008
>From The Economist print edition

Largely for better, sometimes for worse, our world has been defined by trade

Bridgeman Art Library

WORLD trade gets a bad press: to many people globalisation seems more of a menace than an opportunity. Whether it is the threat to the environment posed by the phenomenal growth of Chinese manufacturing exports, the outsourcing of jobs by footloose corporations or the re-emergence of inflation as oil heads for $150 a barrel and food prices soar, trade is cast as the villain. As this year’s American presidential election campaign heads for the final straight, the candidates, especially Barack Obama, will face ever more strident demands to protect workers from “unfair” foreign competition.

By contrast, too little is heard about the positive effects of world exports that reached $14 trillion in 2006. The boost to Western living standards from all those cheap Chinese goods is taken for granted, while the astonishing increase in the sum of human happiness that has been wrought by lifting hundreds of millions of Asians from the misery of subsistence farming into comfortable prosperity is conveniently forgotten.

William Bernstein’s “A Splendid Exchange” is a timely and readable reminder that the desire to trade is not only one of the oldest human instincts but also the cause of many of the most important developments in our shared history. As Adam Smith observed: “The propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another is common to all men, and to be found in no other race of animals.”

Mr Bernstein’s purpose is to show how that trait evolved and shaped the world. His story begins with Sumerian farmers who realised, some time in the third millennium BC, that the surpluses of grain generated within Mesopotamia’s fertile crescent could be used as barter for things they did not have. Among these was copper, obtained from Sinai several hundred miles to the west, that could be used to make weapons to repel the nomadic raiders who were otherwise helping themselves to the fruits of Sumerian labour.

Mr Bernstein eschews a rigidly chronological narrative in favour of a more thematic approach. His discussion of the disastrous Peloponnesian war between Athens and Sparta serves to make a wider point about the importance (and vulnerability) of sea-lanes. The Athenians were driven by the dictates of trade to create first a powerful navy and then an empire.

Though Greek agriculture was rich in highly exportable wine and olive oil, thin soil, low rainfall and a mountainous topography made it impossible for farmers to produce enough grain for a growing and increasingly city-based population. The Spartans and their allies looked west to Sicily but the Athenians increasingly relied on access to the breadbasket of Pontus (modern Ukraine). This, in turn, meant keeping open those narrowest of choke points: the Dardanelles (to the Greeks, the Hellespont) and the Bosphorus.

Other states in the region were just as dependent on the trade with Pontus and were therefore prepared to contribute to the costs of Athenian naval operations. Before long, this “coalition of the willing” evolved into the Athenian empire. However, with two rival power blocks competing for resources within a relatively confined space, conflict was inevitable and when it came, it was Athens, always more exposed than Sparta, that was eventually starved to defeat. Today, it is the Straits of Hormuz, through which much of the world’s oil is carried, that has acquired the same strategic importance as the Hellespont had for the Athenians.

With an ability to switch gracefully from the macro to the micro, Mr Bernstein whisks his reader on a tumultuous journey. Along the way, it takes in the Pax Islamica established in the Mediterranean by the heirs of the Prophet Muhammad (a trader by profession himself); the rise and decline of Venice and Genoa; the devastation caused by the Black Death; the Portuguese-led age of discovery; the establishment of the great Dutch and British East India trading companies; the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade; the campaign (that led, among other things, to the founding of this newspaper) to abolish the Corn Laws; the golden period of the late 19th century in which trade flourished under the benign wing of the British empire; and the 20th century’s descent into beggar-my-neighbour protectionism.

The strength of Mr Bernstein’s book is the analytical rigour that overlays the rollicking history and the way in which he seamlessly weaves in the theoretical with the practical. For anyone wanting a painless primer in the ideas of Adam Smith, David Ricardo or more recent economists, such as Paul Samuelson, this is the place to find it. At the same time, Mr Bernstein never neglects the vital role of technology as a driver of trade, above all perhaps the coming of steam and reliable refrigeration.

The author also deserves credit for his willingness to take seriously the plight of the victims of trade, the workers and farmers displaced by the iron rule of comparative advantage. He argues, persuasively, that it is far better to help workers affected by disruptive change than it is to shield industries with efficiency-destroying tariffs.

BOTTLEMANIA: HOW WATER WENT ON SALE AND WHY WE BOUGHT IT

by ELIZABETH ROYTE

(中文书名(仅供参考):疯迷瓶裝水)

ABOUT THE BOOK

「水」是人們的基本需求，在重視生活品質的現代社會，飲用瓶裝水成為日常的生活習慣。便利商店裡的瓶裝水總類繁多，瓶裝水銷量已超過牛奶、啤酒僅次於汽水。然而所謂的礦泉水、深層水、鹼性水等令人目不暇給的品牌與種類，我們真的了解手中正在飲用的水嗎？！

瓶裝水對於環境已造成重大影響。製造水與瓶裝水容器的過程更消耗了許多能源。在全球鼓吹節能的風潮下，不喝瓶裝水的主張逐漸被重視。此書深入探討瓶裝水的歷史、產業結構、水源污染及文化社會等面向，提供對於瓶裝水的深層反思。

An incisive, intrepid, and habit-changing narrative investigation into the commercialization of our most basic human need: drinking water. Having already surpassed milk and beer, and second now only to soda, bottled water is on the verge of becoming the most popular beverage in the country. The brands have become so ubiquitous that we’re hardly conscious that Poland Spring and Evian were once real springs, bubbling in remote corners of Maine and France. Only now, with the water industry trading in the billions of dollars, have we begun to question what it is we’re drinking and why.

In this intelligent, eye-opening work of narrative journalism, Elizabeth Royte does for water what Eric Schlosser did for fast food: she finds the people, machines, economies, and cultural trends that bring it from nature to our supermarkets. Along the way, she investigates the questions we must inevitably answer. Who owns our water? What happens when a bottled-water company stakes a claim on your town’s source? Should we have to pay for water? Is the stuff coming from the tap completely safe? And if so, how many chemicals are dumped in to make it potable? What’s the environmental footprint of making, transporting, and disposing of all those plastic bottles?

A riveting chronicle of one of the greatest marketing coups of the twentieth century as well as a powerful environmental wake-up call, Bottlemania is essential reading for anyone who shells out two dollars to quench their daily thirst.

RELATED ARTICLE

Waterlog

Jul 17th 2008
From The Economist print edition

“SPARKLING or still?” The waiter’s question seems to offer a choice, but is in fact designed to deny it: tap water, after all, is never on the menu. According to Elizabeth Royte’s “Bottlemania”, in 2002 Nestlé produced a training manual aimed at waiters called “Pour on the Tips”. Converting guests to pricey bottled water, it said, could boost their monthly earnings by $100 or more. Some waiters even try to humiliate people who resist. “I get great pleasure out of making each of those ladies who are trying to impress their friends repeat the word ‘tap’ back to me,” wrote a server on “The Waiter’s Revenge”, an online message board.

Snobbery, convenience and worries about tap water have propelled the American bottled-water industry from sales of $4 billion in 1997 to $10.8 billion in 2006. Globally the industry is now worth about $60 billion. As well as the plain variety, there are now bottled waters laced with all sorts of extra ingredients, such as caffeine, appetite suppressants, skin enhancers and even laxatives. Bottled-water giants such as Nestlé, the Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo reckon that the market will continue to fizz. Last year Coca-Cola spent $4.1 billion to buy Glacéau, a firm that makes vitamin-enhanced water.

For bottled-water firms large and small it has been a marketing triumph. So confident are they that one executive promised a gathering of Wall Street analysts in 2000 that tap water would eventually be used only for showers and washing dishes. For those who enjoy conspiracy theory, public water fountains are mysteriously disappearing; renovated airports, for instance, emerge without their fountains—and a proliferation of drinks-vending machines.

Villain of the piece?

It should be easy enough to pillory bottled water. It costs between 250 and 10,000 times more than tap water and in blind tastings people cannot usually separate the fancy beverage from the ordinary stuff. Then there is the environmental cost: according to one estimate, the total energy required to make and deliver each bottle of water is equivalent to filling them a quarter of the way with oil. While New Yorkers enjoy the services of water sommeliers, millions of people in developing countries lack access to any clean water at all.

But although Ms Royte displays all the usual prejudices—private enterprise bad, collective provision good—her book concludes that even in rich countries tap water sometimes contains small quantities of harmful chemicals. She also points out that in water shortages, local authorities may supply people with water reclaimed from sewage without telling them. Bottled water, therefore, “has its place”: a confused message, if an honest one.

Nor do all bottled-water companies come out badly. In Fiji, half of whose inhabitants did not have access to clean water last year, the water-bottler plays an important part in the local economy: it pays well above the minimum wage, builds schools for workers’ children and puts money into a trust for local infrastructure.

Yet in the past few years a backlash against bottled water has gathered pace, with some upmarket restaurants deciding to offer only tap. Gisele Bundchen, a supermodel who has campaigned to conserve fresh water in Brazil, now sports a reusable metal water bottle. What waiter could complain about that?