When Iron is More Valuable Than Gold: 60 Stories Behind World Trade
by (italian) Alessandro Giraudo
About This Novel
In the slave market on the ancient Greek island of Delos, a woman with gray eyes was worth four ordinary women, and a slave who knew how to make a knife earned 500 times more than a free worker. In the eighth century AD, a Tang Dynasty princess hid silkworm cocoons in her dowry and brought the secret of silk to Khotan. The spice market was so profitable that the Dutch even exchanged Manhattan Island for the nutmeg-rich Ploren Island from the British. Before and after the Great Geographical Discovery, a new trade pattern emerged in Eurasia. Supply and demand relationships, pricing strategies, industrial espionage, and technology dissemination affect the interest relationships between countries. Weather changes and political and military activities changed trade routes, and desert fleets were gradually replaced by sea fleets. Economic interests are switching between land and sea, and the world's political and economic structure has become confusing. The stories of precious metals, spices, and color manufacturing techniques told by Alessandro Giraudo plunge us into the boiling economic history.
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