The World's Sandbox-the History of Material Civilization

This book retells world history from the perspective of the ocean, revealing how people communicate and interact through oceans, rivers and lakes, as well as exchange and spread goods, products and culture. It aims to reveal that various groups, nations, countries and civilizations shape their own civilizations and history through waterways around the world. The author shows the connection between the rise and fall of civilization and the ocean, narrates the development of human navigation in a fascinating way, and composes an epic about the voyagers.

At the beginning of the 17th century, the nutmeg produced on an unknown island in the Pacific became the focus of competition among European countries in the spice competition. This triggered a fierce and bloody struggle between the Dutch East India Company and a small group of British spice merchants led by Nathaniel Courtop. This struggle eventually ended with the Netherlands and Britain reaching a deal with a far-reaching impact in history. The British ceded control of Lanyu Island to the Dutch, and in return received Manhattan. This book tells a wonderful adventure story. The author selects several representative spice merchants and vividly reproduces a legendary history for readers through their stories.

The author tells the story of the rise and fall of the world's major diets, from the mastery of grain cooking some 20,000 years ago to the present. Through the apparent jumble of diverse diets, the author reveals the underlying simplicity of a culinary genealogy, illustrating how cyclical changes in culinary philosophy about health, economics, politics, society, and belief in the gods drove the creation of new diets, some of which were chosen as imperial diets and came to dominate the world. The authors also illustrate how traders, missionaries, and armies moved diets across mountains, oceans, deserts, and political borders. This book's innovative narrative considers cooking, like language, clothing, or architecture, as a human creation. By emphasizing how cooking transforms produce into food and using the global rather than a specific country as the stage, it challenges the agrarian and romantic myths that underpin the contemporary food movement.

The historical Silk Road spanned the three continents of Europe, Asia and Africa, passing through deserts, grasslands, mountains, rivers and lakes, where countless materials and cultures were born, forming the splendid Silk Road civilization. The author selected ten ancient objects and narrated their stories, which not only showed the craftsmanship and shape, theme and decoration of the material, but also told the intricate connection between people and objects: Who created the material? Who carries them across mountains and rivers? Who regards them as treasures and sacred objects? Who abandoned them, and who unearthed them from the layers of loess... Materials and the people and society behind them interact with each other, different cultures collide and blend with each other, and economies, systems, technologies, and ideas continue to develop and evolve in the process of communication. All of this is integrated into a vivid and tangible history of Silk Road civilization.

This book reconstructs the history of Indian Ocean civilization and its gradual decline under the control of Western invaders. Through extraordinary narrative ability and keen analysis, author Richard Hall describes how the emergence of Europeans from the 16th century onwards irreversibly changed the lives of people along the Indian Ocean: prosperous kingdoms were conquered, and previous religious and ethnic relations fell into chaos; and, with the emergence of Western capitalism, ancient trade patterns soon became extinct. However, although European guns could create new empires in the East, their vast populations made it impossible for Westerners to suppress the East for long. In the thousands of years of changes in the Indian Ocean, African giants have formed the long western flank of the Indian Ocean and have played almost no role other than acting as silent bystanders. But after the mid-19th century, the potential of the various ethnic groups in sub-Saharan Africa was fully tested, and the monsoon of history blew again. This book reproduces the author's understanding of foreign cultures from a subtle and unobstructed perspective. This epic work is sure to inspire and inspire reading.