[ElJefe]

Enormously informative and richly detailed history of global trade. The authors are not beyond inserting snippets of political correctness, such as allusions to the supposed moral superiority of Arab slave traders, but I forgive them for providing such rich detail on so many other areas. Again, hardly any books can be read by themselves because authors so often have an agenda, but this one should be included in any man's library who wishes to put global trade and economic power in context.

[ElJefe]

I just finished the final parts of this book.

In general, I would not recommend it. It reads like an economics paper providing a review over the latest research. In order to cover everything over the last 1,000 years, it passes over topics rather quickly - it does offer very interesting insights, for instance on the British fiscal-military state of the 18th century of the convergence of commodity prices during the industrial revolution, or even the true nature of the early Portuguese and Dutch East India Companies, but the value of their contribution is seriously undermined in my view when they demonstrate CLEAR ignorance on for instance Arab slavery, where they on page 54 allude to the moral superiority of Arab slavers by pointing out the lack of distinct African minorities in the Middle East.

The answer is, of course, because they only bought men (some 50,000 per year, and they continued to buy new slaves until the 20th century - read up on Gordon of Khartoum to learn about how he stopped the Arab slavers in the Sudan in the late 19th century), and they cut their balls off. For their harems, Arabs preferred European, especially Northern European women (they still do) which is why you find so many Arab coins in Scandinavia. Vikings would pillage each other and the Anglo-Saxons, and sell the captured slaves on to merchants who would cross the Russian rivers and make their way to the Black Sea or the Caspian, and then sell their female slaves to Arabs. So Africans were desired only for work and death, and Europeans for sex.

In many other instances, they assign moral superiority to many non-white groups, for instance describing Native American tribes as "bravely" resisting the ruthless Europeans... and I'm sure they were brave, but you get my point - these guys just reiterate the basic message that Europeans are mostly bad and non-white people mostly good.

Which brings me to my next point... in rating books in this part of the forum, may I suggest two parallel scales? An overall measure of reading worthiness and also a red-pill measure in order to assess overall usefulness in advancing red-pill thinking?

Overall score: 4/5 as a reference work
Red-pill score: The book scores 1/5 stars on the red-pill scale.