Economist editor,Tom Standage, says if you want to get a good picture of world history, you should look at spices.
In his book, An Edible History of Humanity, Standage writes about how tall tales of carnivorous birds and flying snakes let Arab middleman charge Europeans inflated prices for cinnamon and pepper for years. Standage says it wasn’t until an Indian ship went adrift in the Red Sea that the Europeans realized there was an easier route to get all those spices they had been craving.
Tom Standage is the business editor of The Economist. He started his career as the Science and Technology Editor at the Guardian, and has written several books which merge popular science and history including Victorian Internet, The Neptune File and The Mechanical Turk and A History of the World in 6 Glasses.
His latest book is An Edible History of Humanity, an account of the key role food has played in our history.
http://skeptic.org.uk/podcasts/little-atoms/564-tom-standage-an-edible-history-of-humanity
Before governments had regulators with suits and briefcases, says College of William and Mary history professor Philip Daileader, they had knights. The Lancelots of real life went around the kingdom forcing people to pay whatever the knights decided they owed. It was a brutal economic approach. If you think the knights were tough, be thankful you never faced the guild system. It existed to eliminate competition and benefit producers at the expense of consumers. Craftspeople fought each other for control and tried to limit access to the market — at their own expense, it turned out.
Tagged with economics planet money medieval history
Does the existence of hope unfulfilled make for a worse life? Medieval historian Philip Daileader says it might. People in places like 12th and 13th century France lived far more constrained economic lives than we do, but they had no expectations that their situations would ever improve.
Tagged with economics planet money medieval history