Bound Together How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers, and Warriors Shaped Globalization Nayan Chanda

Format:
Hardback
Publication date:
01 Jun 2007
ISBN:
9780300112016
Dimensions:
224 pages: 203 x 127 x 34mm
Illustrations:
Illustrations

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Since humans migrated from Africa and progressively dispersed throughout the world, they have found countless ways and reasons to reconnect with each other. In this entertaining book, Nayan Chanda follows the exploits of traders, preachers, adventurers, and warriors throughout history as they have shaped and reshaped the world. For Chanda, globalization is a process of ever-growing interconnectedness and interdependence that began thousands of years ago and continues to this day with increasing speed and ease. In the end, globalization - from the lone adventurer carving out a new trade route to the expanding ambitions of great empires - is the product of myriad aspirations and apprehensions that define just about every aspect of our lives: what we eat, wear, ride, or possess is the product of thousands of years of human endeavour and suffering across the globe. Chanda reviews and illustrates the economic and technological forces at play in globalization today and concludes with a thought-provoking discussion of how we can and should embrace an inevitably global world.

Nayan Chanda is director of publications, Yale Center for the Study of Globalization and editor, YaleGlobal Online. He is former editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review and the Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly.

'What stands out in Bound Together is its astonishing historical reach, which provides the basis for Chanda's examination of globalisation.' - Sam Medelson, Financial World Magazine

'To find a book that is prepared to venture into the lion's den, and actually say something new and interesting about a subject that has been done to death and contaminated by polemics is a rarity. To find a book that can say this with calm fluency and gentle argument is a pleasure...Bound Together does all this, and it does it in a literary style that is largely free of both economic theory and jargon.' - Julius Sen, World Business

'Mr. Chanda makes a solid and attractive case for globalisation and its potential as a force for good. But he also has a great deal of sympathy for globalisation's losers. In his closing chapter he notes coolly that "more than a billion people live on less than a dollar a day, and most are likely never to have made a phone call or to have travelled beyond their place of birth." In view of all that has gone before, this one simple point has more impact than any number of tractor-borne assaults on American fast-food restaurants by over-subsidised continental gourmets.' - The Economist

'Chandra knows his subject well, and has combined a reporter's curiosity and power of observation with the academic rigour of a scholar... Partisans on both sides can learn much from his book.' Salil Tripathi, Independent

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