A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World From Pre-History to the Present
By William Bernstein
Atlantic Books £22, 467 pages A parallel story about the globalisation of goods, colourfully retailed. Trade, the basic human instinct, propelled merchant and military adventurers and fuelled empires. Now it is seen as a guarantor of peace. But why does free trade remain politically so problematic? Bernstein tries to explain.

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
By Niall Ferguson
Allen Lane £25, 442 pages
From cowrie shells to collateralised debt obligations, a timely and readable survey of what Ferguson – a contributing editor to the FT – calls the “crystallised relationship between debtor and creditor”. Speculative bubbles are inevitable, he says, but they arrest only briefly the fascinating evolution of the system.