100 books like Trading Roles

What Mangan’s work does for the Andes, Velasco Murillo’s scholarship does for Mexico. The book covers an astounding historical range, taking readers through the first silver strikes in Zacatecas under colonial rule until the edge of early nation-statehood. In telling this 250-year history of Zacatecas, Velasco Murillo demonstrates how Indigenous mining communities, their labor, and the capital they generated were critical to shaping – and were shaped by – emerging ideas of mestizo citizenship. It does so, moreover, by centering women and Indigenous miners in ways that other social histories of mining had not yet accomplished. Velasco Murillo shows definitively that the history of silver is not just underground – it is a story of women who prepare food, raise children, and form a political and economic community is life-giving, meaning-making ways across urban geographies and remote mining spaces. Readers looking for new ways to understand mining and revolution in… show more.

In this methodologically creative approach, Rossana Barragán narrates the history of colonial Andean silver through images. The slim, 90-page book is organized around 12 images and their global movements. Barragán expertly analyzes scenes of underground mining that other European empires used to justify their own violence, depictions of the Cerro Rico that appealed to Ottoman sensibilities, and the architecture of the mint of Antwerp, the city responsible for coining much of Potosí’s silver and printing many of the books and images that shaped early modern understandings of the Andes. Readers looking for an accessible history of the global consequences of Potosí will be well-served by Barragán’s work.

Kris Lane’s new work on Potosí does in words what Barragán does in images. Lane manages to tell a story that is at once global and comprehensive yet still rooted in local details of mineral extraction, assay, and coining. This book takes us from underground tunnels, adits, and galleys into refineries and, especially, the mint of Potosí. Readers seeking a big-picture view of the importance of Latin American mining and metallurgy to the story of the Spanish empire, and one told in vivid detail and readable prose, will find a lot to like here.

Although mining in the colonial period has lasting implications for contemporary public policy, extractive industries, and science and technology, few books can tell this 500-year history in the detail it requires. Kendall Brown’s History of Mining in Latin America is one of those few. In vivid prose, Brown explains key aspects of economic, technological, and labor history that shaped mining and metallurgical industries in the major mining zones of Mexico, Brazil, and the Andes, as well as less-studied regions like the Caribbean and Nueva Granada. Readers looking for a comprehensive regional synthesis that shows change over time will learn a lot from Brown’s book.

Mises was often referred to as the “godfather of Austrian Economics” for his voluminous contributions to economic science. This book is his most well-known and hefty treatise. 

Mises expertly walks the reader through his explanation of economics being a branch of praxeology, the study of the implications of human action. With a passionate writing style, Mises pulls no punches on his critics while providing the reader with a graduate-level economic education without the often-confusing technical jargon academic courses often impose on students.

Mises uses explanatory language rather than mathematical equations and graphs to make his points. The book is not light reading, however, and should not be attempted without first gaining some understanding of the Austrian School of Economics. And weighing in at nearly 900 pages, expect to set aside some time to get through it. But it will be time well spent.

Covo investigates long-neglected economic aspects of the Haitian Revolution. Beginning in the pre-revolutionary period, when the French called the colony of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti) the “Pearl of the Caribbean,” this deeply researched book spotlights the role Haiti played as a commodities hub during the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions. I find this book particularly important because it shows how imperial trade and racial capitalism defined the age of commercial republicanism.

This book by David Aslanian features the Armenian merchants of the New Julfa district of the city of Isfahan in modern-day Iran. They conducted long-distance trade between India and Europe and competed against some of the giant corporations of the day such as the Dutch East India Company. The experts of the old silk road trade competed against the new maritime trades well into the nineteenth century.

In The Confusions of Pleasure Timothy Brook captures the consternation of a local official as he witnesses the cultural and economic changes wrought by the rise of private wealth in the late Ming, (c. 1600). Unable to raise adequate revenue or to adapt the conservative agrarian foundations of its legitimacy to changing times, the Ming eventually collapses from within, unable to protect itself from marauding bands led by a disgruntled former government post station worker and subsequent invasion by a foreign force. Yet, those who are able to adapt to changing times survive. The resonances for our own day are multiple and apt. 

This book examines the exotics imported into China during the Tang Dynasty (A.D. 618-907) and depicts their influence on Chinese life. During the three centuries of Tang came into the land the natives of almost every nation of Asia, all bringing exotic wares either as gifts or as goods to be sold. Ivory, rare woods, drugs, diamonds, magicians, dancing girls—the author covers all classes of unusual imports, their places of origin, their lore, their effect on fashion, dwellings, diet, painting, sculpture, music, and poetry.

This book is for students of Tang culture and laymen interested in the same topic. Its author Edward Schafer was an eminent American sinologist.

Colleen Kriger illuminates the commercial exchanges between European and Africans in the Upper Guinea Coast, a region covering present-day Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, between 1680 and 1715.

Explaining how these economic exchanges relied on existing West African trading routes, Kriger examines the role of England’s Royal African Company which lead the trade of enslaved Africans in the region.

West African commodity currencies such as bar iron, cloth, and cowry shells were carefully organized in bundles that became unities of measure and exchange in the Upper Guinea trade external trade in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

She underscores the cultural norms underlying economic exchanges. For example, exchanging gifts to start and continue the trade was a central protocol. Kriger’s book ultimately shows that the trade in people was shaped by the creation and exchange of things.