Second Thoughts

Jerry Bentley, Old World Encounters (1993). A wonderfully succinct and engaging history of cross-cultural interaction all across Afro-Eurasia before 1500.

William J. Bernstein, A Splendid Exchange (2008). A global account of “how trade shaped the world.”

E. W. Bovill, The Golden Trade of the Moors (1970). A classic account of the trans-Saharan trade.

Nayan Chanda, Bound Together (2007). Places contemporary globalization in a rich world historical context.

K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean (1985). A well-regarded study that treats the Indian Ocean basin as a single region linked by both commerce and culture during the third-wave era.

Philip Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (1984). Explores long-distance trade as a generator of social change on a global level.

Xinru Liu, The Silk Road in World History (2010). A brief, accessible, and up-to-date account by a leading scholar.

“The Last Salt Caravan,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNwQeLFk74o. A ten-minute trailer for a documentary showing an early twenty-first-century camel caravan crossing the Sahara, reminiscent of much earlier caravans of the Sand Roads network.

Silk Road Seattle, http://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/. A wonderful Web site about the Silk Road with many artistic images and maps as well as extensive narrative description of that vast network of exchange.