The books are not listed in any preferential order, but there is still ‘pattern’ to their arrangement.
Arguably a modern day Adam Smith. The essential conclusion is that ‘culture’ determines a nation’s fortunes. We have yet to learn if a form of Confucianism might yet be the 21st Century’s winning culture.
Morris does not so much accept culture as geography as a nation’s most important asset when it comes to predicting its future. See Tim Marshall’s two books below for a reinforcement of this argument.
Ferguson believes the West won after it developed six ‘killer apps’ after 1500: competition, science, property, medicine, consumerism and the work ethic. The East has downloaded these apps…and added a few of its own. In the 21st Century geopolitical and geoeconomic arm-wrestle, it is not clear who will be the ultimate winner.
Frankopan’s remarkable overview of one of the least written about - yet in today’s world, most important - regions of the world: Eurasia or, in Mackinder’s atlas, the Heartland.
I particularly like this Niall Ferguson book for the ‘compare and contrast’ between the two financial hegemons: Britain in 1900 vs the US in 2000. For all the ostensible similarities, there were some big - and important - differences too.
If the “Everything Bubble” bursts, this is the book that will come to haunt almost every Western World central banker since - and including - Alan Greenspan.
Leonard tells the story of how the Fed - notwithstanding the rearguard defence of Governor Thomas Koenig - drugged American capitalism with easy money. The question now is can the US break this addiction.
First issued just before the Greenspan Bubble burst and updated just after the Global Financial crisis, this book has stood the test of time. Also interesting for what it says about the geoeconomics and geopolitics of countries outside the West.
YNH may not be to everyone’s liking but there is no doubt that he has opened the eyes of many as to where humanity might be heading. This book does precisely that. See also his brilliant essay on AI in The Economist.
The first of a pair of books by Tim Marshall. Great prescience on the geographic straitjacket that probably drove Putin to launch a war against Ukraine. Geopolitics as geography.
Marshall shows that not only is demographics destiny: geography is too.
Is this the book that began the modern publishing trend of big picture economics? You have to admire the audacious subtitle…especially as Diamond begins by saying that he has not said much on the most recent thousand years as nothing much has happened during this period!
After Ferguson above, what got the West going, tantalised by land explorers that glimpsed Asia and its riches, was the discovery of the sea route to Asia and the Americas. FF-A details how the ‘discover new worlds’ bug gripped the West for 400 years.
Marjorie Shaffer tells how pepper was the pot of gold at the end of the exploration rainbow. Quoting Salman Rushdie’s mother: “India was not so much sub-continent as sub-condiment. What the world wanted from bloody mother India was day-light clear. They came for the hot stuff, just like any man calling on a tart.”
Two companies in particular were to reshape the world after 1600: the Dutch and British East India Companies. Darymple tells the odious tale of how the latter subjugated India.
Not content with dehusking India, the British East India Company set in motion the same fate for China by precipitating the Opium Wars. China was to be too rich a prize for but one company to bring to its knees. By 1900, most of Europe, the US, Russia and Japan had combined forces to dehusk China.
The book that shook me too! Kynge’s book was remarkable for its prescience, prescience that could only come from the FT Correspondent’s Beijing assignment. Many books have echoed and filled out his predictions but this was the one that - at least for me - allowed me to glimpse into a very different future. Afterwards, I also started reading Chinese history and realised that the transformation the world is now seeing was in many respects pre-destined.
Only by reading Chinese history did I became aware of the fact that, for 21 of the past 23 centuries, Asia has been the centre of gravity for the global economy. As Khanna details, the status quo ante is being restored and there seems little the West can do to stop Asia reclaiming its economic birthright.
