Philip Coggan in More opens a chapter on the global history of human energy use with a vignette about clams. Some species of clam, Coggan explains, harness the sun's power with the aid of specialized cells in their soft tissues called iridocytes. Packed with tiny crystals, the iridocytes scatter light like prisms over columns of algae living inside the clams as symbiotic partners. The algae, in turn, photosynthesize at rapid rates, fixating more carbon that the clams can absorb to grow and develop. Seemingly removed from pertinent subjects like electric lights and gasoline engines, the phenomenon has nevertheless inspired research that could lead to more efficient solar arrays and biofuels. Thus, clams represent a promising if unexpected direction in humankind's centuries-long efforts to discover untapped energy sources. Coggan's point is simply that people will continue such efforts for generations because the potential economic as well as environmental payoffs are so great—and therein lies the bigger story.
The vignette exemplifies the style, structure, and substance of Coggan's book as a whole. Best known as the author of The Economist's Bartleby column on management and work, Coggan promises with More a comprehensive layperson's guide to the world economy and delivers in style. Focusing on the evolution of trade, the state, and finance from prehistory to the present, the veteran journalist engrosses the reader by alternating between chronological and thematic storytelling in eighteen digestible chapters. To weave the two kinds of chapters together, Coggan uses a strong normative position on economic growth as a common thread. The overarching narrative, the author insists, must be one of progress. While the allure of material wealth has repeatedly driven humanity to genocide and ecocide, the global economy now enables more people in more places to “have many more choices over how to live their lives” than ever before (p. 8). He also embraces nuance, pledging to elaborate “a warts-and-all history” that still underscores “how far we have come” (p. 13). The resulting tension gives rise to the book's greatest strengths and weaknesses.
In the chronological chapters, Coggan guides the reader from the earliest recorded sales of barley in Stone-Age Mesopotamia to Donald Trump's inauguration of a trade war with China via two periods of “Great Enrichment,” a term borrowed from Deirdre N. McCloskey denoting sudden surges in economic growth. He exposits the first enrichment, the British Industrial Revolution, in the framework of a detective story to highlight the rich scholarly debates on its causes and geography. Engaging with the usual suspects, including colonialism, scientific culture, and legal institutions, among several others, the author develops “the ‘Orient Express’ explanation,” a riff on Agatha Christie's famous whodunit that means all the key factors interacted to produce the breakthrough of sustained expansion (p. 103). The explanation provides a springboard into the book's latter half, in which the second, more gradual enrichment unfolds as twentieth-century interventionist states and financiers shift economic power from the so-called Western world back to the Middle East, Indian Ocean, and South China Sea. Thus, a narrative of truly global change follows a clear arc that begins and ends in Asia, providing a foil for Eurocentric analysis. Throughout, Coggan concentrates attention on people, goods, and institutions, especially firms, eschewing more abstract economic systems like capitalism, a term he finds “slippery” (p. 10). Indeed, the word “neoliberalism” appears only in the epilogue, and even then just in a single-sentence defense of its general absence (p. 359). The result is an eminently readable account centered on the world economy's interconnectedness and interdependency.
In the briefer thematic chapters, Bartleby emerges to redirect the reader through explorations of the world economy's major component systems such as agriculture, immigration, and central banking. The subtle shift in narrative voice brings with it a clearer shift in focus from trade to technology, or “the ‘X factor’ in economic growth” (p. 101). The world economy advanced, the journalist contends, mainly because of breakthrough inventions like artificial fertilizer as well as conceptual innovations like the limited liability company that led to wider prosperity. While often uneven, unjust, and environmentally unsustainable, the progression has only accelerated over time, lifting increasing multitudes out of poverty. In the book's penultimate chapter, entitled “Technology and Innovation,” the author elaborates on this interpretation in a wide-ranging discussion of information-age marvels, weighing modern life's drawbacks against its benefits and ultimately favoring the latter. True to form, Bartleby musters much of his supporting evidence in the form of original reporting as well as academic studies.
More not only fills a need for an accessible introduction to world economic history but also stands out as a work of synthesis. In the main text, Coggan mentions by name more than twenty leading academics, including Angus Maddison, James C. Scott, Barbara Hanawalt, Kenneth Pomeranz, Douglas North, Judy Stephenson, Robert Allen, and Thomas Piketty, as well as McCloskey. And in the footnotes, he cites another couple hundred more. Many scholars of business history, therefore, will find the book to be a useful addition to their undergraduate syllabi, not to mention a model for their own writing aimed at broad audiences. Others will find it problematic, however, and not without justification. To keep attention fixed on economic progress, Coggan occasionally qualifies descriptions of economic history's “warts” to his narrative's detriment. For example, after recounting the catastrophic impacts of the Columbian Exchange, he admonishes the reader “not to romanticize the pre-European societies of Latin America”—something few have ever done (p. 98). Yet, on balance, Coggan generally remains even-handed, emphasizing along with progress the horrors of slavery, the brutality of industrial agriculture, and the increasing perils of anthropogenic climate change. Moreover, he also conveys optimism in humanity's future, showing how people have historically found solutions to major societal problems in unlikely places, like inside a clamshell. For that reason alone, the book merits a careful read.
