World History in Goods

Learn more about the interconnections between commodities, human history, technology, and economic development with key titles on the global history of goods, selected by RCL editors. Resources for College Libraries (RCL) features 90,000+ core titles for academic libraries, curated by Choice/ACRL subject specialists and available at rclweb.net.

Updated September 23, 2025
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Beer : a global journey through the past and present
Arthur, John Wood
Ebook
The world of sugar : how the sweet stuff transformed our politics, health, and environment over 2,000 years
Bosma, Ulbe
Ebook
The definitive 2,500-year history of sugar and its human costs, from its little-known origins as a luxury good in Asia to worldwide environmental devastation and the obesity pandemic. For most of history, humans did without refined sugar. After all, it serves no necessary...
Rice : global networks and new histories
Bray, Francesca
Paper Book
Rice today is food to half the world's population. Its history is inextricably entangled with the emergence of colonialism, the global networks of industrial capitalism, and the modern world economy. The history of rice is currently a vital and innovative field of research attracting serious...
Empire of cotton : a global history
Beckert, Sven.
Paper Book
WINNER OF THE BANCROFT PRIZE * A Pulitzer Prize finalist that's as unsettling as it is enlightening: a book that brilliantly weaves together the story of cotton with how the present global world came to exist. "Masterly ... An astonishing achievement." --The New York...
Salt : a world history
Kurlansky, Mark.
Paper Book
Homer called salt a divine substance. Plato described it as especially dear to the gods. Today we take salt for granted, a common, inexpensive substance that seasons food or clears ice from roads, a word used casually in expressions ("salt of the earth," take it with a grain of salt") without...
The devil's milk : a social history of rubber
Tully, John A.
Ebook
Guano and the opening of the Pacific world : a global ecological history
Cushman, Gregory T.
Ebook
Potato a history of the propitious esculent
Reader, John.
Ebook
The long journey of the potato, from Incan gardens in the Andes thousands of years ago to a NASA manned rocket destined for Mars in the twenty-first century The potato--humble, lumpy, bland, familiar--is a decidedly unglamorous staple of the dinner table. Or is it? John...
Empire of tea : the Asian leaf that conquered the world
Ellis, Markman
Paper Book
Although tea had been known and consumed in China and Japan for centuries, it was only in the seventeenth century that Londoners first began drinking it. Over the next two hundred years, its stimulating properties seduced all of British society, as tea found its way into cottages and castles...
Water : the epic struggle for wealth, power, and civilization
Solomon, Steven.
Paper Book
"I read this wide-ranging and thoughtful book while sitting on the banks of the Ganges near Varanasi--it's a river already badly polluted, and now threatened by the melting of the loss of the glaciers at its source to global warming. Four hundred million people depend on it, and there's no backup...
Uncommon grounds : the history of coffee and how it transformed our world
Pendergrast, Mark.
Paper Book
The definitive history of the world's most popular drug.Uncommon Grounds tells the story of coffee from its discovery on a hill in ancient Abyssinia to the advent of Starbucks. Mark Pendergrast reviews the dramatic changes in coffee culture over the past decade,...

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