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 core titles for academic libraries, curated by Choice/ACRL subject specialists. In Syndetics Unbound, RCL Librarians recommend a selection of the 90,000+ titles available at rclweb.net.

Updated April 1, 2025
RCL Librarians
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The world of sugar : how the sweet stuff transformed our politics, health, and environment over 2,000 years
Bosma, Ulbe
Paper Book
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...
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...
Potato : a history of the propitious esculent
Reader, John.
Paper Book
The potato—humble, lumpy, bland, familiar—is a decidedly unglamorous staple of the dinner table. Or is it? John Reader’s narrative on the role of the potato in world history suggests we may be underestimating this remarkable tuber. From domestication in Peru 8,000 years ago to...
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
Uncommon Grounds tells the story of coffee from its discovery on a hill in Abyssinia to its role in intrigue in the American colonies to its rise as a national consumer product in the twentieth century and its rediscovery with the advent of Starbucks at the end of the century . A...

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