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1
The Coffee Trader (2003)
6.0/10on Open Library
Published
Amsterdam, 1659. David Liss puts a Portuguese Jewish trader and a Dutch partner on the trail of a new commodity: coffee. Read it for the difference between moving the goods and controlling the market. A prospective fortune depends on who learns about the deal, and what they can do with that knowledge.
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The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010)
8.2/10on Open Library
Published
In 1799, a young Dutch clerk arrives at Dejima, an island trading post in Nagasaki Harbor. David Mitchell gives the island’s interpreters as much to do as its merchants. Start here for a port where even a conversation depends on who is permitted to cross a boundary and who gets to speak for whom.
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River of smoke (2011)
8.0/10on Open Library
Published
Amitav Ghosh takes the opium trade into Canton through the eyes of Bahram Modi, a Parsi merchant from Bombay. The waterfront gives him room to make a life far from home, but the threat of an embargo exposes who can afford to keep doing business. This is the middle book in the Ibis Trilogy, and the one to pick for a close look at Canton’s trading community.
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Seta (1920)
7.4/10on Open Library
Published
In Alessandro Baricco’s short novel, published in English as Silk, French silkworm merchant Hervé Joncour travels to Japan in 1861. The encounter to notice is one he can barely put into words. A note he can’t read until he gets home makes the language barrier more consequential than any account of the cargo.
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Barkskins (2016)
6.9/10on Open Library
Published
Two French woodcutters arrive in New France, and Annie Proulx sends their family lines in different directions. Charles Duquet moves from fur trading into timber while René Sel’s descendants live between cultures. The scale lets you follow the forest from place of work to source of wealth, and see who bears the cost as the business grows.
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Ségou (1984)
6.0/10on Open Library
Published
Maryse Condé begins in the kingdom of Segu in 1797. A royal adviser’s sons take different paths as Islam spreads and the slave trade bears down on the kingdom. Start with the contrast between Siga, who becomes a merchant, and Naba, who is kidnapped. The family gives you a way to see how unevenly people could experience the same changes.
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Sacred hunger (1992)
8.7/10on Open Library
Published
Barry Unsworth begins in Liverpool in 1752 with a merchant trying to recoup his losses by sending a slave ship to the Guinea coast. Read this alongside Segu for a view from the shipowners’ side of the Atlantic trade. The voyage shows the violence behind what starts in Liverpool as a plan to make back lost money.
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Homegoing (2016)
8.2/10on Open Library
Published
Yaa Gyasi places two half sisters on opposite sides of the walls at Cape Coast Castle. Effia marries an Englishman, while Esi is imprisoned before being sold into slavery. The two family lines that follow make this a good choice if you want to trace the consequences of the trade beyond any single voyage.
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The Glass Palace (2000)
8.0/10on Open Library
Published
Amitav Ghosh opens with the British invasion of Burma in 1885. Rajkumar rises from poverty to build a business in Burmese teak. Where River of Smoke follows a port at a moment of crisis, this novel is the longer view of commerce, moving through Burma, India, and Malaya and following what political changes make possible for a trader.
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The devil's company (2009)
Published
Pick David Liss’s Benjamin Weaver novel when you want the East India Company viewed from outside its boardroom. A hired man has to rob the company’s headquarters to protect his friends. The result is a brisk way into the power that trade concentrates in London, even when the goods come from far away.
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Tai-Pan (1966)
Published
James Clavell follows Dirk Struan, a trader and opium smuggler, during Hong Kong’s founding in the 1840s. Try this for the scale of the rival trading houses and their ambitions. Read it beside River of Smoke to move from the merchants in Canton to a story organized around the man determined to dominate a new port.
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The tea girl of Hummingbird Lane (2017)
Published
Lisa See starts with Li-yan in an Akha tea-growing community in China and follows a daughter growing up in California. Read it for the different meanings tea takes on as it moves between places. What one family understands as work and inheritance becomes something buyers far away are just learning to recognize.
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daughter of fortune (1999)
Published
Isabel Allende sends the young Chilean Eliza north by ship into the California Gold Rush. Her friendship with the Chinese doctor Tao Chi’en makes the story more than a rush for a single commodity. Their journeys offer a way into the different worlds that converged on San Francisco when gold started drawing people there.
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The Pet Hawk of the House of Abbas (2013)
Published
Dmitry Chen’s silk trader Nanidat Maniakh starts out at the head of a prosperous trading family. Murder and revolution put that position at risk. Pick this Silk Road novel for the way a merchant’s ties can stretch across political boundaries, then become liabilities when the political order changes.
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Ironhand (2019)
Published
Hilary Green sends Ranulph to sea after a childhood among monks. He becomes a trader and eventually makes his fortune as a merchant in silk and spices. Try it for the way his years at sea and knowledge of eastern Mediterranean ports become useful far beyond the trading voyage.
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The indigo girl (2017)
Published
In colonial South Carolina, Eliza Lucas hears what French buyers pay for indigo dye and sees a chance to rescue her family’s plantations. The hardest part is finding out how to make it. Natasha Boyd puts an exchange of knowledge at the center of the story when Eliza asks an enslaved person to teach her the process in return for teaching enslaved people to read.
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