56 Quotes by William J. Bernstein

Although the Muslim commercial web possessed many advanced features, including bills of exchange, sophisticated lending institutions, and futures markets, no Islamic state ever established the bedrock financial institution of the modern world: a national or central bank

Dramatic conquests often lead to startling serendipities: the most momentous Muslim acquisition at Talas was not territory or silk, but a commodity at once prosaic and precious. Among the Chinese prisoners taken at Talas were papermakers, who soon spread their wondrous craft into the Islamic world, and then to Europe, changing forever human culture and the course of history.

Although the Romans knew Chinese silk, they knew not China. They believed that silk grew directly on the mulberry tree, not realizing that the leaves were merely the worm's home and its food.

When Vasco da Gama breached the Indian Ocean, the playing field had just been vacated by the one force capable of repelling him.

Our urge to trade has profoundly affected the trajectory of the human species. Simply by allowing nations to concentrate on producing those things that their geographic, climatic, and intellectual endowments best enable them to do, and to exchange those goods for what is best produced elsewhere, trade has directly propelled our global prosperity.

The forces that drove Britain and the United States to control the world's shipping lanes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, respectively, first saw light of day in Greece's need to feed itself with imported wheat and barley.

For most of the period following the fall of Rome, the adherents of a powerful new monotheistic religion dominated medieval long distance commerce as completely as the West dominates such commerce today; the legacy of that former dominance is still all too visible.

Christians and Jews often taunted the Arabs about their polytheistic beliefs and their lack of an overarching creed and an afterlife. Consequently, a sense of religious inferiority arose among the desert dwellers, along with a pent-up desire for a comprehensive belief system of their own.

Nestorian Christians, expelled for their heresies from the Byzantine Empire but tolerated in the Muslim world as "people of the book," began to arrive from the West via the overland route. It is easy to see how a splinter Christian movement, repelled by the savage intolerance of the Catholic Church and attracted by the relative tolerance of Islam, spread ever eastward.