Andrew Marr's History of the World 5 of 8 Age of Plunder

We’ve reached 1492 and Columbus sailing his ships off the map of the known world, hoping to reach China. Instead he reached the Bahamas – “the most important mistake in human history”, as Marr puts it. It’s one of his watershed moments: the point when European technology (ships, guns, armour) encounters the wealth of the new world (gold, silver, spuds) and decides to make a killing, in every sense.  Marr breezes through the horrors that ensued and takes in other tectonic shifts – the Reformation, the rise of Russia and the invention of multinational companies. It’s the birth pangs of capitalism, played out to the smell of nutmeg and tulips. Andrew Marr relates how European trading rivalry in the 145 years from 1492 to 1637 led directly to the establishment of limited companies and the stock exchange, and an explosion in global capitalism. Beginning with Spain's colonisation of the New World, an action that yielded 10 trillion dollars' worth of gold and silver, Marr plots the transition from piracy to private enterprise. This culminated in the pre-eminence of Dutch and English armed merchantmen, who ferociously contested the lucrative sea trade in spices, furs and luxury items such as tulips.

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par EZTV