Bound Together

How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers, and Warriors Shaped Globalization

By: Nayan Chanda

Narrated by: Stephen Russell

Since humans migrated from Africa and dispersed throughout the world, they have found countless ways and reasons to reconnect with one another. In this entertaining book, Nayan Chanda follows the exploits of traders, preachers, adventurers, and warriors throughout history as they have shaped and reshaped the world. For Chanda, globalization is a process of ever-growing interconnectedness and interdependence that began thousands of years ago and continues to this day with increasing speed and ease.

In the end, globalization - from the lone adventurer carving out a new trade route to the expanding ambitions of great empires - is the product of myriad aspirations and apprehensions that define just about every aspect of our lives: What we eat, wear, ride, or possess is the product of thousands of years of human endeavor and suffering across the globe.

Chanda reviews and illustrates the economic and technological forces at play in globalization today and concludes with a thought-provoking discussion of how we can and should embrace an inevitably global world.

©2007 Nayan Chanda (P)2008 Yale University Press

Critic reviews

"By unbundling the attributes of modern globalization and linking them to an almost endless chain of historical precedents, Mr. Chanda demystifies a phenomenon invested by its enemies with nearly satanic properties." (The New York Times)

"A lively book that is packed with incident, anecdote and derring-do....Mr. Chanda makes a solid and attractive case for globalisation and its potential as a force for good. But he also has a great deal of sympathy for globalisation's losers." (The Economist)

School Assignment

This book was interesting but I found myself falling asleep at some points. The way it hopped around to all different time periods was confusing and most historical figures were only mentioned once, so none of the names stuck in my head.