Credit Networks of Empire: Who Financed Early Colonialism
Behind every colonial flag stood a banker calculating risk and return across oceans
The Dutch Difference: How a Small Republic Built a Global Empire
How financial innovation, strategic tolerance, and network thinking let a small republic dominate global trade
How Japan Closed Itself: The Sakoku Decision and Its Limits
The myth of sealed borders hides a sophisticated system of controlled contact that shaped Japan for centuries
The Atlantic Slave Trade's African Side: How States Participated
The kingdoms that traded in captives and those destroyed for refusing—how Atlantic commerce reshaped African power.
The Indian Ocean Before Europeans: A Millennium of Connected Trade
A thousand years of global trade before European ships appeared—and why their arrival disrupted rather than created commerce
Tea, Opium, and Empire: The Triangle That Addicted Two Continents
How British tea demand created a drug trade that reshaped China and revealed colonialism's moral core
The Spice Trade's Real Stakes: Why Europeans Killed for Nutmeg
How profit margins exceeding 60,000 percent transformed European merchants into mass murderers and built the first global corporations.
Slavery's Atlantic Mathematics: The Numbers Behind the Middle Passage
How demographic data reveals the brutal commercial logic behind history's largest forced migration and its uneven distribution across the Americas
The Little Ice Age and Global Politics: Climate's Hidden Hand in History
How a two-degree temperature drop reshaped dynasties, drove migrations, and revealed the hidden environmental foundations of political power across three continents.
How Malaria Shaped the Americas: Disease Ecology and Colonial Power
Discover how microscopic parasites and inherited immunities created colonial labor systems, demographic patterns, and regional differences that still shape the Americas today.
Coffee's Revolutionary Path: From Yemen to Global Commodity
How a Yemeni stimulant created new social spaces, restructured colonial labor systems, and synchronized global work rhythms around caffeine
Why China Didn't Colonize: Zheng He's Voyages and the Roads Not Taken
How Ming court politics, not European superiority, determined which civilization would dominate the world's oceans for centuries.
Silver's Global Circuit: How One Metal Rewired the World Economy
How Spanish American silver mines accidentally engineered the first global economy and created monetary interdependence patterns that still shape international trade today.
The Columbian Exchange Beyond Disease: Foods That Transformed Civilizations
How three transferred crops reshaped global population dynamics, labor systems, and political possibilities far beyond any epidemic's reach.