More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy

'Big and timely ... Coggan's account of the rise of the world economy is accessible and mercifully free of jargon' Sunday Times More tracks the development of the world economy, starting with the first obsidian blades that made their way from what is now Turkey to the Iran-Iraq border 7000 years before Christ, and ending with the Sino-American trade war that we are in right now. Taking history in great strides, More illustrates broad changes by examining details from the design of the standard medieval cottage to the stranglehold that Paris's three belt-buckle-making guilds exercised over innovation in the field of holding up trousers. Along the way Coggan reveals that historical economies were far more sophisticated than we might imagine - tied together by webs of credit and financial instruments much like the modern economy. Coggan shows how, at every step of our long journey, it was connections between people - allowing more trade, more specialisation, more ideas and more freedom - that always created the conditions of prosperity.

About the Author :
Philip Coggan writes the Bartleby column for Economist and is the former writer of the Buttonwood column. Prior to joining Economist he worked for the Financial Times for 20 years. In 2009, he was voted Senior Financial Journalist of the Year in the Wincott awards and best communicator in the Business Journalist of the Year Awards. Among his books are The Money Machine, a guide to the city that is still in print after 25 years and The Economist Guide to Hedge Funds. His book Paper Promises was Spears' business book of the year in 2012.

Review :
How did humanity transform the world over the last 10,000 years? Philip Coggan provides a comprehensive and lucid account This is economics entertainingly and expertly demystified ... Coggan, a columnist at The Economist, is one of the best financial journalists of his generation ... This is a grown-up book that is not suitable for adolescent Twitter warriors of the left or right Epic Big and timely ... Coggan's account of the rise of the world economy is accessible and mercifully free of jargon More, a lucid and wide-ranging new history of the global economy from Philip Coggan, is a book firmly in the Smithian tradition ... vivid, lively and rich in insight ... a truly amazing story It is a real pleasure, then, to read a history that naturally includes the crises but sets them in the context of the immense economic advances over the past ten millennia ... Philip Coggan, The Economist's Bartleby columnist, tells the story with both narrative verve and acute observation ... By the end of the book, More has given the reader a vivid sense of the extraordinary achievements of the interwoven modern world economy, with numerous lively anecdotes. It is quite an accomplishment to find the right length to tell a 10,000-year story while including so much relevant detail. Packed with amazing facts ... Occasional brushstrokes of humour add light touches ... given the immensity of the subject, it is a masterpiece of selection and compression. Ambitious in its scope and quite brilliant in its achievement ... I would place this book in the ranks of Yuval Noah Harari's best-selling Sapiens More takes a vast 10,000 year sweep of economic history and melds it into a compelling story of countries and conflicts, civilisations and civic institutions, stagnations and transformations. All in little more than 300 pages of lucid prose. It is a majestic must-read. More is a glorious sweep through economic history. Open any page and Philip Coggan gives us new insights on the global economic system. His new book is an undiluted pleasure. Philip Coggan tells his epic story of humankind's economic development with both wisdom and wit. Brilliantly weaving together a sweeping historical narrative with a focus on the "drivers" of development - energy, transportation, government and so on - Coggan has written a book that should be essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how our modern day economy came into being. Philip Coggan's More is a monumental work of scholarship that never feels like one while you are reading it. All of human economic history is here distilled, with something you didn't know on every page, and today's apparently terrible economic problems put into a clear context.It should be recommended reading for students, economists, anyone who works in business, and anyone with an interest in how our world came to be the way it is. More is an extraordinary achievement. How can it be possible to turn 10,000 years of human endeavour into a tale which is at once exciting, coherent and surprisingly optimistic? The Economist's Philip Coggan has a very rare gift. Economics books usually overwhelm the reader with heavy analysis and too many statistics, or frustrate with oversimplification. Coggan distils a vast expanse of human history - the history of trade and economic advance - into a beautifully light and elegantly written tale, full of surprises, and free of ideology. If you have never read any economics, I can think of no better place to start. If you are a seasoned economist, you will discover there is much to learn. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. An engaging and highly accessible narrative about the long historical development of global trade, commerce, and innovation. Philip Coggan writes clearly about how and why it all happened, and gives us cause for optimism in difficult times. a fantastic sweep ... Boris Johnson doesn't have much time on his hands for reading at the moment. But ... I can only hope someone is providing him with the odd precis of this kind of book.