banks wouldn’t touch him-his underlings formed a new company, Glencore, which played an outsized role in the new economy and, naturally, in the book. When his eponymous firm became too toxic-U.S. Blas and Farchy describe how his firm dominated shady dealings with rogue regimes, physically connecting the people who had things like oil with the people who needed it. Take Marc Rich, the trader who made a killing in the 1970s before becoming a tax fugitive. What they found isn’t pretty-but it’s plenty illuminating. The World for Sale: Money, Power, and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources, Javier Blas and Jack Farchy, Oxford University Press, 416 pp., $29.95, March 1, 2021 The World For Sale: Money, Power, and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources, Javier Blas and Jack Farchy, Oxford University Press, 416 pp.
The book is superbly researched and tidily written: There’s no overwrought prose or tortured jargon, just a clean, compelling chronicle of the central role that commodity traders have played in the global economy from the end of World War II to the present. They mined thousands of pages of legal filings, company reports, prospectuses, and other rich veins of information. If you have the slightest interest in how the modern world was made, by whom, at what price, and at what profit, this is the book for you.īlas and Farchy, who both covered the commodities industry for the Financial Times before moving to Bloomberg News, have spent years talking with people who don’t talk. There’s not a word about the Bronze Age in The World for Sale, from Javier Blas and Jack Farchy, but there’s a motherlode about the people who literally created the world we live in now by trading the modern equivalents of tin, whether oil, coal, or cobalt. Now we do know-maybe not about them, but about the modern tin traders. We don’t know who they were, what they earned, or what corners they cut. Somebody found a source-in Cornwall, or Devonshire, or Brittany-and somehow delivered it to Egypt or Sumer. It was a crucial commodity, mixed with copper to make the rudimentary swords and spears that drew the borders of the ancient world. The Bronze Age, which midwifed the modern world, relied upon unknown traders in tin, a metal in short supply across Europe and the Middle East.
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