According to the back cover blurb, he "tells the epic story of global commerce, from its prehistoric origins to the myriad crises confronting it today". Obviously, I was interested.
In the first few chapters of the book, Bernstein touches on a couple of areas that I happen to know someting about: the history of Islam, and sailing. That's where the trouble starts.
To start with sailing, on page 76 Bernstein says this:
Even so, Mediterranean shipping did benefit from the introduction of the Arab triangular lateen sail, which enabled vessels to tack into the wind, a feat not possible with the square rigging of Western antiquity.
First of all, as even the Wikipedia article will tell you, the lateen sail did not originate with the Arabs. Much more importantly, though, I'm baffled as to what Bernstein thinks tacking means. Again, the Wikipedia article is perfectly clear:
Tacking or coming about is the maneuver by which a sailing vessel turns its bow through the wind so that the wind changes from one side to the other.
The question is, what other kinds of tacking are there, apart from tacking into the wind? The reverse maneuver is called wearing. Much more importantly, though, square-rigged vessels, of antiquity or later times, are perfectly capable of tacking "into the wind"; it would be strange indeed if they couldn't.
The confusion persists later, when Bernstein talks about Chinese junks (p. 98):
The Chinese military leadership made maritime engineering a high priority, and their boatyards began to turn out many types of huge military and maritime (!?) vessels with... advanced fore-and-aft sails (which enabled ships to tack almost directly into the wind).
What on earth is a non-maritime vessel? The confusion with tacking continues; here Bernstein seems to confuse tacking with sailing close to the wind.
The larger point, however, is that on the topic of sailing, Bernstein clearly has no idea what he's talking about. This doesn't stop him from making statements about sailing. The question obviously becomes: is he taking other matters he's writing about equally lightly?
I can attempt a partial answer by looking at his chapter on the birth of Islam; Chapter 3: Camels, Perfumes and Prophets.
Bernstein discusses the birth of Islam in strangely contradictory terms. Pages 66 and 68-69:
66: "There [Mecca], the incense trade catalyzed the birth of Islam, whose military, spiritual and commercial impacts transformed medieval Asia, Europe and Africa."
68-69:
Exactly how Mecca became a bustling commercial center is something of a mystery; it produced nothing of value, was not a great center of consumption or government, and had little strategic worth. (...) The role of the incense trade in the city's rise is also uncertain: ther eis controversy as to whether or not the main caravan route bypassed the town. (...) In a narrow sense, Mecca may be thought of as a miniature, parched, landlocked Arabian version of Venice, whose food supply and rhythms of daily life hummed to the tunes of trade, whether or not it actually sat on the main incense route.
The problem is that Mecca was never any such thing. Here the reason for Bernstein's confusion is amply clear: his bibliography and notes omit any mention of the definitive work on the topic, Patricia Crone's Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam. Crone's book makes it perfectly clear that Mecca was only a bustling center of commerce in later Islamic traditions. There is absolutely no historical evidence to support those traditions. Almost unbelievably, Bernstein credits the siting of Mecca 100 miles away from the trade route to Nigel Groom's Frankincense and Myrrh; apparently Bernstein is unaware that Crone's book even exists.
Bernstein, has been quite content to write a chapter on the topic without even consulting such standard texts of Islamic studies that should occur to every undergraduate student. He doesn't seem to use any of the current scholarly works on the topic, but instead references books like Karen Armstrong's biography of Mohammed. Karen Armstrong is not a trained historian or islamicist, but an ex-nun. He quotes her work, but ignores any serious academic sources. The source material for the chapter is at best haphazard; in my opinion it can fairly be described as inept.
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So far, I've read Bernstein's work on two areas that I have some knowledge in, and in both I've found his methods leave much to be desired. Despite what seems to be a total ignorance of sailing, he glibly makes statements about it. In writing on Islam, he is quite content to use sources that seem to have been selected at random. I stopped reading the book shortly later, as I don't see that a more comprehensive criticism is worthwhile. The way he treats these two areas is so incompetent that it throws the entire work into question. Has he been as haphazard in his source material for other claims? I'm not competent enough in those areas to say, but I have my doubts.
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As a sidenote, reading reviews of the book is frightening. In lieu of a review, the New York Times printed a page-long summary of the book and called it a review (here. According to its back-cover blurb, the book was selected as "An Economist Book of the Year".
Most frighteningly, historian Paul Kennedy reviewed the book for Foreign Affairs, no less. Here's what he said:
A Splendid Exchange is a work of which Adam Smith and Max Weber would have approved. And it is all the more interesting because it is written by someone who is deeply knowledgeable about and active in the financial world yet finds the time to write graceful and insightful history with a delicate display of scholarship that conceals a vast erudition.
I find several of his insights to be, at best, questionable, and the scholarship he displays in the chapter on Islam is delicate in the sense that a car crash is a delicate display of driving.
I would assume that anyone who has the slightest background in Islamic studies could poke considerable holes in Bernstein's work. That even someone like Paul Kennedy seems to accept the entire work at face value is a powerful reminder of how important it is for us to read critically.
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Having said all this, I certainly can't recommend Bernstein's book to anyone. The inept scholarship of his chapter on Islam is enough to raise serious doubts as to his methodology and rigor; serious enough to me that I can't take his book seriously as a work of history, even popular history. If all of his facts have been checked as rigorously as those on sailing and Islam, I can't even imagine what the rest of the book might contain.
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