eBook - ePub

Gold: How it Shaped History

Name: Gold: How it Shaped History
Author: Alan Ereira

Alan Ereira,

496 pages
English
ePUB (mobile friendly)
Available on iOS & Android

eBook - ePub

Gold: How it Shaped History

Alan Ereira,

About this book

Gold is not what we think. It is usually discussed in the context of wealth and art but this book has a broader subject, so fundamental that it has been largely unremarked. Informed by a mass of recent discoveries and a South American indigenous perspective, it offers a new way of understanding the history of civilization. Gold has been coinage, treasure and adornment. But it has been much more, as the hidden driver of wars and revolutions, the rise and fall of empires and the transformation of societies. As the sun traveled east to west across the sky, gold, incorruptible and corrupting, flowed west to east, hand to hand across the world.That flow has brought empires to grow and collapse and driven plunder, conquest and colonization. It brought about wars and revolutions, empowered new forms of arts and science and created the capitalist consumer economy that dominates us now. All the gold people ever shaped still exists, shining as new; it can be mislaid but never decays. Right from its first appearance on the west shore of the Black Sea, long before the rise of Egypt and Mesopotamia, gold crowned the first proto-king. Ever since, it has been regarded as value incarnate with transcendental power. The quantity we take has been increasing steadily for 6, 500 years. Now extraction accelerates. Our gold mountain has doubled in the last fifty years. Yet its price increases faster. While the quantity doubled, its buying power multiplied by six. What does gold do that makes us want it so much? As Alan Ereira reveals in this skilfully woven narrative, gold is the hidden actor that shapes our story.

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Yes, you can access Gold: How it Shaped History by Alan Ereira in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Economics & Ecology. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.