book notes (24 of b) ------------- 1/8 Oceans of Grain by Scott Reynolds Nelson (@nelsonhist) 369 pgs, Published 2022 (#booknotes from 2022) Context: ------------ These #booknotes are not book reviews, nor book summaries. Just my high-level thoughts on the book along with some quotes which I find interesting. If @nelsonhist would not like me to quote from this book, please DM me the same, I would promptly delete the quotes here-from. In some quotations, I have included bracketed text (like this) to enable flow / context and three dots (like this...) to bring together dispersed sentences, to synthesise an idea My Notes: ------------ This is a history book like no other. While it is quite short, it packs in so much that every sentence is a keeper, and I could not resist the temptation of reading it once again, last week (in Dec 2022), after my initial read mid-year (around Jun 2022) This book frames the struggle for empire for almost 3000 years starting 800 BCE as essentially a struggle for control of grain and takes us through the Greek, Roman, Arab, Byzantine, Ottoman, Russian, European and American empires as it weaves it's tale. And in doing so, one traverses along a wonderland of historical ideas and structures: – from Marx to Lenin, - from the founding fathers of America to those of Russia, - from the role of dynamite to that of shipping lanes, - from roots of political power to those of merchant power and of divine power, - from rise of Genoa, Venice and other city states to rise of nation states, and - from power-shifts driven by innovations (futures contracts, steam-based-locomotion) to those driven by social structures (slavery, serfdom, capitalism). The book covers much ground and as always I have found it hard to retain it all. And as always. I have struggled to select paragraphs to quote, as I cannot reproduce the whole book here and whatever I include here seems so distant from the book’s essence. In the net, this book cannot be summarised, its essence cannot be tl;dr'd, its a masterpiece to be slow-read in its entirety, a few times. Some quotes from the book follow: #oceansofgrain #ScottReynoldsNelson #history #empire #ukraine #russia #shipping #power