From Silk to Silicon: The Story of Globalization Through Ten Extraordinary Lives

An Amazon Best Book of March 2016: Globalization has been happening for a lot longer than there has been a word to describe it. In From Silk to Silicon, Jeffrey E. Garten of the Yale School of Management examines the lives of ten people whose actions contributed to the history of globalization. He begins with Genghis Khan, who did much to open up trade in his time, and ends chronologically with Deng Xiaoping, who reformed the Chinese economy and drew millions of Chinese workers into the modern market. In between, he touches on such disparate characters as Margaret Thatcher (free markets), John D. Rockefeller (multinationals) and Andrew Grove (Intel and the microchip). Garten could have picked ten different people to populate his book, but that’s not the point. The spread of globalization has been built on the pieces that came before it, and individuals have both been impacted and found ways to make an impact. This is an interesting approach to telling the story of globalization. --Chris Schluep