Grove Atlantic
William J. Bernstein’s A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World placed him firmly among the top flight of writers like Jared Diamond and Bill Bryson, capable of distilling major trends and reams of information into insightful narrative. In his new book, Bernstein chronicles the technology of human communication, or media, starting with the birth of writing thousands of years ago in Mesopotamia. This revolutionary tool allowed rulers to extend their control far and wide, giving rise to the world’s first empires. When Phoenician traders took their alphabet to Greece, literacy’s first boom led to the birth of drama and democracy.
As Bernstein illustrates, it’s not just new communication technologies—that have changed the world, it’s access to them. Medieval scriptoria and vernacular bibles gave rise to religious dissent, but it was only when the combination of cheaper paper and Gutenberg’s printing press drove down the cost of books by some 97 percent that the fuse of Reformation was lit.
The Industrial Revolution allowed information to move faster and farther than ever before, but the new technologies were more easily exploited by the powerful, as seen in Germany, the Soviet Union, even Rwanda. With the late twentieth century rise of carbon duplicates (Russian samizdat) and photocopying (the Pentagon Papers), and the boom of the Internet and cell phones in the twenty-first century (the Arab Spring), access to technology has again spread, and the world is both more connected, and more free, than ever before.Masters of the Word is an utterly captivating, enlightening book, and one that will change the way you look at technology, human history, and power.
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