San Antonio College Library

"Commerce meets conquest in this swashbuckling story of the six merchant-adventurers who built the modern world. It was an era when monopoly trading companies were the unofficial agents of European expansion, controlling vast numbers of people and huge tracts of land, and taking on governmental and military functions. They managed their territories as business interests, treating their subjects as employees, customers, or competitors. The leaders...

Attention is directed here to the men who established, developed, and maintained the traffic in black Africans to the Americas over several centuries.

Understanding the origins of business is fundamental to grasping modern life, yet most historians look only to the nineteenth century to build their narratives. While the industrial revolution profoundly remade business practice and established much of the corporate organization we recognize today, the sweep of business history actually begins much earlier, with the initial cities of Mesopotamia. Traveling back to this society of ancient traders and...

Examines the history of slavery and the trans-Atlantic slave trade that brought 11 million African slaves to America over a period of 300 years and discusses the abolition movement that began in 18th-century England.

A food journalist tackles one of the world's most popular narcotics--chocolate--in search of the biological, historical, and social reasons why this substance has so tantilized humans the world over.

From its early beginnings in Southeast Asia, to the machinations of the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica and Central America, the banana's history and its fate as a victim of fungus are explored. To most people, a banana is a banana; yellow and sweet, uniformly sized, always seedless. Americans eat more bananas than apples and oranges combined. In other parts of the world, bananas - like rice, wheat, and corn - are what keep millions of people...