In his magisterial new book, Economist columnist Philip Coggan tells the life-story of the entire world economy, starting with the first obsidian blades that made their way from Turkey to what is now the Iran-Iraq border 7,000 years before Christ, and ending with the Sino-American trade war that we are in right now.Along the way we zoom in on fascinating details of economic organisation such as the design of the standard medieval cottage, the development in the 12th century of great international trade fairs under the patronage of the Counts of Champagne and Brie, and the stranglehold that Paris's three belt-buckle-making guilds exercised over innovation in the field of waistline definition. Along the way Coggan reveals that historical economies were far more sophisticated than we might imagine - tied together by webs of credit and financial instruments much like the modern economy.Between the chapters making up the grand historical sweep Coggan dives into different facets of the economic world - providing potted histories of migration, finance, energy, and agriculture. And he shows how, at every step of our long journey, it was connections between people - allowing more trade, more specialisation, more ideas and more freedom - that always created the conditions of prosperity.