- Paperback: 272 pages
- Publisher: Pan Books; New edition edition (21 Jun 2002)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0330493167
- ISBN-13: 978-0330493161
- Product Dimensions: 21 x 13.4 x 3.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 584,113 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Product Description
Product Description
Traces the history of five commercial plants - sugar, tea, cotton, potatoes and quinine - and seeks to illustrate how man's need, or greed, for these products has shaped human development. This edition includes a chapter on the coca plant, demonstrating its social, political and economic effect.
From the Publisher
Update
The first edition of Seeds of Change traced the history of five commercial plants - sugar, tea, cotton, potatoes and quinine. This new edition includes a chapter on another historically fascinating plant - the Coca. Henry Hobhouse demonstrates how man's need, or greed, for these products has changed the face of history and shaped destinies.
The first edition of Seeds of Change traced the history of five commercial plants - sugar, tea, cotton, potatoes and quinine. This new edition includes a chapter on another historically fascinating plant - the Coca. Henry Hobhouse demonstrates how man's need, or greed, for these products has changed the face of history and shaped destinies.
'This marvellous book is hard to beat.' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
'Fascinating ...Henry Hobhouse's book makes you think about the mysterious and often paradoxical ways in which providence operates.' DAILY MAIL
'A wonderful read, provocative and well-informed.' INDEPENDENT
'You cannot help but admire and enjoy the company of a man who takes such a novel and global view of history....Seeds of Change is a mind-opener.' SPECTATOR
'The clever dashes across historical disciplinary lines he makes are both audacious and - this is the hallmark of their validity - obvious once made.' GUARDIAN
'I find Hobhouse's theories fascinating ... The perceptions and information that he passes on along the way are a great part of the book's charm and interest...What a delightful and revealing book. I warmly recommend it.' DAILY TELEGRAPH --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
16 of 16 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This book is about the history of vegetables and I read it about 10 years ago yet I still remember so much about it. For those who think history is all about kings, parliaments and wars, this book is a revelation.
It is very readable and the not at all highbrow.
By telling the stories of Quinine, Cotton, Potato, Sugar and Tea, Hobhouse teaches us about the creation of nations, wars, countries and civilisations, I am delighted to see it on the Amazon hot 100 and know that all who buy it will be thoroughly entertained and informed. This is the very best sort of book
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I read this book first when it dealt with just 5 plants and the extra chapter on Coca had not been added. It is one of those narratives that enables you to see history from a different perspective, showing you the patterns and currents of world history and how something as simple as one commodity can twist and change people's humanity, ethics, fashion and taste as well as the drastic changes it can wreak on the world as a whole.
It was written long before the current trend of popular and quirky history and in my opinion, is superior to most of them. Absolute thinking history at its best.
It was written long before the current trend of popular and quirky history and in my opinion, is superior to most of them. Absolute thinking history at its best.
39 of 41 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
In the 1980s, I wrote the first book to identify plants as an important cause of change in History. In 1985, this was published in London as Seeds of Change. (The title was thought up by my editors). The book, greeted as an unusual, readable and fresh approach to history, was in the end translated into a dozen languages. It was published in New York in 1986 and lent its theme and title to the Smithsonian Institution for the Quincentennial Exposition of the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Caribbean in 1492. The Exposition, at the Natural History Museum in Washington (1992), turned into an icon for Political Correctness, being anachronistic, against the spirit of the conquistadors and alien to the message of the book, which tried to reflect the spirit of the contemporary post-Renaissance world, not the guilt of modern people living within the Washington Beltway.
The secondary title of Seeds of Change was Five Plants that Transformed Mankind and these were Quinine, that allowed Europeans to dominate the Tropics; Sugar, that changed the Caribbean population from Red Arawaks and Caribs to White Masters and Black Slaves; Tea, that inter alia, led to the destruction of classical China through the use by traders of opium in exchange for tea; cotton, that, like sugar in the Caribbean, led to a slave-economy in the Southern United States; and finally, the Potato, which produced huge increases in the Irish population and, when disease struck the potato, famine followed as did the greening of some of the United States.
The Seeds of Change Exposition in Washington in 1992 extended the story of transfer to the New World of Old World diseases and animals. There was also the Eastward move of some of the plants of the Americas to Europe, such as the tomato, without which it is hard to imagine modern Mediterranean cuisine. Despite efforts to be visitor-friendly, I thought the Exposition, that used, by agreement, my ideas and my title, lacked authority and integrity, largely because its guiding hands were not those of historians, but of anthropologists and of practitioners of other, even more modish disciplines, who had an agenda of their own, derived from the Washington of 1992, not that of Europe of 1492.
The Exposition spawned a large, illustrated book, also called Seeds of Change, with Herman J Viola as the author. All the other twenty-odd books with the same title stem from the Exposition.
My own, the original, Seeds of Change, went through many printings and has always remained available in London. A new edition has an extra chapter: Coca: how an Andean boon became a scourge on the streets, which tells the story of the Andean use of coca leaves and of the abuse of the modern concentrate, cocaine, which has harmed so many.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Excellent and highly readable
A friend recommended this book to me and I took it away as my 'summer read' this year. I was not disappointed and ploughed straight through it in 4 days, enjoying every page. Read more
Published 22 months ago by C. Knowles
Additional Comment to Review
Like the first reviewer, I also rate this with 5 stars: it is as much about the history of vegetables as "Fear of Flying" was about aeronautics. Read more
Published on 2 May 2000 by Michael E Allen
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