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The Origins of Globalization: World Trade and the Making of the Global Economy, 1500–1800 by Pim de Zwart and Jan Luiten van Zanden (review)

Another quibble is that rather than “group biography,” the letter G might have been better deployed for a discussion of gender, which is seriously under-theorized in the volume. Hamilton and Renders are passionately opinionated about their subject. They are no friends of the term “life writing,” amazed at the toehold that it has gained as an academic discipline. They dismiss memoir as “four parts entertainment, four parts narcissism, two parts selfhelp” (111). Furthermore, they continually bemoan how their beloved biography, which is by definition deeply interdisciplinary—drawing from fields as disparate as journalism, history, psychology, literary studies, film, and television—is almost universally absent from university programs. Working their way through the alphabet, general readers will experience a broad but eclectic selection of material about biography, some of which will interest them and some of which they may simply want to skip. Practitioners of biography will quickly realize that this book is not a “how to” guide to writing biography, although they will probably nod in agreement at the statement about how addictive biography is, not just for readers but for biographers themselves. Probably the best way to envision this volume is as an introductory text for one of those hypothetical courses in the theory and practice of modern biography that Hamilton and Renders fervently hope will soon be part of the university curriculum.