This is a book of facts and paradoxes, but it has a moral. The text connects the cultural history of natural resources with the global history seen in the Russian perspective. World history began in deserts, but this book says more about swamps. History requires actors, but here peat and hemp, sugar and iron, fur and oil speak and act. The unevenness of available resources was the engine of trade, and it also led to the accumulation of wealth, the growth of inequality and the multiplication of evil.