Book Review: Interviews add depth to commodity trading history

Protagonists in a world almost routinely described as ‘murky’ have proven remarkably open to shedding light on the industry’s less illuminated corners

When authors Javier Blas and Jack Farchy conceived the idea to write The World For Sale , they were careful to suggest that it would not be written as a ‘kiss and tell’. Rather, their interest was to write a social and business history that would hopefully find its way onto the new non-fiction shelves at higher-end bookshops. That there are relatively few books covering a group of people and their companies who have, in the authors’ words, "shaped history" is surprising. The wider industry’s primary texts have been Anthony Sampson's Seven Sisters and Daniel Yergin's The Prize, although the scope of both is more the IOCs and NOCs of the crude and refined products industries, while neither are