Seeds Of Change: Six Plants That Transformed Mankind

Henry Hobhouse

Editions

Review

Taking six commercial plants - tea, cotton, the potato, quinine, sugar and the coca plant - Hobhouse shows how man's need and greed for these products has changed the face of history and shaped destinies.  This is history-through-a-prism, and all the better for it.  It succeeds in illuminating where a less impassioned author would be dull.  The world doesn't look the same after reading this book. - review by John de Falbe