Intended for general readers with a high school or college-level education, this encyclopedia presents some 400 alphabetical entries, ranging in length from 200 to 3,000 words each, that provide information on the expansion of world trade since 1450 and its impacts upon the world. Presented by McCusker (American history and economics, Trinity U.), the interdisciplinary entries deal with persons, places, developments, ideas, events, and trends from all regions of the world. The thematic outline gives some sense of the general approach of the encyclopedia, with its division of the entries into sections covering business families, cities, commodities, concepts and ideas (economic), concepts and ideas (general), corporations and businesses, countries and regions, economic agents, empires, industries, infrastructure, labor, organizations and institutions, people, phenomena, and shipping. Also included in the encyclopedia are 18 primary source documents (some only in excerpt), examples of which include Matthew Perry's Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan, Alexander Hamilton's Report on Manufactures, Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, Woodrow Wilson's "Fourteen Points" speech, the Bretton Woods Agreement, the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade, and the preamble to the "Final Act" of the first United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, as well as a glossary. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)