Two recent books both tackle world history from an economic point of view: Ferguson’s through the lens of money and monetary instruments, Bernstein’s from the viewpoint of international trade. Both were written before the severity of the current financial crisis became clear, which provides an interesting and relatively neutral perspective: they do not suffer from the bias that comes with hindsight interpretations. On the other hand, this leaves the reader to do the work of applying their insights to the current situation.

When they set out to write these texts, neither author must have expected to create an especially political book. But for the first time in decades, opinions about the detailed management of the economy are intensely political, and any book, article or quotation on financial matters in the last few years is likely to be re-read in that light.

From this angle, Bernstein’s book is at least easier to evaluate. It has a consistency of theme and treatment lacking in The Ascent of Money, which betrays its origins as a TV series in an episodic structure that fails to develop a clear thesis. A Splendid Exchange can be placed clearly in a tradition of books from Adam Smith onwards extolling the benefits of trade (in fact, as Bernstein points out, Smith was preceded 75 years earlier by Henry Martyn, whose free-trading ideals were ahead of his time). The book does graphically cover many of the nastier side-effects of trade: massacres of indigenous populations, the spread of plague around Eurasia and the well-known (and some not so well-known) horrors of slavery. But Bernstein’s moral stance on these never implicates trade as a principle.

In some cases – European brutality towards Asians particularly – it would be reasonable to argue that trade was occurring anyway, and this violence took place between people competing to appropriate its profits for themselves. While this doesn’t excuse the actions, it shifts the blame from trade itself to individual greed. But mass slavery is an evil which would never have occurred except to enable trade, and modern defenders of free trade (among whom I count myself) need to acknowledge the costs of our principles that have been borne by others.

This is very different from the assertion that all trade involves such costs, and here Bernstein could perhaps have made a stronger argument. In the concluding chapter he discusses globalisation and the reduction of tariff barriers, and the book could benefit from a more detailed rehearsal of the arguments made by Smith, Martyn and others. Free trade in the modern world is undoubtedly beneficial to all those who participate in it, and while there can be individual losers (General Motors employees perhaps) in the rich world, we can easily afford to compensate them. Poor countries have everything to gain and virtually nothing to lose from trade, and nobody arguing against globalisation should pretend to be acting on their behalf.

Bernstein’s other argument is a little more controversial, and therefore more interesting. He portrays nearly every major development in world history as the result of trade, competition over trade profits, or protection against trade. Early chapters cover the expansion of Islam across the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia; the middle of the book explores European exploration and colonisation of key locations in the Pacific and the New World; and the last third explains the rise and fall in turn of Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, Britain and America as dominant world powers. At times the idea is stretched – was protectionism really a major contribution to the outbreak of World War II? – but in general it is well argued and sheds much light on how the world turned out as it is.

The Ascent of Money on the other hand has no such argument. It is a survey of six different aspects of money, conveniently scaled to fit into six one-hour episodes on Channel Four. The chapters – on the invention of money, bonds, bubbles, risk, property, and ‘Chimerica’ – contain some interesting ideas, and there’s more enquiry into the nature and philosophy of money than Splendid Exchange makes into the ideas behind trade. But the book is still unsatisfying, and it is hard to see any thread consistently running through the chapters.

This is frustrating, because Ferguson does have something to say. He has shown up frequently as a commentator during the financial crisis and now has an FT column – and while his views are quite conventional (too much consumer debt, property was overvalued, we’re all doomed) they are usually argued with an interesting historical insight. The Ascent of Money, however, feels patched together.

It does have its own controversial moments which will make you pause and think. Ferguson discusses the controversial relationship between the father of monetary theory, Milton Friedman, and the military regime in Chile from the 1970s onwards. He acknowledges that Pinochet’s actions were undemocratic and that a legitimate government was overthrown, leading to widespread death and torture. And while carefully tiptoeing around endorsing the coup itself, he is confident enough to say – more confident indeed on TV than in the book – that he thinks it was justified for Friedman to advise Pinochet, not only on the near-privatisation of Chile’s pensions, but also to provide retroactive justification for the overthrow of the socialist government.

The best segments of both books are between about 1400 and 1800, where Bernstein tells stories of exploration, misunderstanding and chance, and of the grand contest between the English and Dutch East India Companies (and by proxy, Britain and Holland); and Ferguson shows us that bond and derivatives profiteering and stockmarket bubbles are nothing new. Each book less evocative in the further past, with Ferguson showing some pictures of 3000-year-old money in clay tablet form, and Bernstein providing a thousand years of detail about ports and sultanates in the Middle East which no longer exist and have little relevance to the ongoing argument.

Strangely, the book that’s about the stuff of all our lives – how often do you live a day without money? – feels less relevant and meaningful than the book about something we only come into occasional contact with, international trade. There is a book waiting to be written about how we psychologically interact with money and what it means to us when it’s in our pocket or leaving our wallet. Maybe that will be informed by history too, but The Ascent of Money isn’t it. A Splendid Exchange, on the other hand, makes real and immediate the effects and benefits of the movements of containers that most of us never see and goods whose origin we rarely notice. The arc of the story of the rise of trade over five thousand years is well drawn.

Perhaps an improvement in both books would have been to explore why it is that these phenomena arose in the first place. Both trade and money are treated as a given and there’s little attempt to say why it is that they are so important – The Ascent of Money touches on this but only at a basic level. In fact, there are interesting reasons for both which shed light on how the economy works – and how our lives operate. Trade and money are both, in a sense, behavioural phenomena. Trade exists – in the technical language of economists – because there are diminishing marginal returns to consumption, but decreasing marginal costs to production. This means that it’s in our interest to make an excess of what we’re good at, and to swap it for a variety of different goods that we don’t have enough of. Money arises because of barriers to communication and inherent cognitive limits. We can’t remember and process all the different goods available to barter, and their relative values, so we simplify by swapping them for a neutral medium of exchange – money – instead.

The existence and extent of trade and of monetary instruments therefore shed a lot of light on how our preferences work, and on the limits of our intellectual capability. Perhaps it’s asking too much to expect an exploration of this in what are, essentially, history books.

Technically, neither goes into a lot of detail, and both books have occasional minor errors – Bernstein tries to argue that skilled workers are more abundant in the US than unskilled, by looking at the incomes of the top 20%. Of course if they’re only the top 20%, they aren’t more abundant. And Ferguson opens his book with a statement that the value of world stockmarkets is higher than global economic output, which is akin to complaining that your house costs more than a year’s salary. It’s simply not the point.

But these are minor issues, and a reading of both books will give a good insight into economic concepts such as the fallacy of mercantilism - a belief that the way to get rich is always export more than you import, and to accumulate a pile of gold (or foreign exchange) reserves. While China and Germany have pursued this approach assiduously in the last decade, it hasn’t saved them from the consequences of the recession. Bernstein adroitly compares this to the error of King Midas – having gold isn’t worth much if you can’t or won’t spend it on things you want to use. A similar error is the assumption that only manufacturing goods, and not services, are a sustainable base for economic activity. Two hundred years ago the same argument would have been made about raw materials and agriculture, with manufactured goods playing the part of the frivolous parasitic industry which is destroying the heart of the British economy.

If you only have time to read one, A Splendid Exchange will give you a set of interesting stories to tell, a real insight into the world as it is and was, and a reasoned argument – with which you may or may not agree – about the benefits and importance of trade. The Ascent of Money will let you tell people who saw the TV show that you’ve read the book. Your choice.