Quando e come il grano, per millenni merce scarsa, deperibile e difficile da conservare e trasportare, è diventato una commodity scambiata in immense quantità, prevalentemente da pochissimi, «faustiani», giganti mondiali? A partire da uno sguardo sui complessi e angusti mercati di ancien régime, dove gli scambi erano convulsi, frammentati, opachi, soggetti al rischio costante del clima, delle guerre e dell’arbitrarietà dei governi e soprattutto a corta portata, questo libro ripercorre l’imponente ma sottostimata «Rivoluzione commerciale» che da metà Ottocento ha fatto del grano una merce improvvisamente «facile» da trasportare e negoziare su scala planetaria. È infatti a ridosso del mercato del grano che nascono sia le prime grandi multinazionali moderne sia il mercato dei derivati finanziari: quei contratti future, divenuti negli ultimi decenni protagonisti della scena finanziaria mondiale, ma nati come assicurazione contro l’oscillazione dei prezzi del grano nella Chicago di metà Ottocento. Nel delineare le «vie del grano» apertesi tra Otto e Novecento, a ridosso della messa a coltura di interi continenti, incontreremo i riservatissimi attori di questo inedito mercato mondiale, dominato da una vera «passione per la segretezza»: attraverso di loro si potranno ripercorrere i meccanismi e le tappe fondamentali dell’evoluzione di un mercato strategico per la sopravvivenza dell’umanità. Scoprendo che il grano ti porta dove vuole: nelle cucine di campagna e nei giganteschi stabilimenti molitori di Minneapolis, nelle aule parlamentari e nelle nuove borse merci ad esso dedicate, nelle foschie dei conflitti geopolitici e negli intrighi dello spionaggio industriale, nella letteratura e nelle guerre alla pirateria, nei codici criptati della telegrafia intercontinentale e nella rivoluzione oceanografica. [Abstract translated by Google Translate: This is the abstract in English… When and how did wheat, for millennia a scarce, perishable and difficult to store and transport commodity, become a commodity traded in immense quantities, mainly by a very few, "Faustian", global giants? Starting from a look at the complex and narrow markets of the ancien régime, where exchanges were convulsive, fragmented, opaque, subject to the constant risk of climate, wars and the arbitrariness of governments and above all short-range, this book traces the impressive but underestimated "Commercial Revolution" which since the mid-nineteenth century has made wheat a suddenly "easy" commodity to transport and negotiate on a global scale. It is in fact close to the wheat market that both the first large modern multinationals and the financial derivatives market were born: those futures contracts, which in recent decades have become protagonists of the world financial scene, but were born as insurance against the fluctuation of wheat prices in the Mid-nineteenth century Chicago. In outlining the "grain routes" that opened between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, close to the cultivation of entire continents, we will meet the very secretive actors of this unprecedented world market, dominated by a true "passion for secrecy": through them we will be able to retrace the mechanisms and fundamental stages of the evolution of a strategic market for the survival of humanity. Discovering that wheat takes you where it wants: in country kitchens and in the giant milling plants of Minneapolis, in parliamentary halls and in the new commodity exchanges dedicated to it, in the mists of geopolitical conflicts and in the intrigues of industrial espionage, in literature and in wars to piracy, in the encrypted codes of intercontinental telegraphy and in the oceanographic revolution.]
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