In the 1990s, a strange, hulking mass of modified shipping containers—five stories high—could be seen in New York’s East River: It was a floating jail. Just as unusual was the prison ship’s history. As Ian Kumekawa discovered in writing Empty Vessel: The Story of the Global Economy in One Barge (Knopf, March 22), the jail sat on a barge that had several past lives and would continue to pop up around the world in various guises, under various owners. Built in 1979, the Swedish-made barge once served as a “floatel” for offshore oil drillers in the North Sea. It also housed British troops during the Falklands War, factory workers assembling VW Beetles in Germany, and prisoners in the postcard-pretty harbor of Portland, England. Our starred review called the book “a stellar account of a complex offshore world, as seen through the tangled history of a humble barge.”

Empty Vessel makes for especially timely reading because it shows just how interconnected the world is—try as some politicians might to sever foreign ties and put up barriers to international trade and cooperation. Regardless of whatever pell-mell approach is taken to tariffs, the lowly barge in Kumekawa’s book is an example, he writes, “of the abstract forces that have transformed our world over the past forty years.”

Not that international commerce and relationships forged beyond borders are anything new. In his most recent book, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World (Bloomsbury, April 29), the historian William Dalrymple argues that, yes, the ancient Silk Road joined the East and West, but another route—the “Golden Road” of southern seas—linked India with distant lands over a span of centuries. As our reviewer noted, Indian sailors loaded their ships with “pepper, spices, ivory, cotton, gems, teak, and sandalwood—all in great demand in the Roman Empire.” Dalrymple demonstrates that this longstanding exchange also fostered an interplay of cultures. Religious beliefs traveled from India to China and Southeast Asia: Angkor Wat in Cambodia, writes Dalrymple, is proof of the “ever-widening Indosphere where ideas and forms and stories first dreamed up in South Asia were being discussed, appreciated, adopted and adapted very far from home.” As our critic put it, “The ancient world, too, was a global village.”

This to-and-fro between cultures has long shaped art as well, of course. The debut book by art historian Leslie Primo is a refreshing case in point: In The Foreign Invention of British Art (Thames & Hudson, May 13), wrote our reviewer, Primo convincingly asserts that the “‘new artistic sensibility’ that eventually became known as the British school of art could not have developed without the influx of artists from abroad.”

And something as simple as the orange can have us thinking about our connections to other cultures and other times. In Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange (Tin House, May 6), Katie Goh explores her family’s roots in China by focusing on the titular fruit. “Goh’s quest for self-knowledge mirrors the journey of citrus itself,” wrote our critic in a starred review. “In smart, engrossing prose, Goh teaches us as much about the fruits as about ourselves.”

John McMurtrie is the nonfiction editor.