Imagine summer without a fridge or air conditioning, and now imagine someone saying a block of ice, cut from a frozen pond, is on the way to cool you down. A 1984 study in The Accounting Historians Journal traced the numbers behind such an unlikely 19th-century trade: ice cut from frozen New England ponds, shipped across two equator crossings, to cool the tropical heat of colonial Calcutta.
How Tudor made the ice trade work
