The Export Adventurer

Before email, mobile phones and video calls, international business was built face to face—and often lived out of a suitcase.

The Export Adventurer follows Gerald Bratley through nearly sixty years of exporting, overseas manufacturing and government trade promotion across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, East Asia, Australasia and the Caribbean.

Beginning in industrial Yorkshire in the 1960s, the story moves through export sales, market development, licensing, technology transfer, overseas manufacturing and government service. It records the long flights, repeated visits, difficult negotiations, cultural misunderstandings, political upheavals, successes and costly misjudgements that formed part of working internationally before digital communications transformed business.

This book will appeal to readers interested in:

• International trade and exporting
• Economic and commercial history
• Life and work overseas
• The realities behind globalisation
• How business was conducted before the digital age

Written with restraint and clarity, this is a documentary-style account of one individual’s working life, set against the broader changes that reshaped global trade over half a century.

It is not a dry business manual, but a human story of opportunity, endurance and a life spent crossing borders—often with little more than experience, persistence and a suitcase.