The world that trade created society, culture, and the world economy, 1400 to the present, fourth edition

i

The World That Trade Created

The World That Trade Created brings to life the history of trade and its actors. In a series
of brief, highly readable vignettes, filled with insights and amazing facts about things
we tend to take for granted, the authors uncover the deep historical roots of economic
globalization.
Covering over seven hundred years of history, this book, now in its fourth edition,
takes the reader around the world from the history of the opium trade to pirates, to the
building of corporations and migration to the New World. The chapters are grouped
thematically, each featuring an introductory essay designed to synthesize and elaborate
on key themes, both familiar and unfamiliar. It includes ten new essays, on topics ranging
from the early modern ivory and slave trades across the Indian Ocean, to the ways in
which the availability of new consumer goods helped change work habits in both Europe
and East Asia, and from the history of chewing gum to that of rare earth metals.The introductory essays for each chapter, the overall introduction and epilogue, and several of the
essays have also been revised and updated.
The World That Trade Created continues to be a key resource for anyone teaching world
history, world civilization, and the history of international trade.
Kenneth Pomeranz is University Professor in History at the University of Chicago,
USA, and was President of the American Historical Association in 2013–​2014.
Steven Topik is Professor of History at UC Irvine, USA, where he has worked since
1984. Previously he taught at Brazil’s Universidade Federal Fluminense and Colgate
University.


ii


iii

The World That Trade Created
Society, Culture, and the World Economy,
1400 to the Present

Fourth Edition

Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik


iv

Fourth edition published 2018
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2018 Taylor & Francis
The right of Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik to be identified as authors of
this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in
any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
First edition published by M.E Sharpe 1999
Third edition published by M.E Sharpe 2013

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Names: Pomeranz, Kenneth, author. | Topik, Steven, author.
Title: The world that trade created : society, culture, and the world economy,
1400 to the present / Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik.
Description: Fourth Edition. | New York : Routledge, 2017. |
Revised edition of the authors’  The world that trade created, 2013. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017020753 | ISBN 9781138680739 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781138680746 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781315564081 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Commerce–History. | Commerce–Social aspects–History. |
Culture–History. | Industrialization–Social aspects–History. |
International economic relations–History. | Economic history.
Classification: LCC HF352 .P58 2017 | DDC 382.09–dc23
LC record available at />ISBN: 978-​1-​138-​68073-​9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-​1-​138-​68074-​6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-​1-​315-​56408-​1 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Out of House Publishing


v

For my mother, Lottie Pomeranz Spaeth (1924–​2015), one more thank you; and for
Maureen, to whom I owe more every day—​Kenneth Pomeranz
To Martha, for your brilliant insights, your steady patience, and your perfect grammar, this
book is dedicated with all my love—​Steven Topik


vi

vii

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction
1 The
1.1
1.2
1.3
1.4
1.5
1.6

Making of Market Conventions
The Fujian Trade Diaspora
The Chinese Tribute System
Funny Money, Real Growth
When Asia Was the World Economy
Treating Good News as No News
Pearls in the Rubble: Rediscovering the Golden Age of Quanzhou,
ca.1000–​1400
1.7 Aztec Traders
1.8 Primitive Accumulation: Brazilwood
1.9 A British Merchant in the Tropics
1.10 How the Other Half Traded
1.11 Deals and Ordeals: World Trade and Early Modern Legal Culture
1.12 Traveling Salesmen, Traveling Taxmen

1.13An Indian Ocean Commodity Circuit: How to Turn Cotton into Ivory
1.14 Going Nonnative: Expense Accounts and the End of the Age of
Merchant Courtiers
1.15 Empire on a Shoestring: British Adventurers and Indian Financiers
in Calcutta, 1750–​1850

2 Transport and Tactics
2.1 Woods, Winds, Shipbuilding, and Shipping:  Why China Didn’t Rule
the Waves

xi

1
7
13
15
18
20
23
26
30
32
35
37
39
41
43
48
50

53
58


viii

viii  | Contents
2.2 Better to Be Lucky Than Smart
2.3 Seats of Government and Their Stomachs: An Eighteenth-​Century
Tour
2.4 Pioneers of Dusty Rooms:  Warehouses, Transatlantic Trade, and the
Opening of the North American Frontier
2.5 People Patterns:  Was the Real America Sichuan?
2.6 Winning Raffles
2.7 Trade, Disorder, and Progress: Creating Shanghai, 1840–​1930
2.8 Out of One—​Many
2.9 Guaranteed Profits and Half-​Fulfilled Hopes: Railroad Building in
British India
2.10 A Brief  Trip Across the Centuries

61

3 The Economic Culture of Drugs
3.1 Chocolate: From Coin to Commodity
3.2 Brewing Up a Storm
3.3 Mocha Is Not Chocolate
3.4 The Brew of Business: Coffee’s Life Story
3.5 America and the Coffee Bean
3.6 Sweet Revolutions
3.7 Paying for Power: “Sin Taxes” and the Rise of the Modern State

3.8 How Opium Made the World Go ’Round
3.9 Tobacco: The Rise and Decline of a Magical Weed
3.10 Making Smoking Modern: From Pipes to Cigarettes in Egypt and
Elsewhere
3.11 Chewing Is Good, Snorting Isn’t: How Chemistry Turned a Good
Thing Bad

81
86
87
90
92
94
96
99
103
106

4 Transplanting
4.1 Unnatural Resources
4.2 Bouncing Around
4.3 Golden Misfortune: John Sutter in the Wilds of California
4.4 California Gold and the World
4.5 El Dorado or Wild Coast? How a Remote Place Was Washed by the
Tides of  World History
4.6 Beautiful Bugs
4.7 How to Turn Nothing into Something: Guano’s Ephemeral Fortunes
4.8 As American as Sugar and Pineapples
4.9 How the Cows Ate the Cowboys
4.10 The Tie That Bound

4.11 The Good Earth?
4.12 One Potato, Two Potato

119
126
128
130
133

63
65
66
68
73
75
77
79

112
115

135
138
142
144
146
149
150
152

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Contents  |  ix
4.13 Cocoa and Coercion: Advances and Retreats for Free Labor in West
African Agriculture
4.14 Trying to Get a Grip: Natural Rubber’s Century of Ups and Downs

5 The
5.1
5.2
5.3
5.4

Economics of Violence
The Logic of an Immoral Trade
As Rich as Potosí
The Freebooting Founders of England’s Free Seas
Adventure, Trade, Piracy: Anthony Shirley and Pedro Teixeira, Two
Early Modern Travelers
5.5 The Luxurious Life of Robinson Crusoe
5.6 No Islands in the Storm: Or, How the Sino-​British Tea Trade
Deluged the Worlds of Pacific Islanders
5.7 The Violent Birth of Corporations
5.8 Buccaneers as Corporate Raiders
5.9 Looking for the Next Worst Thing: Emancipation, Indentures, and
Colonial Plantations After Slavery
5.10 Bloody Ivory Tower by Julia Topik
5.11 How Africa Resisted Imperialism: Ethiopia and the World Economy
5.12 Never Again: The Saga of the Rosenfelders

6 Making Modern Markets
6.1 Silver and Gold in Mexico and Brazil
6.2 Weighing the World: The Metric Revolution
6.3 From Court Bankers to Architects of the Modern World
Market: The Rothschilds
6.4 Grain Goes Global—​and the Globe Makes “Grain”
6.5 How Time Got That Way
6.6 How the United States Joined the Big Leagues
6.7 Clubs, Casinos, and Collapses: Sovereign Debt and Risk
Management Since 1820
6.8 Fresher Is Not Better
6.9 Packaging
6.10 Trademarks: What’s in a Name?
6.11 Learning to Feel Unclean: A Global Marketing Tale
6.12 Chewing on Global History: Wrigley, Adams, and the Yucatán
6.13 Things Go Better with Red, White, and Blue: How Coca-​Cola
Conquered Europe
6.14 Survival of the First
6.15 It Ain’t Necessarily So
6.16 Location, Location, Location: How History Trumped Geography in
Andorra and Panama

155
159

162
170
172
176

178
181
184
186
188
191
193
195
199

203
208
213
216
219
225
227
229
233
234
236
239
242
247
249
250
252


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x  | Contents
7 World Trade, Industrialization, and Deindustrialization
7.1 Sweet Industry: The First Factories
7.2 Why We Work So Hard: The Industrious Revolution and the Early
Modern World
7.3 Fiber of Fortune: How Cotton Became the Fabric of the
Industrial Age
7.4 Combing the World for Cotton
7.5 Killing the Golden Goose
7.6 Sweet Success
7.7 No Mill Is an Island
7.8 Feeding Silkworms, Spitting Out Growth
7.9 From Rocks—​and Restrictions—​to Riches: How Disadvantages
Helped New England Industrialize Early
7.10 Sideways Breakthroughs and Stalled Transitions: Crooked Paths from
Coal to Oil, 1859–​2012
7.11 American Oil
7.12 Running on Oil, Building on Sand
7.13 Not So Rare, But Pretty Strange: How Rare Earth Metals Became a
Chinese “Monopoly”
7.14 Minding the Store and Forgetting the Factory: U.S. “Fair Trade”
Laws and the Rise of Offshore Manufacturing Since World War II
Epilogue: The World Economy in the Twenty-​First Century
Selected Bibliography
Index

258
267
272

277
279
281
283
285
287
289
291
293
297
300
303

307
323
330


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newgenprepdf

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the following people for the help they received on the
fourth edition:
Alex Borucki
Vinayak Chaturvedi
Maureen Graves
Mathew Restall

Allen Wells


xii


1

Introduction

When fifteenth-​century China began replacing depreciated paper and copper currency
with silver, the ripple effects touched remote peoples on five continents. At first, Chinese
demand mostly drew in Japanese silver, plus a bit from Southeast Asia, but this changed
when Europeans arrived, beginning in the 1500s. The Chinese traded their silks to the
Portuguese, British, and the Dutch, who bought them with Spanish pesos that had been
minted by African slaves in what is today Mexico and Bolivia and mined by indigenous peoples recruited through adapted forms of Incan and Aztec labor tribute. Some
pesos came via Europe. Some of the silver took the more direct route from Mexico to
China via the Philippines on Spain’s Manila Galleons. European pirates hovered around
America’s Caribbean and Pacific coasts, in the Mediterranean, and off the east coast of
Africa, where they struggled with Arab and Indian corsairs who coveted the silver cargoes
and the silk and spices that they purchased.
Silver also found its way east also through Muslim and later Christian purchases of
coffee in Yemen’s Red Sea port of Mocha, the world monopoly producer for more than a
century. Pilgrims to Mecca spread the taste for coffee from Morocco and Egypt to Persia,
India, and Java, and to the Ottoman Empire. Finally France’s Louis XIV in his soirées
introduced his Catholic aristocracy to the Muslim drink, served on Chinese porcelain,
sweetened with sugar grown on the slave plantations of the African Atlantic island of São
Tomé and later Brazil, and followed by a smoke of Virginia tobacco. Some noblemen
preferred chocolate, a drink of the Aztec nobility so precious that cacao beans served as
money; the English came to favor Chinese tea, which was also used as money in Siberia,

and various other parts of Asia. Eventually the British introduced tea cultivation into
India, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and African colonies like Kenya.
Many lands and cultures were swept into the vortex of the world economy, but that
did not mean that they passively accepted its terms. In 1770 a French trader in Senegal
was frustrated with local African merchants who, far from readily accepting baubles and
beads, refused to trade slaves even for French furniture. The African leaders demanded
Dutch or British chairs and bureaus, which they found more stylish. At roughly the same


2

2  | Introduction
time, British merchants in Canada were unable to sell Virginian tobacco to the Iroquois,
who had already acquired a taste for African-​cultivated Brazilian tobacco and accepted
no substitutes in exchange for the beaver pelts they offered for the elegant garments of
northern Europe. Other North American furs went to China, as did increasing numbers
of seal and otter pelts from the Northern Pacific; there they competed with pelts shipped
overland from the Russian Far East.
In Naples, meanwhile, enraged consumers threw a shipload of potatoes overboard during a famine, convinced that the Peruvian tuber was poison. At the same time, fashionable
men and ladies in London delicately sprinkled grated potato on other foods, believing
that the tuber was an aphrodisiac.
Clearly the world economy has connected myriads of far-​flung peoples for a long
time. Although globalization has today reached unprecedented proportions, there is really
not much that is fundamentally new about the globalizing New World Order. Nor is
diversity a recent invention. The object of this book is to describe, through a series of
stories, the long-​standing interconnectedness of the world.We attempt to wed the insights
of world systems analysis—​that the local must be understood in its global context—​with
the perspective of local studies that see variation and local agency shaping the global.
The stories included here began as articles in a column, “Looking Back,” which we
wrote for the business magazine World Trade for more than 10 years. The column focused

on the history and the creation of the world economy. Steven Topik and then Kenneth
Pomeranz were responsible for the column. Julia Topik contributed a guest article. This
book is not simply a collection of the articles, however. Rather, it is unified by several
central propositions on the nature of the world economy and the forces that shape it.
We reject a Eurocentric teleology that sees Europeans as the prime movers and everyone else responding to them; instead, we see the world economy as long-​standing and
non-​Europeans playing key roles in its development. To the extent that Europeans had
advantages, they often came as much from the use of violence or from luck (as when
European-​borne diseases devastated New World societies, opening vast territories for
conquest) as from economic precocity. Only in the latter part of our period did Europe
clearly have superior productive technology, and it is not clear that it ever had a unique
amount of entrepreneurship or social flexibility.
Consequently, politics have been as central to shaping international commerce as economics have been. The market structures that are basic to our world were not natural or
inevitable, always latent and waiting to be “opened up”; rather, markets are, for better or
worse, socially constructed and socially embedded. They required a host of agreements
on weights, measures, value, means of payment, and contracts that have not been universal
nor permanent, plus still more basic agreements about what things should be for sale, who
was entitled to sell them, and which people could haggle about prices (and settle disputes
without drawing swords) without compromising their dignity in the eyes of their neighbors. In the process of negotiating these rules of conduct, the very goods being bought
and sold sometimes became new markers of status and carriers of meaning.Thus “natural”
uses and advantages clashed with human-​made meanings—​as when people resisted the


3

Introduction  |  3
introduction of the potato—​and associations so deeply embedded that they probably
seemed natural were gradually reversed:  over time, chocolate became associated with
children, sweetness, and domesticity rather than with warriors, girding for battle, and religious ecstasy. In other words, goods themselves have “social lives” in which their meanings, their usefulness, and their value are in flux; “demand” and “supply” are culturally
determined by people with loves, hatreds, and addictions, not by reified “market forces.”
Moreover, it would be a mistake to assume that pomp and role-​playing can be clearly

separated from a supposedly more basic level of utilitarian behavior. Thus the Chinese
tribute system helped define upper-​class style, set rules for various kinds of trade, and
conferred enormous value on certain goods that non-​Chinese rulers obtained in those
exchanges. It thereby provided these rulers with gifts that helped mark them as important
patrons for other elites back home. In setting standards both for luxury consumption and
kingly behavior, the tribute system was thus able to play some of the roles we associate
today with the World Trade Organization or even the United Nations (helping to stabilize rulers by recognizing them) precisely because it also played some of the roles now
dispersed among fashion designers, elite schools and universities, and international media
companies. Success in this complex social, political, and economic arena came to the
successful, not necessarily to the most virtuous, hardworking, or clever; that is, the world
economy has not been a particularly moral arena. Slavery, piracy, and sale of drugs have
often been much more profitable than the production of food or other staples. In other
cases, sheer accident diverted key resources from one competitor to another, made somebody look particularly trustworthy or untrustworthy, or otherwise intervened to pick
winners and losers we would not otherwise expect. Finally, it is necessary to understand
both the local specificity of a transaction or event as well as its international context to
appreciate its importance.
We eschew a Eurocentric position while also avoiding simple-​minded anti-​imperialism;
that is, Europeans and North Americans were neither especially gifted, nor especially vile.
Rather than focusing on just European trade with the rest of the world or concentrating
on one area, we look at numerous areas and their interactions. We are telling the story of
the ebbs and flows of the world economy, created by people with cultures, not by homo
economicus or by capital itself. The creation of trade conventions, variations in knowledge
and goals, the interlinking of politics and economics, social organization, and culture all
are given attention.
We insist that the more things are connected, the more impossible it becomes to
describe them comprehensively. Rather than attempt the impossible task of covering the
development of the entire world economy over six centuries, we have chosen seven central topics around which to organize chapters; what we take to be major issues and debates
relating to a topic are laid out in an introductory essay. Each chapter then contains a set of
brief case studies, which are meant to be illustrative, not exhaustive. Often they are based
on the insights of other scholars, though a fair number derive from our own original

research or our take on lively debates. (We have included a brief bibliography at the end
of the book.) Rather than providing the last word on any topic, these articles seek to open


4

4  | Introduction
up discussion, encouraging people to think in different ways about various parts of our
world that we often take for granted or that we assume have always existed and needed
only to be “discovered.” This in turn leads us to question widely shared (though often
implicit) stories of how new ways of making and trading things born in early modern
Europe knit together (for better or worse) a world that had previously been composed
of separate societies often assumed to have been isolated from each other. Instead, we
emphasize that complex cross-​cultural networks with many centers already existed: the
ways in which those networks were used, reconfigured, and sometimes destroyed is an
essential part of understanding the new networks that came to center on Amsterdam,
London, New York, or Tokyo.
The chapters are organized by subjects and chronologically within chapters.The chapters overlap chronologically, but gradually become more modern in focus.Thus, we begin
with early modern markets and the institutions and conventions necessary for them to
function. Chapter  2 examines the role of transportation improvements in linking up
distant markets and intensifying trade. The third chapter focuses on drugs such as coffee, tobacco, and opium, their contributions to stimulating long-​distance trade, and their
effects on those who produced and consumed them. Next, we look at a wide variety of
goods that became commodities, moving across both physical space and mental categories
in the process: from the commonplace potato and corn to the coveted gold, silver, and
silk; from mundane but useful industrial raw materials such as rubber to the bizarre ones
such as the cochineal bug. Chapter 5 discusses the role of violence in capital accumulation
and market formation. This includes state-​directed repression, private initiative, and “outlaws” such as pirates. Chapter 6 then considers features of the modern world economy
such as standardization of money, measures, and time; the creation of trade conventions;
and corporations. Finally, our last chapter discusses episodes of industrialization and—​to
a lesser degree—​deindustrialization.

Kenneth Pomeranz was trained as a historian of China, Steven Topik as a historian
of Latin America; each has more recently expanded into writing (for both scholarly and
general audiences) and teaching on topics that transcend these regional boundaries. In
writing this book, we have allowed each author to present the topics he knows best and to
make his own decisions about what to emphasize in the case studies he originally wrote.
We have discovered in the chapters themselves a general unity of outlook, which we have
tried to systematize in the jointly written chapter introductions, but have not insisted on
precise agreement on each point in each article or on a checklist of particular examples
that must be included.The result, we hope, is a set of lively vignettes that can be read separately, but which the longer, more synthetic essays reveal to add up to more than just the
sum of the book’s parts, just as the world economy, while undoubtedly composed of parts
worth study in themselves, is more than the sum of those parts. In moving back and forth
between the local and the global, the meaning of each is enriched.
We are writing this fourth edition of The World That Trade Created to further expand its
geographic and chronological breadth. We have added ten new articles and one greatly
revised reading that span the globe as well as making other smaller revisions on other


5

Introduction  |  5
articles and updating the Epilogue. The new readings are on two early modern European
adventurers, Anthony Shirley and Pedro Teixeira, who connected the Mediterranean
world with the broader globe (see reading 5.4, page 178); on Sir Walter Raleigh’s gilded
Guyana and the multicultural realities of his fabled and fictitious El Dorado (see reading
4.5, page 135); and a discussion of the rapid international spread of tobacco (including
Raleigh’s efforts) from the Americas to Europe, to China and then to Africa and its consequences for tobacco’s many uses (see reading 3.9, page 106). Another article describes
how one particular purveyor of tobacco—​the Ottoman and later Egyptian cigarette
industry—​both reflected and shaped a changing culture of consumption, while competing with British American Tobacco, the central actor in most accounts of the rise of the
cigarette (see reading 3.10, page 112). We also visit the Indian Ocean through a widespread trade diaspora constructed by Hindu traders from the textile-​producing Indian
state of Gujarat: a network that turned cotton into ivory while enslaving Mozambican

people to work on sugar and coffee plantations in the Mascarenes Islands and South
America (see reading 1.13, page 43).
Tobacco and other everyday luxuries—​
many of them mood-​
altering, addictive
substances—​powered much of sixteenth–nineteenth-​century trade; and in fact powered much more than trade. “Sin taxes” on tobacco—​and on other goods often seen
as vices, such as alcohol and opium—​proved to be essential sources of revenue for
expanding states all around the world (see reading 3.7, page 99); in some places, they
still are. But these sinful products, paradoxically, also seem to have played a significant
part in what some scholars call the “industrious revolution” (see reading 7.2, page 272).
Beginning in the sixteenth or perhaps seventeenth century, people in various parts of
the world began working harder, and longer, and focusing more of that work on production for the market (instead of producing things for their own families to consume).
The reasons for this shift are complicated, but a growing demand, even among fairly
poor people, for exotic nonnecessities such as sugar and tobacco seems to have played a
big role.
Still one could not subsist on drug foods; in some sense, basic starches like wheat and
rice remained the most important commodities in the world, as they provided most of
the nutrition consumed by most humans, and took up a large, though slowly shrinking,
share of their budgets. But until the nineteenth century, their markets were generally local,
regional, or at most national. Reading 6.4 (page 219), discusses what happened when that
changed:  grain markets went global after the mid-​nineteenth century, with profound
implications for farmers, consumers, and the grains themselves.
The spread of modern capitalism has given rise to new commodities since the end of
the nineteenth century. One, chewing gum (see reading 6.12, page 242), became a working man’s small luxury—​indeed, one that many people hoped would replace the widespread use of another such item, chewing tobacco. Before long, gum became a branded
international product, which was widely identified with the United States. At the same
time, this product of modernity required great efforts in the Mexican Yucatán Peninsula
by local Mayan and then other Mexican workers tapping chicle trees.


6

6  | Introduction
Another new commodity, of far more fundamental importance to our world, was
petroleum (see reading 7.12, page 297). First exploited in the mid-​nineteenth century,
primarily for lighting, oil became the most important new energy source of the twentieth
century, the raw material for numerous twentieth-​century inventions (petrochemicals,
including plastics), and the industrial world’s strategic raw material par excellence. It even
turned a remote desert into one of the world’s richest lands. Finally, we include what have
more recently become coveted strategic materials: so-​called rare earth metals. Though
these materials began to be used for a few applications in the late nineteenth century, they
became more important in the twentieth; they have become even more important in the
late twentieth century, as some of their properties made them ideal for use in computers
and other sophisticated electronic equipment. Reading 7.13 explains what rare earths are,
why China has come to dominate the market, and why brief bouts of concern about this
have not led to the emergence of large-​scale, enduring competitors elsewhere.
As these and other cases make clear, the larger story of trade and global change continues to be written. We have therefore also added to our epilogue as well—​though we
did not find that it needed major revisions. While many events since 2012 have been surprising, certain historical patterns are as relevant as ever.


7

1

The Making
of Market
Conventions

Humans might be smart, but there is little evidence that we are by nature “economically
rational”—​that is, that human nature drives people to maximize their independent welfare by accumulating as many material goods as possible. Many of us remember Adam
Smith’s dictum that it was a basic part of human nature to “truck and barter”—​so basic,

according to Smith, that this tendency had probably developed along with the ability to
speak. Indeed, modern economics has made this a basic principle for analyzing human
behavior. But Smith’s juxtaposition of trade with speech has an implication that his modern disciples have often forgotten—​that trade, like speech, could sometimes serve expressive ends. Acquiring a particular good or sending it to others was (and still is) sometimes
a way of making a statement about who a person or group was or wanted to be, or about
what social relationships people had or desired with others, as much as it was a way of
maximizing strictly material comfort. And because economic activities are social acts,
they bring together groups of people who often have very different cultural understandings of production, consumption, and trade.
It is certainly true that people have traded things for thousands of years: evidence of
the exchange of shells, arrowheads, and other goods over long distances (and thus of geographically specialized production) goes back many millennia before any written records.
But in most cases we can only guess at the motives and mechanisms of trade and of the
way in which the exchange ratios between different goods were determined. We have
evidence that even in ancient times there were some markets in which multiple buyers
and sellers competed and prices were set by supply and demand, but also we have a great
many cases in which exchange reached a fairly large scale while governed by very different principles. Where supply and demand did set prices, as appears to have been the case,
for instance, for many goods in ancient Greece and at roughly the same time in China,
and for some goods traded between societies as far back as 2000 bce, the exchange value
of goods—​what they could fetch in other goods—​became more important than their
inherent usefulness (use value) or their status. But even price-​determining competitive
markets were affected by the fact that they were understood to be just one of various


8

8  | The Making of Market Conventions
ways of exchanging. In the second century bce, the Chinese emperor held a debate at
court about whether the state (and the people, though he cared less about them) were
best served by competing merchants or government monopolies over crucial goods such
as salt and iron; and though the ruler’s decision for monopoly could never be fully implemented even for these goods, the debate reverberated through the centuries, shaping
notions of what was and was not acceptable behavior both for unregulated merchants and
their would-​be regulators.

Everywhere it took a very long time for the concept of prices settled by supply and
demand to overcome more traditional notions of reciprocity (equal exchange of goods
and favors); status bargaining, which was more ritualistic trading between acknowledged
unequals, and usually designed to reproduce that status hierarchy; or Aristotle’s notion of
a just price, set not by barter in the market but rather by ethical notions of a moral economy, of just exchanges.
Some people resembled the fleet Ouetaca of Brazil. As we see in reading 1.8 (see
page 32), they were what some people today unkindly call “Indian givers”: people who
try to take back what they previously got credit for giving. The chase after the exchange
was as important as the actual exchange itself. Both parties mistrusted the other, and there
was only a very dim sense of property values.
Others were like the Brazilian Tupinamba, who thought the French traders “great
madmen” for crossing an ocean and working hard in order to accumulate wealth for
future generations. Once the Tupinamba had enough goods, they instead spent their time,
according to a Jesuit priest, “drinking wines in their villages, starting wars, and doing
much mischief.” And among the Kwakiutl of the Pacific Northwest, giving large amounts
of goods away could be either a way of procuring witnesses to one’s accession to a new
rank (and of outcompeting for that rank people who could not assemble enough goods
to give away fast enough), or a way of deliberately embarrassing a rival; but whether the
purpose was to proclaim solidarity or hostility, the giver was the winner, and goods were
accumulated in order to get rid of them on the right occasion as ritual gifts or Christmas
presents.
Even large-​scale, interdependent civilizations were often not based on market principles. The storied Incas of Peru knit together millions of people over thousands of miles
in a prosperous, strong state that seems to have had no markets, no money, and no capital.
Instead, trade was based upon the familial unit known as the ayllu and overseen by the
state. Reciprocity and redistribution were more guiding concepts than profit and accumulation. The Aztecs and Mayas of Mexico also had great empires that engaged in long-​
distance trade. The Aztecs (see reading 1.7, page 30) enjoyed an enormous marketplace
in their capital city of Tenochtitlán (today Mexico City), which hosted as many as 10,000
shoppers and sellers at a time.The Mayas, on the other hand, apparently had no local markets in their considerable cities. Both empires traded goods in an area that stretched from
New Mexico to Nicaragua, the equivalent distance in Europe from its northernmost to
farthest southern point. Yet long-​distance trade was completely separate from the local

markets of Aztec cities. Long-​distance traders dealt in luxury goods as emissaries of their


9

The Making of Market Conventions  |  9
imperial aristocracies. They were essentially state bureaucrats. These sophisticated long-​
distance traders would completely disappear once their states collapsed and European
merchants arrived.
Asia, linked by busy sea networks and so less dependent on difficult overland routes
like those used in Peru and Mexico, had much more active private trading. As reading 1.4
(see page 20) demonstrates, diasporas of trading peoples—​such as the overseas Chinese,
Muslims, and Hindus—​joined together an enormous and complex network of commerce
(we will return to these trade diasporas shortly). Moreover, the Chinese “tribute system”
(see reading 1.2, page 15) helped provide a framework for trade across vast areas of East
and Southeast Asia. Though its primary purposes were political and cultural rather than
economic, it helped provide an “international” monetary system, promoted shared luxury
tastes across a huge area (making the market big enough for specialized producers to target),
created quality standards for many goods, and promoted at least some common expectations of what constituted decent behavior. The leaders of ethnic trading communities (see
reading 1.1, page 13) provided other elements of a shared framework for trade; so did the
accumulated practices in certain long-​established entrepôts (usually city-​states that were
convenient meeting places for East and South Asians because of the patterns of the monsoon winds [see reading 2.1, page 56]). These trading networks were linked to states, but
they also had gained a life of their own. Thus, when Europeans finally entered the waters
of the Indian Ocean in the sixteenth century and tried to wrest away the trade, they found
their Asian competitors resilient.We see in reading 1.4 (page 20) and reading 1.13 (page 20)
that for a long while Europeans were treated as simply one more competitor who had to
be tolerated, but not obeyed. Unlike New World traders, Asians were less dependent upon
their states and hence could persist, even thrive, in the face of European cannons.
But saying that Asian trade was more independent of the state than that of the Incas
or Aztecs does not mean that it operated in a purely economic realm outside politics and

culture. On the contrary, even “merchants” often derived more profit from state concessions and monopolies than from clever entrepreneurship. Muhammed Sayyid Ardestani
(see reading 1.12, page 41) amassed a huge fortune as a tax farmer and a contractor for
government purchases. The importance of good relations with government officials was
obvious even to the representatives of the English East India Company (see reading 1.13,
page 43). In order to impress the Indian princes with whom they dealt, agents of the
company spent lavishly to maintain themselves in the lifestyle of local princes and made
frequent shows of military power. Being a successful trader required spending as much as
accumulating: minimizing costs was not a consistent high priority.
Success for many Europeans in Asia also demanded intermarrying with the local population. Agents of the Dutch East India Company took Malay, Javanese, Filipina, and especially Balinese wives (see reading 1.10, page 37) to implicate themselves in the local market
and society. Even though the British and Dutch agents represented some of the first modern capitalist enterprises organized as joint stock companies, they also relied on the traditional means of business alliances: marriage. But while a high-​level European marriage
generally linked two “houses” in which males controlled the capital and managed the


10

Figure 1.1  Map of trading ports and cities in the Indian Ocean, 618–​1500.
Source: adapted from K.N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History, Cambridge
University Press, 1985


11

The Making of Market Conventions  |  11
business by exchanging a woman—​almost as if she were a trade item herself—​in Southeast
Asia it was often the bride herself who had the liquid funds and the business acumen (her
aristocratic male relatives considered themselves above such haggling). Some European
men were delighted to get a domestic partner and a business partner in the same person;
many more seem to have found the independent spirit of these women irksome. But for a
long time they had little choice but to adapt if they wished to prosper. In fact, the European
sojourners often indirectly reinforced the importance of these women even while they

(and the missionaries who accompanied them) complained about it. Not being used to the
tropics, these men tended to die well before their “local” wives; with inheritances in hand,
these women then had even more bargaining chips for their next venture or next marriage.
Europeans often had to “go native” in the first centuries of contact because of their
own weakness and because of the variety of local laws and traditions that governed commerce. A diversity of states, religions, and trade diasporas and no agreed-​upon commercial
law left room for violent disputes. As we see in reading 1.11 (page 39), the intensification
of trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led to greater contact and increasing
agreements on trade conventions. The spread of Islam also provided an ethical basis for
conflict resolutions. But a convergence of practices was not inevitable. In fact, a depression
in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries led to a reversal of the trend, at least
in what is now Indonesia; commercial customs again became more local and disparate.
Moreover, “native” was a relative term. The typical Asian port housed Gujaratis,
Fujianese, Persians, Armenians, Jews, and Arabs, just as European trading centers housed
separate groups of Genoese, Florentine, Dutch, English, and Hanseatic merchants. Only
the most near-​sighted European could fail to see that these groups differed. (The greatly
increased power of Europeans in the nineteenth century encouraged such myopia and
allowed more Europeans to get away with it, but earlier traders, lacking the aid of a colonial
state, could not survive if they were that obtuse.) The individuals who made up these trade
diasporas may have expected to leave someday, but the accumulated knowledge, contacts,
and ways of operating that each group created were much more enduring—​sometimes
more important and lasting than the laws of the supposedly rooted local authority.
Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that trade diasporas remained the most
efficient way of organizing commerce across much of Afro-​Eurasia and the Americas
until the nineteenth century, as they had been for centuries (see for instance, readings 1.1,
1.4, 1.6, 1.12, 1.13, and 1.14). Trade diasporas made sense from many points of view. In
an era when contracts could be hard to enforce, especially across political boundaries, it
helped to deal with people who came from the same place you did. You were likely to
understand them better than you did strangers: not only did you speak the same language,
but you shared an understanding of what was good merchandise, of when a deal could
(and could not) be called off, and of what to do in embarrassing but inevitable situations

such as bankruptcy or accident. If you traded with somebody with whom you did not
share these understandings, you ran a higher risk of trouble, including having to deal with
the culturally alien, sometimes arbitrary, principles of the local ruler’s courts. And in case
your trading partners were tempted to cheat you, it helped that their relatives and yours


12

12  | The Making of Market Conventions
lived near each other. If worse came to absolute worst, there were people to take your
anger out on, but more often a shared home base enforced honesty in a less physical way.
Somebody who eventually hoped to return home, to inherit his parents’ business or to
marry his children to members of other elite families in his home territory, would think
twice before hurting the reputation of his family back home. In some cases, this allowed
merchant-​organized courts back home to issue judgments that their countrymen overseas
obeyed; this was true, for instance, for Armenian traders from New Julfa, wherever they
lived. In others, no formal institution was created, but people knew that they would pay
if they embarrassed their relatives back home.
These principles not only kept traders abroad—​two Gujaratis doing a deal in Melaka
or Mozambique, for instance—​honest with each other; it worked even better to keep
either one from enriching himself at the expense of his partners or employers back home.
One practice used by Fujianese in early modern times drew particularly heavily on social
rank at home to enforce honest dealings abroad. Great merchant families often sent their
indentured servants off to manage their most far-​flung business interests, especially in
Southeast Asia. (Among other things, they may have wished to keep their actual sons at
home—​for company, for safety, to maximize the chance of grandchildren, or to protect
the family’s other interests by managing their land or training to become government
officials.) The servants understood that only if they returned home having done well
would they be given their freedom, adopted into the family as a son, and furnished with
an elite bride selected by their new parents. Until they succeeded, there was not much

point in going home.
The rulers of port cities also found it convenient to have trade handled this way.
Concentration of wealth in the hands of aliens was less threatening than concentrations
of wealth in the hands of, say, local aristocrats who might have the right blood and connections to make a bid for the throne; and if many of the aliens came from the same place,
they could be assigned to keep each other orderly. Even Stamford Raffles (see reading 2.6,
page 65), who saw himself as a child of the English Enlightenment and professed a belief
in the rule of law, not men, found it convenient to organize Singapore (which he founded
in 1819) as series of separate ethnic quarters, with a few leading merchants in each quarter
responsible for governing according to the customs they were used to. Twenty-​five years
after that, the founders of the International Settlement in Shanghai initially imagined an
all-​white settlement where they would rule only themselves; it took a civil war, which
brought wealthy Chinese refugees who sent rents soaring, to trump the desire for racial
separation and create a mostly Chinese community under Western rule.
In the best of all possible worlds, a ruler might even convince a key figure in a trade
diaspora to pay a handsome sum to be named “captain” over his ethnic fellows: if the ruler
chose the right person, he got revenue, a grateful (and wealthy) follower, and good government in the merchant quarter at no cost to himself. With so many advantages, trade
diasporas remained an indispensable way of organizing trade until full-​fledged colonial rule
(and with it Western commercial law) was established across much of the globe in the nineteenth century. Even then—​and in fact still today—​such networks remain an important