Many years ago, while trying to find suitable mid-winter presents for my family and friends, I came upon this book; purchased it and gave it to my mother (whose first degree was in history); and stole it off her once she had had the chance to read it. Something probably over a decade later (in 2006/April) I finally got round to reading it, so that I could return it to her before her 70th birthday. (This prompted me to buy another copy, so that I could lend it to a friend I thought would find it interesting and pass it round.)
CUP - first published 1984. Library of Congress Cataloging in publication data: Curtin, Philip D. Cross-cultural trade in world history. (Studies in comparative world history) Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Commerce - History. 2. World history. I. Title. II. Series HF352.C87 1984 382'.09 83-23202 ISBN 0 521 26319 0 hard covers ISBN 0 521 26931 8 paperback
The most interesting book I can remember reading. I would commend
this book to anyone persuaded of the virtues of Free Trade—which should
include all anarchists, libertarians and such folks as term themselves
capitalist
without being so besotted with vested interests as to consent
to the state depriving the general population of freedom so as to assure the
economic advantage of those who possess so much thereof as to pose a clear and
present threat to the liberty of their fellow-citizens. Not that the book's
looking at it like that.
Cutrin considers the long-term story of what he terms trade
diasporas
: sub-cultures which have engaged in (generally long-distance)
trade by the strategy of combining local residents in chosen places along the
trade route with cultural peers who move among those places carrying goods for
trade. Such sub-cultures have existed throughout recorded history: we have all
heard of the Jews, most famous for their part in the early banking culture of
Europe but also a crucial trade diaspora ever since Roman times; but there have
been ample others, on every continent and in every epoch of human history.
Banking dates back to the Mesopotamian city of Ashur about four millennia
ago. The Armenians – whose home-land was never their own to rule –
were one of the most successful trading nations
of history –
despite never having a state power to back them up – doing better than the
Dutch and British during their respective eras of naval supremacy until the
collapse of the land-route for the silk trade – in the middle of the
eighteenth century, when Britain's naval supremacy made the sea route reliable
enough to realize its natural economic advantages. Even after that transition,
Armenian traders prospered by making the most of the Free Trade domain which had
destroyed the original back-bone of their success.
Curtin also describes – deliberately in less detail than the overtly
cross-cultural trade which he takes as his subject – what he terms
relay trade
. This could cross cultural barriers by diffusion –
since a chain of trades may pass from hand to hand, without any transit
considering itself a cultural boundary, and yet take goods from one group to
another who would consider the former culturally alien.
Curtin also, in discussing the European-driven fur-trade of Siberia and
North America, addresses what he describes as the fisheries model
, which
I have seen elsewhere described as the tragedy of the commons
. When a
resource is open to all to use, there is a risk that it shall be over-used. If
enough have access to it that it may be over-used, then each of its
potential users is in a position of gaining maximum (short-term) advantage by
using it as heavily as possible – so that it is necessarily used as
heavily as possible by each, ensuring that it shall be over-used. Thus
(to take the classic example) a common grazing land, available to many, shall be
over-grazed because none has anything to gain by restraint: if one abstains from
grazing there, the future loss (the grazing land becoming exhausted) is no less
sure, so none has any motive to so abstain. Likewise, in the absence of (hard
to implement) international quota systems, fishing on the North Atlantic has
naturally tended to over-fishing, because restraint by any given trawler merely
leaves more for its competitors to seize. It does not matter how clearly those
of us who understand the dynamics of such a system can prove that over-use of
such a resource may lead to long term reduction in the value available,
collectively, to its exploiters: in the short term, it is in the interests of
each to exploit it as much as possible, since doing anything less merely leaves
the surplus for their competitors to exploit. As (IIRC) Keynes remarked, in
the long term, we are all dead
; while I can't agree that this is a sound
basis for policy, it has an unavoidable strategic influence on competition.
In such a case, a monopoly is one solution: while the Russian Tzar could, he
arranged for the trade in Siberian and Alaskan furs to be a state monopoly.
This made it possible for the state's agents to pursue the rational
policy of under-supplying the demand, not (only) so as to drive up the price
– what's now known as supply-side economics – but also (at least so
some degree) because their supplies would become more expensive
(i.e. hunting would become harder) if they supplied more furs (i.e. killed more
animals) than the existing ecosystem could replace. Another solution, the
moratorium, is in practice a specialised monopoly: in a monopoly, the state
stipulates that no-one but the monopolist may engage in a given trade; in a
moratorium, one may substitute any organisation unwilling to engage in that
trade as the monopolist. A system of quotas is a hybrid model, essentially
formalising a cartel in one guise or another.
In the case of the English common grazing lands – in connection with
which this conundrum was (to my limited knowledge) first articulated (by Adam
Smith, I suppose) – one might have hoped to resolve the issue by
restricting the common grazing right to flocks and herds owned by the owners of certain
well-defined properties in the vicinity: and, perhaps, this might have sufficed
(were it not for vested interests) to have resolved most of the issues in
contention where it arose. The most obvious objection would be that drovers
– those who drove cattle to the meat markets of the major cities –
needed places for the beasts in their care to graze. The cities needed these
beasts brought to them well-fed and well-exercised; and rural communities needed
to be able to send their cattle to the city markets sure of adequate pasturage
(on the commons) along the way. This issue, in turn, might have been addressed
by having each body of common land assigned (in similar manner to the way some
markets were run) a local official who would collect some reasonable grazing
fees from transient grazers; that official must also be responsible for ensuring
the locals do not over-stretch their lawful quotas, and for sharing the
transients' grazing fees fairly with the native holders of grazing rights
(likely favouring those who under-use their rights and allowing others to graze
beyond their rights on terms kindred to those exercised by transients). One
might object that such an official introduces scope for partiality, bribery and
other vices; one might endeavour to remedy those vices in various ways; but my
limited knowledge of the relevant history suggests that the land-owners –
who, alone, were represented in the legislature – had a vested interest in
using the problem
as an opportunity to pass laws which caused common
land
to be converted into private property; which is, in fact, what
happened. This lead to what is known as The Enclosures
, by which
parliamentary fiat (infamously) converted public property into private
property; and (to take but one example of its effects) most of the rural Scots
were expelled from Scotland.