THE PATTERNS OF TRADE

I am coming close to the end of my History of Man, with only two more posts to go after this one. So maybe, at this point, I should look at one of the most important patterns within world history.
In the last three posts we’ve seen a modern expression of this pattern in the clash between capitalism and communism. For one of the major things these two systems shared was an inherent idea of trade.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF MAN

At the dawn of history events happened in apparent isolation. This ended when empires began to dominate as powerful men built powerful nations that attacked and subdued their neighbours, culminating in the might of the Roman Empire.
Monotheism – the belief in the One God – then siezed the psyche of man. From the initial idea in the Jews, it spread to create Christianity and Islam. From Arabia an Islamic Empire grew and then declined, but in growing the Christians came together in the Crusades.
This gave Europe its first taste of colonisation, and also turned Christianity into a mighty administrative force. In Europe, learning became the preserve of the Christians. Then secular man began questioning his authority.
It was the time of the Renaissance and the birth of Humanism. The spirit led to a split in the Christian Church and then moved from the arena of the scholar to the soldier. This culminated in the Age of Enlightenment and French and American Revolution, people power triumphant over religious dogma and the rights of kings. But people power was an ominous thing, inevitably turning into further repression.
Napoleon rose through people power and change the face of Europe, bringing politics close to the national interests of today, whilst overseas the European empire builder forged the world into a global society where things could no longer happen in isolation.
The Industrial Revolution brought another surge of people power as the affluent middleclass thrived and the majority led impoverished lives. Marx grasped the essence of the times and the communist revolt stood just around the corner.
Meanwhile a new power – Germany – rose in Europe, thrusting the continent into a bloody civil war based on an ideological clash of left and right, encompassing two world wars and ripping Europe apart.
The wars over, and Europe a sick man, it lost its grip on empire, and people power imbued the oppressed Third World. Seeing communism as the opposite of this imperial dread, they grasped it, turned it into nationalism and grasped independence.
Further, the decline of Europe left a power vacuum soon to be filled by Superpowers and a new left/right ideological clash, the eventual fall of Soviet communism leaving a single Superpower in America, with a wave of Islamic fundamentalism beginning to break out in the Middle East, suggesting a new ideological clash of the secularist and religionist.

GLOBAL VILLAGE

Now, nothing can happen in isolation. The human race is a family on a small planet, becoming increasingly claustrophobic and unsure where the future lies. Troubles seem that much greater nowadays, turning man against thinking at all lest he surfaces a feeling of doom, intellectualism scoffed at, fearful of the political dangers it caused.
But is he correct in this pessimism? Is man close to some great reckoning, or has he just risen from adolescence with a new, exciting future ahead of him in, not doom, but peace and togetherness?
It is easy to see the history of man as a continual process of invasion and warfare, but it should be remembered that there is an underlying trend to such activity.

TRADING MAN

The first expansionist policy in global terms was that of Alexander the Great. And once his empire had come into being the Hellenistic world flourished as a trading society.
The empire which followed this – Rome – forged the whole of Eurasia through trade, providing the first technologically based infrastructure to aid the process with a network of roads.
Similarly, with the unification of the Arabic world through Islam, the Arab trader organised himself and from that time on the famous caravans have continually padded the Sahara.
In line with the Renaissance, northern Italy rose to be the first large scale urban connurbation and trading centre. Venetian merchants created the world’s largest maritime merchant fleet, cementing ties with the whole Mediterranean world and reaching as far as England.
With the beginnings of European expansion worldwide, Venice lost importance as the New World of America was discovered, rich in gold and silver. Indeed, it should be remembered that the initial reason for Spanish and Portuguese seafaring was to find a western route to Asia for trade.
Industrialisation soon came to this New World and the US had their civil war, shooting them forward to lead the economic, capitalist world, the final problem to unlimited trade being overcome by the development of transcontinental railways and rise in tonnage of merchant vessels, together with the transfer from sail to steam.
The Depression of the 1930s, seen after the fact, had benefits in that it made the world economists take a breather and contemplate. The nature of trade had become so complex that it was, by the 20th century, an integral factor in civilised life.
Just as agriculture had regulated civilisation before 1500, trade and technology regulate us now, with multi-nationals competing with governments for power.
The crippling of Europe following the world wars was only alleviated by the US Marshal Plan, flooding European trade with money, and the creation of the European Economic Community following the Treaty of Rome, leading to European Union and ideas of European integration.
Arab oil and US/Japan-led high technology, being the main elements of present life, must be seen, not as a new element of man’s civilisation, but perhaps the latest expression of a major factor in our story of advancement – a story that, although scarred by war and oppression, has been changed fundamentally by only four major events; the agricultural revolution, the development of the city-state, the Industrial Revolution and the present Hi-tech Revolution.
I don’t think, for a minute, that we have this trading impulse right, even now. Multi-nationals are clearly more a process of empire-building in a new world, but it is, nonetheless, trade. And the answer to our present problems will also come from trade.
Trade is, it seems, what we do.

(c) Anthony North, March 2008

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