Markets and Exchanges in Pre-Modern and Traditional Societies
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Markets and Exchanges in Pre-Modern and Traditional Societies

Juan Carlos Moreno Garcia, Juan Carlos Moreno Garcia

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Markets and Exchanges in Pre-Modern and Traditional Societies

Juan Carlos Moreno Garcia, Juan Carlos Moreno Garcia

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About This Book

Markets emerge in recent historical research as important spheres of economic interaction in ancient societies. In the case of ancient Egypt, traditional models imagined an all-encompassing centralized, bureaucratic economy that left practically no place for market transactions, as many surviving documents only described the activities of the royal palace and of huge institutions, mainly temples. Yet scattered references in the sources reveal that markets and traders were crucial actors in the economic life of ancient Egypt. In this perspective, this volume aims to discuss the role of markets, traders and economic interaction (not necessarily organized through markets) and the use of "money" (metals, valuable commodities) in pre-modern societies, based on archaeological, anthropological, and historical evidence. Furthermore, it intends to integrate different perspectives about the social organization of transactions and exchanges and the different forms taken by markets, from meeting places where exchanges operated under ritualized procedures and conventions, to markets in which profit-seeking activities were marginal in respect with other practices that stressed, on the contrary, community collaboration. The book also deals with social forms of pre-modern exchanges in which trust and ethnic solidarity guaranteed the validity of commercial operations in the absence of formal codes of laws or accepted authorities over long distances (trade diasporas, guilds, etc.). Finally, the volume analyzes a critical aspect of small-scale trade and markets, such as the commercialization of agricultural household production and its impact on the peasant economic strategies. In all, the book covers a diversity of topics in which recent research in the fields of economic sociology, archaeology, anthropology, economics, and history proves invaluable in order to analyze the role of Egyptian trade in a broader perspective, as well as to suggest new venues of comparative research, theoretical reflection, and dialogue between Egyptology and social sciences.

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Publisher
Oxbow Books
Year
2021
ISBN
9781789256123

Chapter 1

Markets and transactions in pre-modern societies
Juan Carlos Moreno García
In recent years a considerable interest in pre-modern markets and transactions and, more generally, in long-distance exchanges, has increased substantially the empiric evidence available and contributed to renewing historical interpretations. It was common in previous decades that specialists in ancient economies imported models conceived for other periods of history (the Middle Ages, the early modern period) or by anthropologists and that their conclusions hardly reached general debates on economic history. Perhaps the most noticeable exception was Polanyi and the team of collaborators he led. The influential ambitious project they launched aimed to analysing and characterizing other, usually pre-modern, logics of production that escaped to the mere economic utilitarianism and market-oriented goals of industrial societies, considered nevertheless to embody the very essence of rational economic thought and entrepreneurial behaviour (Polanyi et al. 1957). Polanyi emphasized instead the importance of social relations and the weight of institutional and social factors that limited, if not utterly prevented, the emergence and generalization of capitalist relations of production in many societies of the world in which markets were common nonetheless. It is not the place here to describe once more the shortages and mistakes that marked his pioneering work. Yet the questions and problems he raised still mark an inescapable intellectual path to get a better comprehension of the economies of the ancient and medieval worlds (Clancier et al. 2005). They also suggest an exciting autonomous sphere of historical research in which a careful analysis of pre-modern sources, coupled with the use of archaeology, might help detect other economic logics and, in doing so, to open the scope of what rationality, profit, investment, or enterprise meant in non-Western societies.
From a very different perspective, Max Weber also raised important questions about the organization and limits of pre-modern economies in his inspiring comparative sociology of religion. His classic study on the influence of Protestantism in the development of a modern economic mentality in the West had a reverse: why did other areas of the world, apparently best suited for the emergence of capitalism because of their early extension of trade networks, sophisticated financial tools, and vibrant commercial relations never experience a sustained process of economic growth and capitalist industrial economy? In his opinion, the ethical and religious values promoted by Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, and Islam, among others, limited the mere pursuit of accumulation of wealth, the promotion of sustained investment, and the emergence of individualism as socially prized values. The echoes and influence of the Weberian research program resonated vigorously in the work of influential historians of the ancient economy like Moses Finley and in the debates about primitivism and modernism that characterized the analysis of the Greco-Roman economies in the second half of the 20th century.
In both cases, the impact of the ancient Near East on debates in general economic history or, more specifically, on ancient economies was always quite modest at best. Usually reduced to the specialized competencies of philologists and archaeologists, the economic conclusions obtained by Assyriologists and Egyptologists rarely reached a wider audience and remained confined, on the contrary, to a tiny minority of scholars and rather specialized publications. Little dialogue between ‘oriental’ disciplines only made things worse. Ignace Gelb, for example, a leading specialist on Mesopotamian economy history, admitted as late as 1980:
About twenty years ago, while preparing a paper on Social Stratification in the Old Akkadian Period for the Twenty-fifth International Congress of Orientalists in Moscow, I made a discovery which was destined to influence my scholarly orientation in the years to come. Strange as it may seem, I suddenly found that the Old Akkadian texts, which I had been studying for so many years from the point of view of writing, grammar, and lexicon, have not only form, but also content; and that their content is of fundamental importance for the understanding of the social and economic history of ancient Mesopotamia, and with it, of the history of mankind (Gelb 1980: 29).
Things have changed in the last decades, particularly since the late 1990s and the early 2000s. The reasons for this shift are diverse, but the most important seem related to the explosion of archaeological research and the generalization of new techniques (remote sensing, landscape archaeology, zooarchaeology, and paleobotany) and approaches that are more sophisticated. Hence, integrative multidisciplinary projects focused on particular sites, regions, or materials have contributed to renewing discussions and perspectives of research that were still rooted, in many cases, on topics current in the 1950s (birth of urbanism and agriculture, nature of states and chiefdoms, economic and bureaucratic centralization, etc.). In turn, this has stimulated comparative analyses of economic features present in diverse regions of the world to characterize their commonalities and their idiosyncrasies too (Andreau et al. 1997; Hudson and Levine 1999; Hudson and van de Mieroop 2002; Hudson and Wunsch 2004; Steinkeller and Hudson 2015; Hudson 2018). The study of pre-industrial markets has not escaped from this move as well (Roman and Dalaison 2008; Feinman and Garraty 2010; Garraty and Stark 2010; Hahn and Schmitz 2018).
Another reason is the gradual self-awareness of the decline of the West in a world of accelerated geopolitical and economic changes. New actors risen to a central economic and geopolitical position (China, India, East Asia), capable of challenging the predominance of the West in the last three centuries, reject that the historical path followed by the West represents the ultimate model to imitate in order to reach modernity, economic prosperity, and political maturity. In doing so, these actors criticize the dominant Eurocentric historical narrative. On the contrary, they advocate for their own distinctive trajectories, based on their own cultural values and socio-political traditions, as alternatives that, in the end, have proven to be successful in promoting economic growth, prosperity, and modernity too. The ‘Great Divergence’ debate is perhaps the most influential example of this change of perception. A consequence is that the historical analysis of markets, trade, finance, investment, and enterprise no longer follows exclusively their conceptualization by generations of Western scholars and reveals itself more open to other historical and regional experiences instead.
A third cause is the very idea of globalization. Since the seminal studies by Braudel, Wallerstein, and others, it was assumed that the European discovery of America and the penetration of Western traders in the Indian Ocean in modern times launched a period of global economic integration and consolidation of capitalist economic relations on a worldwide scale. Regional specialization and division of labor, coupled with the emergence of sophisticate financial tools and commercial organization (joint-stock companies, stock exchange, etc.) and the expansion of trade, inaugurated a period of accumulation centred in Europe and the first economic globalization. Yet such view has been contested in recent times, as economic and archaeological research reveals early forms of globalization, certainly limited and relatively short-lived that connected, nevertheless, vast areas of Eurasia and Africa, from the Bronze Age to the Greco-Roman period and the Middle Ages (Hodos 2017). It was in these periods that commercial networks crossed these regions and trading activities expanded, not necessarily on the initiative of states and powerful institutions (temples, nobility, etc.). At their core, powerful merchants and trade diaspores organized caravans, fleets of ships, credit, joint ventures, etc., and made it possible the circulation of particularly coveted items, usually textiles, metals, and luxury products (cosmetics, wine, high-quality pottery, ornaments, etc.). Strategic crossroads situated at the borders of competing political powers and spheres of influence proved ideal to the emergence of specialized trading communities, like Ugarit, Phoenicia, Palmyra, and many others.
The identification of these early globalizations opens many questions about the real impact of trade in ancient societies. Usually regarded as fundamentally agrarian, the synchrony of major periods of political centralization and collapse across vast areas of the ancient world suggests some sort of economic integration, no matter how modest or limited it was. In other words, trade may prove less marginal and less centred on central powers than it was assumed by previous generations of scholars, as herders, sailors, maritime communities, mobile populations, etc., promoted and boosted circuits of exchanges and technical innovations subsequently captured by states. In other cases, some seasonal activities practised by peasants, like mining, gathering, etc., also played a crucial role in the provision of highly demanded goods (Wilkinson et al. 2011; Boivin 2018; Kristiansen et al. 2018). Finally, archaeology also reveals the extension and intensity of commercial and economic contacts from the analysis of prices or the use of weight measures. Warburton observes for instance that silver unified the values of all the articles traded on the markets of the ancient Near East (Warburton 2013). As for weights and measures, the introduction and exploitation of balances, weights, and systems of measurements by traders and the major states of the ancient Near East facilitated the creation of equivalences which offered the basis for prices and market activities over vast geographical areas (Rahmstorf 2012; Warburton 2013; 2018; Wilkinson 2014; Rahmstorf and Stratford 2019; cf. however Ialongo et al. 2018). In all, these developments promoted the expansion of international commerce and the circulation of certain goods over vast distances in some of the earliest ‘globalizations’, more particularly around 2000 BC and in the Late Bronze Age (Sherratt 2003; Warburton 2007; 2011).
In the end, the outcome of all these changes of perspective is what can be defined as a more uninhibited approach to markets, trade, and ancient economies, one emancipated from older dichotomies like the modernism/primitivism debate. One that does not hesitate to detect the early traces of ‘commercial capitalism’, ‘market performance’, and ‘market economies’ in antiquity and to use modern concepts such as ‘privatization’ (Hudson and Levine 1996), ‘enterprise’ (Landes et al. 2010) long before their emergence in Europe in the late Middle Ages. Thus, in his broad-scoping study of ‘commercial capitalism’ in world history, Jairus Banaji, for instance, discusses a rich body of evidence from pre-modern India, the Muslim world, and China that reveals the extent, complexity, and economic integration achieved through trade and markets located far from Europe (Banaji 2020). ‘Industrial’ crops employed in the textile industry, the cultivation of tea, coffee, etc., connected the cities and their rural hinterland and integrated peasants in market production through a diversity of commercial agents. The networks controlled by the latter penetrated deeply into the peasant sphere and oriented its production toward commercial crops and craft activities that complemented or utterly replaced subsistence agriculture. Capitals circulated, guilds of traders financed maritime trade as well as caravan routes and peasant production, whereas credit permeated the entire economy and led to the accumulation of wealth re-invested in the economic circuits they controlled. So, putting-out systems were operative in many parts of the world, when traders provided tools and capital to peasant families who produced textile fibres, commercial crops, or particular items (nails, etc.) for traders. Far from ‘primitivist’ views about ancient peasant economies, as well as about over-simplistic ‘modernist’ interpretations, his conclusions may be linked to the work of specialists of pre-modern economies like Huang. He realized that, in some cases and under specific circumstances, peasant families produced for markets, yet the considerable extent of commercial production thus obtained prevented, nevertheless, the expansion of cities and factories. It also avoided the implosion of domestic peasant units of production thanks to an intensive use of their workforce mostly oriented toward market production, a process that hampered the disintegration of families, the migration of their members to cities and the loss of their land. In this way, the interplay of markets, cities, commercialization of crops, and an intensive use of labor did not necessarily result in the emergence of capitalist relations of production, as it happened in Europe in the Modern Period (Huang 1990).
In other cases, institutional storage and state redistribution of cereals were not only not incompatible with market transactions but rather complemented and promoted market economy. An example can be found in some East Asian dynastic states, most notably Ming/Ching China and Choseon Korea, which dealt with popular welfare through both a state redistribution system and conventional practices of mutual aid and reciprocity prevalent in rural communities. In the case of Choseon Korea, the redistribution system was built upon a network of state granaries that extracted resources (grain and other goods) from the peasant population and that functioned as the focal point of the circulation of principal goods, particularly for rice. The royal house and central administrative agencies drew upon those granaries to provide themselves with necessary supplies, yet the grain also helped prevent disasters, such as drought, famine, and foreign invasions. However, this system proved inefficient because the collection of tribute taxes involved heavy transaction costs, such as the transport of goods. Therefore, since the early 17th century the government relied upon the market to be supplied with necessary goods, instead of upon the previous tribute tax. To this effect, it employed purchasing agents, or government-licensed merchants who supplied government offices with goods purchased on the market. With the new taxation system, peasants were able to pay the tribute tax in rice or hemp, and the government purchased necessary goods on the market and promoted market development. At the same time, the state allowed local granaries to meet people’s needs by exchanging reserves for other goods not produced locally. The resulting growth of market economy made the Choseon monarchy increase the number of state granaries, further reinforcing the state system of grain storage, instead of promoting civilian and private initiatives to address subsistence problems, as it happened in China. In the end, Choseon market growth was in no way opposed to the redistributive economy promoted by the state but it served to supp...

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