Trade: quotes, facts and reflections

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WonderHistory

The Uluburun ship sank off Kaş in southern Turkey around 1300 BC, carrying copper, tin, glass and ivory gathered from across the Bronze Age Mediterranean.

In 1982 Mehmed Çakır, a sponge diver from Yalıkavak near Bodrum, reported strange metal 'biscuits with ears' on the seabed; they were copper ingots. The Institute of Nautical Archaeology, led by George Bass and then Cemal Pulak, excavated the wreck in 11 seasons from 1984 to 1994, with more than 22,000 dives. The cargo held about ten tonnes of copper and one tonne of tin, the right mix for bronze, along with glass ingots, elephant and hippopotamus ivory, ostrich eggshells, Baltic amber and a gold scarab bearing the name of Egypt's Queen Nefertiti. Its goods came from Cyprus, the Syrian and Canaanite coast, Egypt, the Aegean and beyond, about a century before that connected world collapsed. The finds are shown at the Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology.

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WonderHistory

Tyrian purple, the most prized dye of the ancient world, came from sea snails. It took about 12,000 of them to make 1.4 grams of dye, enough to colour only the trim of one garment.

The dye comes from a gland of several Mediterranean sea snails, mainly the spiny dye-murex. The fresh secretion is almost colourless and turns purple in air and sunlight. The name refers to Tyre, a Phoenician port in today's Lebanon and a centre of the trade. Snails left to rot in large vats gave the dye works a stench that ancient writers complained about. Roman emperors kept the finest purple for themselves, and the Byzantine court later reserved purple silk for imperial use; a child born to a reigning Byzantine emperor was called 'born in the purple'. The 12,000-snail figure comes from the German chemist Paul Friedländer, who in 1909 extracted the pure dye and showed that it is a close chemical relative of indigo.

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WonderTrade

The Silk Roads were not a single road but a web of caravan and sea routes that linked China with Central Asia, India, Persia and the Mediterranean for more than 1,500 years. Along with silk and spices, they carried religions, inventions and diseases.

The name is much younger than the routes: the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen coined it, as Seidenstraße, in 1877. The trade grew under China's Han dynasty from the second century BC, when envoys and caravans opened paths westwards through oasis towns such as Kashgar and Samarkand, while ships linked Chinese, Indian, Arab and East African ports. Few merchants travelled the whole way; goods passed from hand to hand. Along these routes Buddhism reached China, and papermaking travelled west to the Islamic world and then to Europe. In the fourteenth century the plague is thought to have spread along them towards the Black Sea and Europe.

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WonderTrade

The Columbian Exchange is the vast transfer of plants, animals, diseases and people between the Americas and the rest of the world that followed Columbus's voyage of 1492. Potatoes, maize and tomatoes crossed the Atlantic eastwards; horses, wheat, smallpox and millions of enslaved Africans were carried west.

The historian Alfred W. Crosby gave the process its name in his 1972 book The Columbian Exchange. American crops changed diets across the Old World: potatoes helped Europe's population grow, maize became a staple in much of Africa, and chilli peppers reached India and Korea. In the other direction, horses transformed life on the North American plains, and cattle, sugar cane and wheat remade American landscapes. The heaviest cost fell on Indigenous Americans. Smallpox, measles and other diseases they had never met killed a large share of the population within decades, and the plantation economy that followed drove the forced transport of millions of enslaved Africans.

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WonderTrade

The Hanseatic League was an alliance of German merchant guilds and trading towns that dominated commerce in the Baltic and North Sea from the 13th to the 15th century, with Lübeck as its informal capital and trading posts from London to Novgorod.

The League grew in the late 12th century from a few north German towns and at its height took in nearly 200 settlements across what are now eight countries. It had no king, army or permanent government. Member towns sent delegates to occasional assemblies called Hansetage, shared trading privileges, and sometimes blockaded or even fought rivals, as in the war that defeated Denmark in 1370. Its great foreign offices, called kontors, stood in London, Bruges, Bergen and Novgorod. As strong territorial states rose, the League faded; its last assembly met in 1669. Hamburg and Bremen still call themselves Free Hanseatic Cities.

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WonderTrade

Shipping containers, steel boxes built to standard sizes, let cargo move from ship to lorry to train without being unpacked. Since the first container voyage in 1956, they have cut loading costs so sharply that they helped create today's global trade.

Before containers, dockworkers loaded ships one sack, crate and barrel at a time, and loading a ship could take days or weeks. The American trucking entrepreneur Malcolm McLean changed that. On 26 April 1956 his converted tanker Ideal X sailed from Newark to Houston with 58 containers on deck. McLean calculated that loading cost about 16 cents a ton, against almost six dollars for cargo loaded piece by piece. International standards for container sizes and corner fittings followed in 1968–1970, so any box could fit any crane, ship or lorry. Ports changed, many dockworkers lost their jobs, and making goods far from where they are sold became cheap.

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WonderTrade

From around the eighth century, camel caravans crossing the Sahara linked West Africa with North Africa and the Mediterranean, carrying gold north, salt south, and books, scholars and ideas in both directions.

Camels, which spread across the Sahara in the first centuries AD, made the crossing practical: they could go for days without water between wells and oases. Salt cut in desert mines such as Taghaza was in huge demand in the West African savanna, which had gold but little salt, and the gold of the Ghana, Mali and Songhai empires reached Mediterranean mints. Caravans could number thousands of camels. Timbuktu grew rich on this trade and, from the fourteenth century, became a centre of Islamic learning around mosques such as Sankore; many thousands of manuscripts from its libraries survive today. The same routes also carried enslaved Africans north across the desert.

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WonderTrade

For more than two thousand years, Indian Ocean trade ran on the monsoon winds, which reverse with the seasons. Timing their voyages to them, merchants linked East Africa, Arabia, India, South-East Asia and China through a chain of busy ports.

In the northern Indian Ocean the monsoon blows from the south-west in summer and from the north-east in winter, so a ship could sail out on one season's wind and home on the next. A Greek sailing guide from the first century AD, the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, already describes this trade between Egypt, Arabia, East Africa and India. Arab and Persian dhows (wooden sailing ships), Indian and Malay vessels, and later Chinese fleets used the same system; Admiral Zheng He's expeditions reached East Africa in the early 1400s. Ports such as Kilwa, Calicut and Malacca grew rich on spices, cotton cloth, porcelain and gold, and Islam, Swahili culture and many words travelled the same routes.

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WonderTrade

From 1565 to 1815, Spanish ships known as the Manila galleons crossed the Pacific between Manila in the Philippines and Acapulco in Mexico, carrying Asian silk, porcelain and spices east and returning with American silver.

Usually only one or two galleons sailed each way a year. The westward run from Acapulco took about three months on the trade winds, but the return had to swing far north to catch westerly winds and could take four to six months, and scurvy and storms cost many lives. Much of the silver, mined at Potosí in today's Bolivia and at Zacatecas in Mexico, ended up in China, whose economy increasingly ran on silver. Chinese porcelain arriving in Mexico influenced the blue-and-white Talavera pottery of Puebla, and Manila grew into a meeting place for Chinese, Spanish, Filipino and Japanese traders. Dozens of galleons were wrecked over the route's 250 years.

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WonderTrade

Cowrie shells, the glossy shells of small sea snails, served as money in parts of Africa, Asia and the Pacific for centuries, because they were durable, easy to count and carry, and hard to fake.

Cowries were used in China during the Shang dynasty, more than 3,000 years ago, and the Chinese sign for 'shell' still appears inside many characters to do with money, such as those for 'goods' and 'buy'. Most of the cowries used in Asia and Africa came from the Maldive Islands. The traveller Ibn Battuta saw them used as currency in the Mali Empire in the 1350s, and from the sixteenth century European ships carried them to West Africa by the ton, often as ballast. There they paid for everyday goods and taxes, and they were also used to buy enslaved people in the Atlantic slave trade. As imports soared their value fell, and colonial currencies replaced them around 1900.

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DriveTrade

Founded in 1602, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) combined investment, shipping, military power and colonial trade to become one of history's first global corporations.

The Dutch parliament, the States General, gave the VOC a 21-year monopoly on Dutch trade east of the Cape of Good Hope, along with powers normally held by states: it could build forts, keep an army, wage war, sign treaties and mint coins. To raise money it sold shares to the public, and trading in those shares in Amsterdam made it one of the first companies with freely traded stock. From its Asian headquarters at Batavia, today's Jakarta, it dominated the spice trade, often by force: in 1621 its troops killed or expelled most of the people of the Banda Islands to control nutmeg. At its height it employed tens of thousands of people. Debt and corruption brought it down, and it was dissolved in 1799.

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WonderTrade

The Incense Route carried frankincense and myrrh, fragrant tree resins, from southern Arabia to Mediterranean markets for centuries, through a chain of caravan towns, wells, forts and water systems across the desert.

Frankincense and myrrh come from trees that grow in the dry lands of southern Arabia and the Horn of Africa. They were burned in temples and homes, and used in medicine, perfume and embalming. Pliny the Elder, writing his Natural History around AD 77, says the road from Thomna in southern Arabia to Gaza on the Mediterranean was divided into 65 camel stages, and that by the coast each camel-load had cost 688 denarii in water, fodder, lodging, tolls and payments to priests, guards and officials. Cities that controlled parts of the route grew rich, among them Shabwa in Yemen and the Nabataean capital Petra in today's Jordan, whose cisterns and dams stored scarce rain for the caravans.

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DriveTrade

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, six fairs a year in the Champagne region of north-eastern France were among the main meeting places of European trade, where Flemish cloth met Italian merchants, Mediterranean spices, credit and currency exchange.

The fairs rotated between four towns, Lagny, Bar-sur-Aube, Provins and Troyes, and each lasted several weeks, so that together they filled most of the year. The Counts of Champagne gave merchants safe conduct on the roads, and fair wardens enforced contracts and punished defaulters, so strangers from distant cities could trust each other. Deals were often settled on paper: debts run up at one fair were cleared at its end or carried over to the next, an early step towards modern banking. The fairs declined in the early fourteenth century. Champagne had passed to the French crown when its heiress married the future Philip IV in 1284; royal taxes rose, war disrupted Flemish trade, and Italian ships began sailing directly to Bruges.

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DriveTrade

The Medici Bank, founded in Florence in 1397, became one of the most powerful banks in fifteenth-century Europe, and its profits paid for the Medici family's political power and its patronage of artists such as Donatello and Botticelli.

Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici founded the bank, and much of its profit came from handling the finances of the popes. The Church banned charging interest, so the bank earned money through bills of exchange: a merchant paid in one city and was repaid in another currency elsewhere, and the exchange rate hid the bank's fee. Under Giovanni's son Cosimo it had branches in cities including Rome, Venice, Milan, Geneva, Avignon, Bruges and London. Later managers lent heavily to rulers who could not repay, such as Edward IV of England and Charles the Bold of Burgundy, and branches closed one by one. The bank finally collapsed in 1494, the year the Medici were driven out of Florence.

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DriveTrade

The Suez Canal in Egypt, opened in 1869, links the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, so ships between Europe and Asia no longer have to sail around Africa. Dug partly by forced labour and later fought over by empires, it still carries a large share of world trade.

The French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps led the company that dug the canal. In its early years tens of thousands of Egyptian peasants were made to work on it under the corvée, a system of compulsory unpaid labour, until the practice was stopped in 1864. Egypt's debts later forced it to sell its 44 per cent stake to Britain in 1875, and British troops stayed in the canal zone until 1956. That year President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the canal, and Britain, France and Israel invaded. International pressure, above all from the United States, forced them to withdraw, a turning point in the end of European empire in the Middle East. In March 2021 the container ship Ever Given ran aground and blocked the canal for six days.

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WonderArchaeology

The Hoxne Hoard, found in Suffolk in 1992, is the largest hoard of late Roman gold and silver ever found in Britain: nearly 15,000 coins, with jewellery, spoons and pepper pots, buried early in the fifth century.

Eric Lawes, a retired gardener with a metal detector, found it on 16 November 1992 while helping a farmer, Peter Whatling, look for a lost hammer. When silver spoons and gold coins appeared, he stopped and reported the find, so archaeologists could excavate it the next day with the objects largely in place, packed inside the remains of an oak chest. The latest coins show it was buried after AD 407, as Roman rule in Britain was ending. Among its treasures are four silver pepper pots, one shaped as the bust of an elegant lady and known as the Empress; pepper, most likely what they held, came from India. Lawes and Whatling shared the £1.75 million reward. The hoard is now at the British Museum in London.

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WonderArchitecture

Great Zimbabwe, the stone city built by ancestors of the Shona people between the 11th and 15th centuries, has huge granite walls laid without mortar. It was the capital of a kingdom that traded gold towards the Indian Ocean coast.

The ruins spread over several square kilometres in the south-east of today's Zimbabwe, and at its height the city was probably home to up to 10,000 people. Its best-known structure, the Great Enclosure, has walls up to 11 metres high, some topped with chevrons, a zigzag pattern of set stones. Excavations found Chinese pottery, glass beads, coins from Arabia and a coin minted at Kilwa on the Swahili coast, signs of the city's place in Indian Ocean trade. Colonial writers claimed Africans could not have built it. David Randall-MacIver in 1905 and Gertrude Caton-Thompson in 1929 showed it was the work of the Shona's ancestors, yet Rhodesia's government kept promoting other theories until independence in 1980. Dzimbabwe means houses of stone in Shona, and the country took its name from the city.

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WonderTrade

Kilwa Kisiwani, an island off the coast of Tanzania, was one of the richest Swahili trading cities from the 13th to the 15th century. It controlled the gold trade of the southern coast and built its mosques and palaces of coral stone.

The Swahili were Muslim African trading communities of the East African coast. Kilwa grew rich when its sultans took control of the gold trade at Sofala, in today's Mozambique, where gold from the Zimbabwe plateau reached the sea. Merchants brought cloth, glass beads and porcelain from Arabia, Persia, India and China. The Great Mosque, one of the oldest standing on the coast, and the vast Husuni Kubwa palace were built of coral stone. For some 500 years Kilwa minted its own coins, mostly copper, which have been found as far inland as Great Zimbabwe. A Portuguese fleet sacked the city in 1505 and its trade declined. UNESCO listed the ruins in 1981; they were on its danger list from 2004 until conservation work allowed their removal in 2014.

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WonderEngineering

Wootz was a steel made in southern India and Sri Lanka by melting iron with carbon in small sealed clay pots. Traded west as ingots, it was prized because careful forging brought out flowing, watery bands in the blade, the pattern of famed Damascus swords.

Crucible steel of this kind was made in southern India from around the middle of the first millennium BCE. Because the metal melted fully in a sealed pot, it took up carbon evenly, giving a hard, high-carbon steel. In Sri Lanka, the archaeologist Gill Juleff found ancient furnaces built on hillsides to catch the monsoon winds, which blew air through them instead of bellows. Ingots travelled to Persia and Syria, where smiths forged them into the blades Europeans called Damascus steel. The wavy bands are sheets of tiny carbides, hard compounds of iron and carbon. In the 1990s J. D. Verhoeven and Alfred Pendray showed that traces of vanadium in the ore, together with repeated heating during forging, are needed for the pattern to form.

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WonderEngineering

The Plimsoll line, a circle with a line through it painted on a ship's hull, marks how deep a loaded ship may safely sit in the water. Extra lines beside it allow for fresh water, tropical water and winter seas, where the safe limit is different.

The mark is named after Samuel Plimsoll, a British member of parliament who campaigned in the 1870s against “coffin ships”: vessels sent to sea overloaded and often over-insured, so that owners could profit even if the ship sank and its crew drowned. His 1873 book Our Seamen stirred public anger, and the Merchant Shipping Act of 1876 made the load-line mark compulsory on British ships. International conventions in 1930 and 1966 extended load lines to ships worldwide. The letters beside the mark stand for tropical fresh water (TF), fresh water (F), tropical (T), summer (S), winter (W) and winter North Atlantic (WNA). Canvas plimsoll shoes are said to take their name from the band where the upper meets the sole, which recalls the line.

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WonderTrade

Baltic amber is tree resin that hardened over tens of millions of years. It was carried from the shores of the Baltic Sea to southern Europe along a web of trade routes known as the Amber Road, reaching Mycenaean Greece and, later, Roman workshops at Aquileia.

Amber began as resin in ancient forests and hardened underground; it is light, feels warm to the touch, and sometimes holds insects trapped millions of years ago. Storms still wash pieces up on Baltic beaches. There was never one paved road: amber moved along rivers and overland tracks, passing from hand to hand. Archaeologists can tell Baltic amber from other kinds by its chemistry, notably its succinic acid, and so trace beads found far to the south back to the Baltic. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder tells of a knight sent north under Emperor Nero who came back with so much amber that it decorated an entire gladiator show in Rome.

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WonderTrade

In the Kula ring of Papua New Guinea's Massim islands, partners sail between islands to exchange shell valuables: red necklaces travel clockwise around the ring and white armbands anticlockwise. No one keeps them for good; each is passed on and carries the story of those who held it.

The necklaces are called soulava and the armbands mwali. A participant receives one from a partner on one island and, after a time, passes it on to a partner on another, so the same objects keep circling for generations; famous pieces have their own names and histories. The Polish-born anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski lived in the Trobriand Islands during the First World War and described the Kula in Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), one of the founding books of modern fieldwork. He showed that it was not barter: prestige came from taking part, from generosity and from being trusted with valued pieces, while ordinary trade in goods went on alongside the ceremonial exchange. The Kula still continues today.

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WonderTrade

On the Pacific island of Yap, large limestone discs with a hole in the centre, called rai, have long served as valuables in important exchanges. Some are taller than a person, so ownership changes without moving them: everyone knows who owns each stone.

The stones were quarried mainly on Palau, hundreds of kilometres away, and brought back by canoe and raft on dangerous voyages. A stone's value depends on its size and workmanship, but above all on its history: who fetched it, and whether lives were lost bringing it home. The largest surviving stone is 3.6 metres across and weighs about four tonnes. In the 1870s the Irish-American trader David O'Keefe helped bring stones to Yap on his ship in return for dried coconut and sea cucumbers. An old account tells of a rai that sank during transport yet kept changing hands, since everyone agreed it was still there. The economist Milton Friedman compared this to gold that stays in a bank vault while its ownership changes. Rai are still exchanged in traditional ways today.

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WonderTrade

Medieval England's royal treasury kept accounts on tally sticks: notches cut into a piece of wood recorded a sum, then the stick was split lengthwise. Each side kept one half, and because only the true pair fitted perfectly, the two halves proved the debt.

The larger the notch, the larger the sum. Because wood never splits the same way twice, a forged half would not match, so the stick served as both receipt and proof. The English royal treasury, the Exchequer, used tallies from the twelfth century until they were abolished in 1826. In October 1834 workers burned the old sticks in the stoves beneath the House of Lords; the flues overheated and the fire that followed destroyed most of the medieval Palace of Westminster. The building that stands there today, with the clock tower that holds Big Ben, was built to replace it. Notched sticks for keeping count were also used in many other places, from village shops to farms.

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