The Pursuit of Power. Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000

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Arms and Society in Antiquity 7

possess them. For many centuries, therefore, trade was largely con­
fined to exchanges of scarce commodities between rulers and admin­
istrators of civilized lands and local potentates of distant parts. Civi­
lized rulers and officials were the only people who had access to luxury
products made on command by specially skilled artisans. Moreover,
civilized rulers and officials were only interested in offering such
goods to those distant power-wielders who could organize the neces­
sary labor for digging ore, cutting timber or performing whatever
other tasks were necessary to prepare and then start the commodity in
question on its way to civilized consumers. Such trade, therefore,
tended to replicate civilized command structures in surrounding
human communities (sometimes in miniature to begin with) in much
the same way that DNA and RNA replicate their complex molecular
structures in favorable environments.
Bargaining over terms of trade could and did respond partly to
market forces of supply and demand and partly to considerations of
power, prestige, and ritual. Dependence on distant suppliers who
were not firmly subject to imperial words of command constituted a
limit upon the management of ancient empires. But it was rarely
encountered, since most of the commodities really important for
maintenance of armies and administrative bureaucracies—the twin
pillars of Xerxes’ and every other great king’s power—were available
from within the boundaries of the state, and could be effectively
mobilized by command. Of these, food was by far the most important.
Everything else was dwarfed by the simple fact that men (and trans­
port animals) could not remain active for more than a few days without
eating.
The contrast between trade relations with outsiders and administra­
tion within the bounds of the state was not as great as the above
remarks might suggest. Local governors and other administrators who
served the king as his agents in the localities had to be rewarded for
their services by an appropriate mix of perquisites, praise, and
punishment. Command mobilization worked only when men obeyed;
and obedience had often to be purchased at a price which differed
only in degree from the price paid to more distant and more fully
independent local potentates.
Early civilizations existed by virtue of. transfer of food from its
producers to rulers and men of power who supported themselves,
along with a following of military and artisan specialists, on the food so
secured. Sometimes, too, the labor power of the food-producing
majority was conscripted for some sort of public works: digging a

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