22 Chapter Oneregions was carried through by command.^24 When rulers found that
they needed something which could not be obtained by issuing a
command, they had to bargain for it, of course; and much internal
administration, even in the most efficiently bureaucratized states, de
pended on bargaining (whether tacit or explicit) between central au
thorities and local governors, landowners, chieftains, priesthoods, and
other potentates.
Power relationships across political frontiers partook of the same
character, with the difference that intermediaries who moved back
and forth across lines of jurisdiction were in a position to emancipate
themselves from subordination to any of the public command systems
in whose interstices they conducted their affairs. Instead of seeking
rank, dignity, and the income appropriate to a niche in existing hierar
chies of command, such persons could seek simply to maximize their
material profit from exchanges at either end of, or along, their route of
travel.^25
But such behavior had limits. Anyone who accumulated large
amounts of wealth while remaining independent of military-political
command structures faced the problem of safeguarding what he had
gained. Unless a merchant could count on the protection of some
formidable man of power, there was nothing to restrain local poten
tates from seizing his property any time his goods came within reach.
To gain effective protection was likely to be costly—so costly as to
inhibit large-scale accumulation of private capital.
Moreover, in most civilized societies, the prestige and deference
paid to men of power, i.e., to bureaucrats and landowners, was
matched by a general distrust of and disdain for merchants and men of
the marketplace. Anyone who succeeded in profiting from trade,
therefore, was likely to see the advantage of acquiring land, or in
some other way of gaining access to a place in some local command
hierarchy.
Accordingly, trade and market-regulated behavior though present
from very early times,^26 remained marginal and subordinate in
civilized societies before A.D. 1000. Most persons lived out their lives
without responding to market incentives in any way. Customary
- James Lee, pending Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago.
- Cf. the perceptive remarks of Denis Twitchett, “Merchant Trade and Govern
ment in Late T’ang,” Asia Major 14 (1968): 63–95, on the role of merchants in China. - A rich find of cuneiform tablets from about 1800 B.C. in Anatolia shows mer
chant colonies from a mother city, Assur, flourishing as part of a trade net that extended
from the Persian Gulf northward through Mesopotamia. These ancient Assyrian traders
shipped tin eastward and carried textiles manufactured in central Mesopotamia west-