Brian Scott wrote
> Everything that I've read indicates that goods moving long
> distances were typically passed along from hand to hand over
> interlocking local or perhaps regional trade networks. Some
> of this short-distance trade of course went by water. So
> what? It hasn't much to do with international trade in
> Vancouver harbor.
Actually from the Uruk period (3,500 BCE) very long distance trade
routes were established, by trading enterprises of surprising
complexity. It has been shown how goods from the Cochin Coast of
India or from Badakhstan in Afghanistan were carried to Uruk via
companies of "ships of Melluhha" - operating out of the Indus. By
there they went overland via individual Sumerian merchant houses to
Byblos (their cylendar seals controlling the traffic), to be carried
again by Ship to Egypt in the Naqada III period. In this way Lapis
Lazuli from Afghanistan made its way to Egypt (and Mozambiquan
rezins found their way into Sumerian tombs). This early "World
System" for inter-regional trade, was the fore-runner of the inter-
regional trade systems that created the Silk Road that "closed the
Eur-afro-asian Oecumene" in Archaemenid times, linking China, India
and the West, creating the beginnings of the Globalised "World
System" we live in today.
For a detailed exposition of how this was organised see Guillermo
Algaze, "The Uruk World System: The Dynamics of Expansion of Early
Mesopotamian Civilization".
"Algaze reviews an extensive body of archaeological evidence for
cross-cultural exchange between the nascent city-states in the
Mesopotamian lowlands and communities in immediately surrounding
areas. He shows that at their very inception the more highly
integrated lowland centers succeeded in establishing a variety of
isolated, far-flung outposts in areas at the periphery of the
Mesopotamian lowlands. Embedded in an alien hinterland characterized
by demonstrably less complex societies, the outposts were commonly
established at the apex of preexisting regional settlement
hierarchies and invariably at focal nodes astride important trade
routes. Algaze argues that these early colonial out-posts served as
collection points for coveted peripheral resources acquired in
exchange for core manufactures and that they reflect an inherently
asymmetrical system of economic hegemony that extended far beyond
areas under the direct political control of Sumerian polities in
southern Mesopotamia. From this he concludes that economic
exploitation of less developed peripheral areas was integral to the
earliest development of civilization in the ancient Near East."
See
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/12225.ctl
Sound like the WTO and modern Corporate Globalisation? It should,
it was the origin of unequal patterns of economic exchange we see
today.
Regards
John