John:
>Sound like the WTO and modern Corporate Globalisation? It should,
>it was the origin of unequal patterns of economic exchange we see
>today.
Torsten:
>Thanks, John.
No, Torsten, John didn't save your ass. All John ended up doing is
reiterating Brian's statement -- that trade was accomplished in those
times through a network, necessitating neighbours to pass along goods
from place to place like a profitable game of Telephone.
What John describes is far-reaching _sea_ trade. Obviously. Why spend
hours and hours hauling goods across a stretch of coastline or trying to
pass goods from one place to another with a hundred middle-men in
between when you can trade directly with everybody and save time?
Plus boats make hauling goods a heckuvalot easier. So all these benefits
are the very reasons why the neolithic flourished so well around the
Mediterranean and other significant bodies of water. In-land peoples
only reaped secondary gains from the sea-based economic explosion.
I've already mentioned that IndoEuropean speakers were not sea
people. So it absolutely requires an intermediary group to pass
the goods from a Mediterranean (or Black Sea) port to a place in-land.
With in-land trade, it ain't that simple. If you're lucky, you might be
able to buy some goods at a port and then haul it by *naxu- up a
river to where your village is.
At any rate, there's no way that trade could be done as effectively
as it had if it wasn't efficient. Trading networks (or any networks,
in fact) are efficient. Your system is inefficient because it involves
everybody travelling far distances when it is of no benefit to them.
Networking and mutual cooperation alleviated what would otherwise
be a profitless nightmare.
= gLeN
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