Slides by M Shahjahan PhDf-15-05

CAMEL COMMERCE TO E-COMMERCE

• Emperor Qian Long’s letter to King George III, 1793

• tea, silk and porcelain which the Celestial Empire produces (CHINA)

• In this chapter we will see many glimpses of what Adam Smith called the basic human instinct for “truck and trade” for profit

• Since the time humans settled in the Fertile Crescent, they have not stopped searching for different and better food, commodities, and tool making materials. To meet that social need and make profit through price arbitrage— buying low and selling high—came along a new class of people, traders

• The means of transporting the fruits of trade have progressed from donkey

• and camel to sail and steamboats, from container ships and airplanes to fiber-optic cables. The modes of payment have evolved from barter, cowries, metal

• coin, paper money, and credit card to electronic bank transfers and online payment

• systems like PayPal. These developments enabled the speedy transportation

• of large quantities of goods, and the consumer base and the number of

• traders and entrepreneurs also grew.

• Multinational enterprises replaced individuals• and groups of traders, all successors to one of

the earliest examples, the• English East India Company, founded in 1600.

By a United Nations count, in• 2003 there were sixty-three thousand

multinational corporations in the world.

• The difference between the camel caravan–borne “c-commerce” of the past and today’s e-commerce,

• which delivered the Apple iPod to my door, is in the scale and speed of such transactions. Thus, it is not surprising that in the popular imagination, foreign trade has become synonymous with globalization.

• A music player designed by Jobs and his engineers in Cupertino, California, integrating the innovations and work of many others from Taiwan, South Korea, and India, was assembled in China, sold on the Internet, and delivered to my home by an American courier company.

• Yet Apple is driven to expand its market by the same profit motive that

• has inspired traders for millennia, with its profit enriching millions of people

• worldwide who own Apple shares.

• The most traded commodity• among communities was the blade of obsidian

—volcanic rock—that• could be used as a knife to cut meat and a

sickle to harvest grains• However, the first written account• of trade comes to us from the beginning of the

second millennium BCE

• Both necessity and a taste for the exotic have led humans to engage in commerce

• Traders frequently worked• with the sanction of the ruler and paid tax, as

we have seen in ancient Mesopotamia.• However, often the ruler himself took charge of

trade to ensure a supply• of luxuries and profit to be made from

commercial transactions

• The fertile Tigris and Euphrates Valley produced enough food grain and wool

• to make cloth but completely lacked mineral resources needed to make bronze

• battle gear• We meet traders like• Assur-idi, Su-Kubum, Salim-ahum, and Pusu-ken, who

prospered by operating• the caravan trade between the Assyrian capital and the

entrepot city of Kanis,• in the Anatolian region of present-day Turkey.

• Long caravans, sometimes• consisting of three hundred donkeys loaded with grain and wool,

made the• eight-hundred-mile journey, at the end of which most of the donkeys

were sold• and a smaller number were sent back to Assur carrying minerals, gold,

and silver.• The donkey caravans traveled at an average speed of almost twenty

miles a• day. A donkey could carry an average of two hundred pounds, limiting

the• quantity and type of goods that could be traded or the kind of terrain

traversed

• It is estimated that traders made approximately 100

• percent profit on tin and 200 percent on textiles

• The key player in the Assyrian trade was the wealthy entrepreneur, or ummeânum,

• who supplied the necessary capital and goods.

• There was also trouble on the path of the donkey caravans that trekked the

• long distance from Assur to Kanis over rugged mountains and deserts

• Transport of higher capacity was pressed into service toward the beginning of

• the Christian era. Although the domestication of camels got under way between

• 3000 and 2000 bce in the Horn of Africa, it was not until sometime between

• 500 bce and 200 ce that the “North Arabian saddle” was invented and

• traders in the Arabian Peninsula could exploit the camel’s ability to be a “ship of

• the desert.”

• Camels can travel approximately twenty miles in about six hours

• and carry about 550 pounds, twice as much as a horse or a mule. Since they foraged

• along the way, historian William McNeill notes, “In most Middle Eastern

• landscapes, where semi-arid wasteland abounded, caravans captured free energy

• just as sailing ships did Thus caravans could often compete with ships on

• fairly even terms.

• They did so for about a thousand years, from the time when

• the arts of camel management became firmly established in the Middle East

• during the early Christian centuries until improvements in ship design and

• techniques of navigation changed the terms of competition after 1300 ad.”

• Camel caravans• across the Central Asian deserts established the first

direct connection between• China, India, and the eastern Mediterranean. A series

of trading routes linking• oases and human habitations along the steppes and

along the edge of the Taklimakan• Desert and mountain valleys of Central Asia emerged• By the• first century ce,

• foreign traders were present in small oasis towns fringing the

• Taklimakan, carrying silk and lacquerware to the Roman Empire and woolen

• From Camel Commerce to E-Commerce 41• and linen textiles, glass, coral, amber, and

pearl to China

• Because Chinese silk• was the most prized commodity transported

along the pathways, the nineteenth-• century German geographer Baron Ferdinand

von Richthofen gave this• collection of routes the romantic name of the

Silk Roads, or Die Seidenstrassen,• popularly known today as the Silk Road.

• For more than a millennium, this constantly shifting network of pathways

• served as the great connector between the Asian mainland, Europe, and sub-

• Saharan Africa.• For rulers, whether in China or India or• other countries without pastures for horse-

breeding, Central Asian horses became• a prized export item on the Silk Road.

• China’s Tang dynasty records show the government spent nearly a seventh of its

• annual revenue received from bolts of silk to import one hundred thousand

• horses

• In the eleventh century, Tibetan tribes who controlled major trade

• routes from Central Asia to China prospered by exchanging Chinese tea for

• Central Asian horses—at times trading twenty-two thousand horses a year.

• And of course, the Silk Road conveyed much more than goods. For more than

• a millennium the path that spanned three continents became a conveyor belt

• for the transmission of religions, art, philosophy, languages, technologies, germs,

• and genes.10

• Trading on the Silk Road reached its peak during the thirteenth century,

• when the Mongol Empire presided over its entire length

• The journey on the• backs of double-humped Bactrian camels from

Afghanistan to Peking took a• year to complete on the average, but goods did

get delivered.