Quotes About Trade

A body of merchants had been transformed into the de facto sovereign rulers of much of northern India. As one contemporary observer put it: 'Through many unexpected contingencies, an incorporated society of private traders [has become] a cabinet of Asiatic princes.'65 The result was what Adam Smith would call 'a strange absurdity' – a Company State.66

Just as with the Maghribis, the clan's ability to enforce contracts is a success on one level in making trade possible when no formal institutions are available. But on another level, the reliance on enforcement inside the clan retarded the development of formal laws and institutions that would have made available a much greater scope of trade—such as between clans.

East Asia's share of global exports went from 12 percent in 1960 to 31 percent by 2011. The same number in Latin America over the same period declined from 7 percent to 6 percent

Just as with the Maghribis, the clan's ability to enforce contracts is a success on one level in making trade possible when no formal institutions are available.

One of the funny things about the stock market is that every time one person buys, another sells, and both think they are astute.

mementos of this world, in which the things worth being were so easily exchanged for the things worth having.

A trades-union is an association of journeymen in a certain trade which has for one of its chief objects to raise wages in that trade. This object can be accomplished only by drawing more capital into the trade, or by lessening the supply of labor in it. To

Pride of gifts hinders the Christian's trade—at least [its] thriving by their commerce, two ways. First. Pride of gifts is the cause why we do so little good with them to others. Second. Pride of gifts is the cause why we receive so little good from the gifts of others.

the devil is the merchant, and the sinner but the broker to trade for him, who at last puts all his gains into the devil's purse. Time,

The message I take all round the world is Britain is open for business.

As a general rule, the Chinese seldom ventured west of Sri Lanka, the Indians north of the Red Sea mouth, and the Italians south of Alexandria. It was left to the Greeks, who ranged freely from India to Italy, to carry the greatest share of the traffic.

Although the Anatolians and the people of the Indus Valley knew each other's products, it is not known whether or not they met each other face-to-face; rather, they would have been separated by an unknown number of middlemen.

Our urge to trade has profoundly affected the trajectory of the human species. Simply by allowing nations to concentrate on producing those things that their geographic, climatic, and intellectual endowments best enable them to do, and to exchange those goods for what is best produced elsewhere, trade has directly propelled our global prosperity.

Venice earned its wealth not only from rare Oriental goods, but also from the pilgrim and crusader traffic to and from the Holy Land.

Another reason for the spread of the script may simply have been the commercial vitality of the Aramaeans, who were to the deserts of the northern Levantine region what the Phoenicians were to the sea, trading particularly in copper, ivory, incense, and textiles of all descriptions. Whatever the reason, with each change of political dominance, from Assyrian to Babylonian, and from Babylonian to Persian, Aramaic only became more prominent.

The forces that drove Britain and the United States to control the world's shipping lanes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, respectively, first saw light of day in Greece's need to feed itself with imported wheat and barley.

The advent of the written word around 3300 BC lifted history's curtain and revealed an already well-established pattern of long-distance trade, not only in luxury and strategic goods, but in bulk staples such as grain and timber as well.

In the early fifth century BC, a roll of papyrus, consisting of about twenty sheets, cost between one and three drachmas—that is, one to three days' wages for a semiskilled worker.

It is precisely Battuta's lack of interest in peoples outside Dar-al- Islam—the world of Islam—that testifies to Muslim dominance of medieval Asian trade. In the fourteenth century, Battuta could travel 74,000 miles through Morocco, East Africa, India, central Asia, Southeast Asia, and China and remain entirely within the Muslim cultural envelope, never having to interact in a meaningful manner with those outside it in order to survive, to travel, or even to make a living.

The ancient incense trade was thus no different from the modern cocaine and heroin trades: relatively safe around the raw agricultural source, but highly risky around the finished product and its ultimate consumers.

The incense trade catalyzed the birth of Islam, whose military, spiritual, and commercial impacts transformed medieval Asia, Europe, and Africa. Riding on a rising tide of global trade along the land and sea routes of Asia, Islam came to dominate that continent's spiritual as well as its commercial life.

What investment banking is to the ambitious and acquisitive today, the pepper trade was to the Romans—the most direct route to great riches.

The coming of the Prophet would sweep away this fragmented and pluralistic pattern of trade in the ancient world. Within a few centuries of Muhammad's death, one culture, one religion, and one law would unify the commerce of the Old World's three continents nearly a millennium before the arrival of the first European ships in the East.

The highly decentralized nature of the medieval world of Indian Ocean trade produced a bubbling stew of Darwinian economic competition, in which those states whose political "mutations" were best suited to trade and commerce thrived, and those whose institutions were not withered.