Quotes About Commerce

William Carey chides his countrymen for deciding it would be impossible for the Gospel to travel over great distances and to penetrate varied cultures when they are willing to face the same trials for the sake of commerce.

envoys to southern China to bring back silkworm eggs and established sericulture in Mysore, something that still enriches the region today. He introduced irrigation and built dams so that even his British enemies had to admit that his kingdom was 'well cultivated, populous with industrious inhabitants, cities [including Bangalore] newly founded and commerce extended'.

Barter and exchange is the business of merchants, not fighting of battles and dethroning of princes.

as Edmund Burke famously put it, 'a state in the guise of a merchant'.

Benares emerged as a major centre of finance and commerce as well as a unique centre of religion, education and pilgrimage. In Bengal, Nadia was the centre of Sanskrit learning and a sophisticated centre for regional architectural and Hindustani musical excellence.

What honour is left to us?' asked a Mughal official, 'when we have to take orders from a handful of traders who have not yet learned to wash their bottoms?

That there is a code and standard of mercantile honor which is quite as pure and grand as any military code, is beyond question, but it has never yet been established and defined by long usage and the concurrent support of a large and influential society. The

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.

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.

Although the Muslim commercial web possessed many advanced features, including bills of exchange, sophisticated lending institutions, and futures markets, no Islamic state ever established the bedrock financial institution of the modern world: a national or central bank

For most of the period following the fall of Rome, the adherents of a powerful new monotheistic religion dominated medieval long distance commerce as completely as the West dominates such commerce today; the legacy of that former dominance is still all too visible.

Whereas theology is the primary driving force behind Christianity and the great Eastern religions, Islam's backbone is a system of law covering all areas of conduct, including commerce. Thus, the new monotheism from Arabia was especially attractive to those engaged in any organized economic activity that flourished wherever rules were plainly visible and vigorously enforced by disinterested parties—again, as in the more secular English common law.

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

most paleographers now believe that the "idea of writing" must have spread along with commerce, most likely from Sumer to Egypt.33

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.

It was an early form of globalization

Artists are notoriously snooty and suspicious of anything coming from the business community.

The making of music is profoundly affected by the market.

When goods don't cross borders, armies will.

Corporate irony not only ridicules the thing it is selling but the very act of selling it. In the process it disarms critics by making anyone who goes against the flow of commerce seem clueless.