The Great Trade War : A Brief History of Trade

For thousands of years families and tribes remained mostly self sufficient producing what they needed themselves.

Eventually people learned that they could obtain more and better goods and services by specializing and trading or bartering the excess to others nearby.

As civilizations advanced a group of people specialized in the very act of trading other people’s goods, and a permanent merchant class developed.

Although there is evidence of sporadic and limited trade throughout Europe thousands of years before Christ, widespread organized trade didn’t develop until the Babylonians entered the scen1696620914 These land based merchants utilized donkey and camal and had limited range of travel. It was the Phonecians who first to turn to the sea as the means to transport large amounts of goods gre1635000420 *

Words from The Wise

Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay

“Free trade, one of the greatest blessings which a government can confer on a people, is in almost every country unpopular.” Essay , 1824.

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Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield

“Free trade is not a principle, it is an expedient.” speech , April 25, 1843

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Benjamin Franklin

“No nation was ever ruined by trade.” Thoughts on Commercial Subjects , undated(he lived 1706-1790)

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Samuel Eliot Morison

“On her first voyage, the Columbia had solved the riddle of the China trade. On her second, empire followed in the wake.” from Maritime History of Massachusetts, 1942.

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Adam Smith

“I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.” from Wealth of Nations, 1776 .

Source: Familiar Quotations, 15th Edition, by John Bartlett