The definition of a free-market trade: Each party gives something he or she values less in return for something he or she values more, and both parties benefit.
This issue of American Consequences is (mostly) about those benefits. But is there a detrimental side to trade? Trade brings people together, often from very distant and very different places. “Bringing people together” sounds lovely. But anybody who knows anything about people knows that when you bring them together the result can be fun… or mayhem. Think “Wedding reception at about one o’clock in the morning.”
Trade itself may be a happy activity, but trade means transport, and transport means trade routes, and trade routes are where people are brought together… not always in a happy way.
When we trace the globe’s ancient trade routes, it is unpleasant to see what contentious regions they traverse and what grievous political fault lines they follow. Even worse is to note that most of these antique grudges are still evident on modern maps.
Among the oldest major trade routes is the link between “cradles of civilization” in Egypt and Mesopotamia. This runs northeast along the Mediterranean littoral from the Nile to the headwaters of the Euphrates. People have been fighting there forever. The Old Testament tells us about it. And that’s the combat record of just one small tribe.
Full-scale warfare in the Levant began at least 4,000 years ago during the reign of Pharaoh Mentuhotep II and lasted until… the end of time is my best guess.
Why are trade routes less like a pleasant shopping trip and more like something Virgil guided Dante through in the Inferno?
It would take a very brave caravan to transport goods along this route today. I wouldn’t care to be the guy leading the camels past the IEDs of Sinai terrorists, through the Gaza kill zone, past trigger-happy Israeli checkpoints, across the chaos of Lebanon, into Syria where ISIS is no less murderous just because it’s “almost defeated,” only to wind up in Baghdad.
What do I have that I could sell in Baghdad? (If you don’t count the weapons I’ve paid for with my U.S. tax dollars.)
Things are not much friendlier along the “Silk Road,” which, starting in 200 B.C., linked China to Europe. (And may continue to do so with China’s “New Silk Road” or “Belt and Road Initiative” to span Eurasia with transportation infrastructure.)
The ancient Silk Road’s path begins in what is now the industrial heartland of China. (These days, whether China is anyone’s friend is a reasonable question.) The route then winds its way through Beijing’s restive Muslim Xinjiang province, cuts though the fraught maze of former Soviet republics in Central Asia – Trashcanistan, Karjackistan, etc. – crosses very grumpy Iran, and makes its way to the EU (where all the countries are quarreling) by way of Turkey (which wants to join the EU so it can get in on the quarrel).
The Grand Trunk Road, in use across the Indian subcontinent since the third century B.C., is no better. It goes from “the graveyard of empires” beyond the Khyber Pass to Afghanistan’s frenemy Pakistan to Afghanistan’s frenemy’s enemy India to India’s bullied stepchild Bangladesh.
Why are trade routes less like a pleasant shopping trip and more like something Virgil guided Dante through in the Inferno?
Everyone along the way wants a piece of the action. Trade routes extend from one productive place to another productive place. But in between are any number of places that produce nothing but thieves. Or – as the thieves are called when they get sufficiently organized to impose tolls, imposts, and tariffs – governments. Unproductive and rapacious governments still line trade routes long after the trading has gone elsewhere.
Any exchange of products also leads to an exchange of knowledge and ideas. Again, “exchange of knowledge and ideas” sounds lovely. But this depends on the form the ideas take and the way the knowledge is used.
Warring religious ideologies have devastated the Levantine trade route for an extraordinary length of time in an amazing variety of ways – parting of the Red Sea, walls of Jericho falling down, Babylonian captivity of the Jews, Herod’s Massacre of the Innocents, Masada mass suicide, Muslim conquest where a thousand years of Roman Empire was defeated by random Arab tribesmen, Christian crusades ranging from the allegedly chivalrous to the absurd (Children’s Crusade of A.D. 1212), Ottoman domination (rule by footstool?), and a very long movie starring Peter O’Toole as Lawrence of Arabia flouncing around in silly clothes, plus whatever horrors tomorrow’s headlines will bring.
Was knowledge a good thing for Pre-Columbian Americans? The Admiral of the Ocean Seas returned from what he thought was an exploration of trade routes to the spice-rich Indies with the knowledge (soon shared by every country in Europe) that there were two whole continents over there, and they were basically defenseless.
So the Europeans got colonialism and imperialism ideas…
And along with an exchange of ideas and knowledge comes an exchange of germs. Some experts in epidemiology and demographics estimate that European diseases killed as much as 80% of the Native American population, not counting the Native Americans the Europeans killed on purpose.
Likewise with the Black Death, which killed as much as half of Europe’s population in the 14th century, it traveled down the Silk Road from Asia.
Among the effects of the bubonic plague was a weakening of feudalism. (The serfs were dead.) Enfeebled feudalism led to a rise in nation states, causing European warfare to expand from local scuffles into true “national war efforts” – thus, Europe’s history of truly horrendous conflicts starting with the 1618-1648 Thirty Years’ War (8 million casualties) and ending with World War II (85 million casualties). Or maybe ending with World War III, depending on what Vladimir Putin is up to. And all of that is at least partly to blame on a trade route…
As a lot of wars are. If you’ve got a road and you can carry loads of frilly panties, crepe de chine frocks, and Hermes scarves down it, you can march an army up it. The Mongol hordes did.
And no mention has even been made of the devastation caused by the kind of trade route where the trade involved a market that was anything but “free.” The slave trade is the worst thing human beings have ever done.
Free trade encompasses many excellent principles. How many excellent principles human beings encompass is another matter.
Maybe we should keep humans off the trade routes…
