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Seaborne trade was probably the leading sector of commercial growth in the world economy – perhaps going back as far as the ninth century, certainly from the fifteenth-century maritime revolution well into the nineteenth. The seventeenth century, however, and at least the first half of the eighteenth, marked a period of intense development in overland trade as well. This chapter will deal with overland connections between Persia and Europe, between Persia and India and East Asia, and especially with the Armenian trade diaspora that was active in the overland trade as well as the maritime trade of the Indian Ocean. In addition, and in these same centuries, new trade diasporas began to carry Euopean goods overland into regions previously served only by indirect relay trade. Siberia was one such region, as European, Chinese, and Ottoman demand for furs sent Russians eastward through the forests of northern Asia. This movement began in the middle of the sixteenth century. By the 1640s, the fur traders had found ways to use the large rivers of Siberia so as to reach the Pacific Ocean with only occasional need to portage goods from one river to another. Continuing by sea, they reached Alaska by the early eighteenth century and had explored down the North American coast to California by the early nineteenth. The same demand for furs sent European fur traders and their local agents into the North American forests with a similar timing. French trading posts on the lower Saint Lawrence from the early seventeenth century became the anchor for a trade network westward along the line of the Great Lakes to reach the Mississippi and beyond by the end of the century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At first glance, there is no apparent reason why traders living in an alien society must necessarily live separately from their hosts, but physical segregation of this kind was almost universal. In part, this separation was necessary simply to preserve the cultural integrity of the trade community. Without barriers of some kind, the traders from abroad would likely disappear through assimilation into the host society within a generation or so; their capacity to act as cross-cultural brokers would then come to an end. Diaspora merchants needed contact with their hosts, but they also needed to keep their distance and enough of their original culture to serve as brokers for the traveling merchants from the original homeland. The host society also had reason to keep alien merchants at a distance. They were, after all, normally considered to be unpleasant people on the double qualification of being both merchants and foreigners – however profitable it might be to have them around when needed. The interests of the hosts and the strangers alike suggest that a slightly distant contact was the most desirable relationship between the two communities. For northern Africa, this kind of physical and social separation went back to the dawn of historical knowledge, as we will see in the next chapter. At the beginning of the eighth century, the division of the Mediterranean basin between a Christian north and a Muslim south reinforced the traders' need for security. The result was the factory system, which provided for the physical segregation of aliens on either shore of the sea in special residences with attached warehouses, variously called fundaco or funduq or feitoria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trade and exchange across cultural lines have played a crucial role in human history, being perhaps the most important external stimuli to change, leaving aside the unmeasurable and less-benign influence of military conquest. External stimulation, in turn, has been the most important single source of change and development in art, science, and technology. Perhaps this goes without saying, since no human group could invent by itself more than a small part of its cultural and technical heritage. Take as simple an example as the manufacture of this book. The English language is derived from one of those that came into Western Europe with German immigrants, combined with elements of Latin, originally imposed by imperial conquerors from the south, plus other borrowings. The alphabet came from the Phoenicians. The page numbers are “Arabic,” which actually means that the Europeans learned about them from the Arabs, who had borrowed them in turn from the Indians, who invented positional notation in the first place. A few years ago, a book like this would have been printed with movable type, which would have given it a possible Chinese heritage as well. On the negative side, cross-cultural trade and communication pose special problems. People with a different way of life are strangers by definition; their ways seem unpredictable, and the unpredictable is probably dangerous as well. Communication itself is difficult. Even after an appropriate medium comes into existence, like a second language in common, understanding is hard to come by. Strangers may appear not to be hostile, but they are still not to be trusted in the same full sense that neighbors and kinfolk can be trusted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]