The Rational Optimist (P.S.)

by Matt Ridley

Trade with the hills continued, but increasingly it came to look like tribute as Uruk merchants’ dwellings, complete with distinctive central halls, niched-façade temples and peculiar forms of pottery and stone tool, were plonked amid the rural settlements of trading partners in the hills. A cooperative trade network seems to have turned into something much more like colonialism. Tax and even slavery soon began to rear their ugly heads. Thus was set the pattern that would endure for the next 6,000 years – merchants make wealth; chiefs nationalise it. The story of Ubaid and Uruk is familiar and modern. You can imagine the Ubaid merchants displaying their cloths and pots and groaning sacks of grain to the wide-eyed peasants of the hills. You can see the Uruk nabobs in their privileged enclaves, surrounded by subservient natives, like the British in India or Chinese in Singapore. It is with a start that you recall this is still essentially the Stone Age. Only towards the end of the Ubaid period is copper being smelted, and well into the Uruk times, sickles and knives are still made of stone or clay. Late in the Uruk period clay tablets appear with uniform marks on them meticulously accounting for merchants’ stocks and profits. Those dull records, dug into the surfaces of clay tablets, are the ancestors of writing – accountancy was its first application. The message those tablets tell is that the market came long before the other appurtenances of civilisation. Exchange and tra...