The Rational Optimist (P.S.)

by Matt Ridley

So the typical Akkadian tamkarum or merchant was a businessman of the most surprisingly modern kind, who depended for his livelihood on freely exchanging goods for profit. Though there was no minted coinage, from the end of the fourth millennium BC there were silver-based prices, which fluctuated freely. The temple would act as a sort of bank, lending money at interest – and the Uruk word for high priest is the same as the word for accountant. By 2000 BC, under the Assyrian empire, merchants from Ashur operated in ‘karum’ enclaves in the independent states of Anatolia as thoroughly modern entrepreneurs with ‘head offices, foreign branch-plants, corporate hierarchies, extra-territorial business law, and even a bit of foreign direct investment and value-added activity’. They bought gold, silver and copper in exchange for tin, goat-hair felt, woven textiles and perfumes shipped in on caravans of up to 300 donkeys. The profit margin was 100 per cent on tin and 200 per cent on textiles, but it had to be because the transport was unreliable and the risk of theft high. One such merchant, Pusu-Ken, operating in a tax-free zone in the Anatolian city of Kanesh, was to be found in 1900 BC lobbying the king, paying fines for evading textile import regulations imposed by the assembly, and sharing profits with his investor-partners, sounding in other words every inch the modern chief executive. Such merchants ‘did not devote themselves to trading in copper and wool because Assyria neede...