These fantasies are fun to entertain, but this really was a world of genuine opportunity. The markets and bazaars were ethnic melting pots, filled with a babble of languages that was probably smoothed out in the lingua franca of trade. Interactions operated at two levels of institution. In formal terms, mercantile exchange must have been bounded by jurisdictions, regulations, codes of conduct, and laws. Informally, these were shot through with the expectations of equally local traditions, cultural norms, ritual observations, and so on. Perhaps the most fundamental of all was the provision of a
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