Myths of Free Markets!
How medieval traders imagined the edges of a globalising world
On 19th September 1620, an unknown scribe at the Mughal court in Agra completed a new copy of Ḥamdollāh Mostowfī’s Nuzhat al-Qulūb. India at the time was going through a rapid process of “globalisation”, as newly conquered territories in Gujarat and Bengal connected the Mughal economy with trading networks stretching as far as Japan, China, West Africa, Portugal and even Britain!
From Mostowfi’s text we can glean some insight into how people in the Persianate world comprehended how business was done in distant lands and with strange peoples. But what does the reproduction of myths about free markets on the edge of the known world tell us about how important common rules and customs were for making globalisation work?
Originally written around 1340 for the ruler of the Ilkhanate, Abu Sa’id Bahadur Khan, Mostowfī’s geography was part of a literary tradition common across the Arab and Persianate worlds that blended histories of key people and events with geographical materials, maps and guides. By the seventeenth century, much of the information contained in the Nuzhat al-Qulūb was out of date, but it remained an important text within the corpus of Persian material about the world.
Although dominated by detailed overviews of the key cities, towns, ports and regions of the Ilkhanate world of the fourteenth-century, Mostowfī’s text did seek to present its readers with information related to the very edges of their known world – and to interrogate the commercial links that had brought these places into the Persianate world’s orbit. This ranged from the Wāqwāq Islands, where pure gold was described as so plentiful it was used for making dog collars, to garnets from the far-west of “Frank country” in little known Europe, and the “Bilaad al-Suub” or “land of the blacks” in West Africa.
For one island in particular, though, Mostowfī thought it important to clarify precisely how merchants travelling to the fringes of the world were able to do business with people so distant. Here, on the Island of Barṭāyil, foreign merchants sought to purchase spices through a process of silent barter. They landed during the day, laid out their goods separately on the coast, and left. At night, the local inhabitants would come down to the coast and leave a quantity of aromatics they believed equal. If the amount was deemed sufficient the aromatics were taken and the imported products left behind, if not, they would wait a further night to see if more goods were forthcoming in exchange.
It’s not hard to imagine that the new copy, produced by our unknown scribe, was created an environment where encounters with new peoples and new commercial cultures were becoming more and more common. Through works like Mostowfī’s Nuzhat al-Qulūb, readers in the Persianate world could experience the challenges global trades had presented in the past, and perhaps feel comforted that some things never change.
The inhabitants of Barṭāyil were not the only people who were reported to undertake such silent trading practices. Abū Rayḥān Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad Al-Bīrūnī, another Persian author, maintained that trade in “a country called Laṅga” followed the same pattern. Here, “merchandise is placed beside the sea on leather mats marked with the owners name” and left. The “next day they find cloves on the mats as payment”. The Arabic writer, Ibrāhīm Ibn Wasīf Shāh, went further still, describing how spices were purchased through a similar process on the edges of the Valley of Cloves, whereby they were sold by the genies resident on the island!
The practice was not only the preserve of accounts from South-East Asia either. In the Chinese historian Zhao Rukuo’s Zhu Fan Zhi, a geographical description of the world and catalogue of trade goods, we are presented with a similar account where “in the Western Sea there is a market where a silent agreement exists between buyer and seller […] the seller first spreads out his goods; afterwards the purchaser spreads out the equivalent, which must lie by the side of the articles for sale till taken by seller, when the objects purchased may be carried off”. Ibn Battuta, the fourteenth-century Arab traveller, presented a similar practice by traders on the Volga River, where “skins of sable, miniver, and ermine” were obtained by leaving goods on the river’s banks.
While in West Africa, similar accounts were passed by Arab traders to European travellers to the region. The Venetian traveller Alvise da Cadamosto, for instance, recounted how he had received “information from many merchants, Arab as well as Sanhaja, and also from persons in whom faith can be placed” about how gold was obtained from the lands south of Timbuktu. Travelling south, Arab merchants piled salt, mined further north at Taghaza, on the banks of a river before withdrawing, allowing local traders to leave gold in return. The barter continued until an acceptable exchange was agreed and “in this way, by long and ancient custom, they carry on their trade without seeing or speaking to each other”.
These reports of silent trade may identify common tropes adopted by authors across the world, represent archetypes used to comprehend the unknown, or even represent accurate descriptions of commercial encounters. Indeed, such traditions can be traced as far back as Herodotus, who recounted a ‘silent trade’ between Carthaginian merchants and traders on the north-west coast of Africa. What is most useful about them is what they reveal about their readers’ understanding of the world. In each case, trade on the edges of their known worlds necessitated an interaction that broke all the rules. To do business here would mean losing the social and cultural baggage that underpinned trade in more familiar markets. On the frontiers of “civilisation” early modern writers conceived of perfect, free markets, and they were shocked by them.