We have always traded across distances. The hard questions are not whether, but on whose terms, and for whose benefit.
Post 2 of a series on globalization, concentration, and strategic de-risking. See the first post on Substack here.
Early on…
Archaeologists found obsidian tools at Çatalhöyük, a Neolithic settlement in central Anatolia, dating to around 7000 BC. Obsidian is a naturally occurring volcanic glass and the closest source of this material was in the Cappadocia highlands, a hundred and twenty miles to the northeast, and other places much further away. Another example is Timna (which I visited a couple of years ago), in the Arabah Valley north of the Gulf of Aqaba, where Egypt’s New Kingdom pharaohs ran an industrial copper-mining operation roughly 400 miles from the Nile, in the 14th century BC…
In Çatalhöyük’s case, this was before the wheel, before writing, before the state. By Seti’s time, three and a half thousand years later, sourcing had grown bigger, more strategic, but the underlying logic was the same: critical inputs come from far away, and the societies that get them thrive.
A Bit Later…
By the third millennium BC, the network becomes bidirectional and on paper. Cuneiform tablets from Uruk record exchanges with Dilmun (modern Bahrain): Mesopotamian grain, textiles, and silver going one way, Omani copper and Persian Gulf pearls coming the other. By the 6th century BC, the Lydians of western Anatolia invented coinage, and within a hundred years standardized currency is circulating from the Aegean to the Black Sea. By the 1st century AD, the network is continental and triangular: Roman gold paying for Indian pepper and Chinese silk, with Pliny the Elder complaining in print that the empire is being drained of bullion to pay for luxuries
Read more on my Substack for free, and every Sunday for another episode:
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