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A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World

Book by William J. Bernstein · 8 quotes · Trade, Incense, Indus Valley

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AllTradeIncenseIndus ValleyIslamAnatoliaArabiaAsiaAutonomyChinaExtravaganceFertile CrescentIndian OceanMesopotamiaPolitical InstabilityPortugalProphet Muhammad PbuhSenecaVasco Da GamaZheng He

A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World Quotes

“Western notions of individual autonomy and rule of law simply do not apply in the desert. An attack on one tribesman is an attack on all, and in a landscape where a murderer can quickly and quietly slip away, it matters little whether the accused is guilty or innocent. His entire clan is held accountable for thar—retribution. The resulting skein of honor and revenge, so familiar in the modern Middle East, is eternal, seemingly without beginning and without end. When the first recourse of victims is to their cousins, and not to the police or to an independent judicial system, poverty and political instability are the usual outcomes.”

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“By the fourth millennium BC, the Fertile Crescent was not the only region of coalesced communities; organized agricultural, military, religious, and administrative activity had also begun to appear in the Indus Valley, in what is now Pakistan. Even before written records, there is evidence of trade between these two regions. Archaeologists have discovered lamps and cups in Mesopotamia dating from the late fourth millennium BC and made from conch shells found only in the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Oman.”

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“The coming of the Prophet would sweep away this fragmented and pluralistic pattern of trade in the ancient world. Within a few centuries of Muhammad's death, one culture, one religion, and one law would unify the commerce of the Old World's three continents nearly a millennium before the arrival of the first European ships in the East.”

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Book:A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World
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