The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [79]
No doubt just as the Tyrians could not believe their fortune at finding savages happy to give them so much silver for a little Cretan olive oil, so the Tartessians could not believe their luck at finding strange seagoing people prepared to give them such a convenient, storable, calorie-rich bounty for a mere metal. It is common to find that two traders both think their counterparts are idiotically overpaying: that is the beauty of Ricardo’s magic trick. ‘The English have no sense,’ said a Montagnais trapper to a French missionary in seventeenth-century Canada. ‘They give us twenty knives for this one beaver skin.’ The contempt was mutual. When HMS Dolphin’s sailors found that a twenty-penny iron nail could buy a sexual encounter on Tahiti in 1767, neither sailors nor Tahitian men could believe their luck; whether the Tahitian women were as happy as their menfolk about this bargain goes unrecorded. Twelve days later, rampant inflation had set in and sex now cost a nine-inch marlinspike.
Traders from Gadir even worked their way south along the coast of Africa, acquiring gold from the inhabitants by ‘silent trade’: leaving goods on the shore and retreating. Comparative Ricardo ruled the Phoenician world. Tyre is the prototype of the trading port, the Genoa, Amsterdam, New York or Hong Kong of its day. The Phoenician diaspora is one of the great untold stories of history – untold because Tyre and its books were so utterly destroyed by thugs like Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus and Alexander, and Carthage by the Scipios, so the story comes to us only through snippets from snobbish and envious neighbours. But in truth, was there ever a more admirable people than the Phoenicians? They knitted together not only the entire Mediterranean, but bits of the Atlantic, the Red Sea and the overland routes to Asia, yet they never had an emperor, had comparatively little time for religion and fought no memorable battles – unless you count Cannae, fought by a mercenary army paid by Carthage. I do not mean they were necessarily nice: they traded in slaves, sometimes resorted to war and did deals with the piratical Philistine ‘sea peoples’ who destroyed coastal cities around 1200 BC, but the Phoenicians seem to have managed to resist the temptations of turning into thieves, priests and chiefs better than most successful people in history. Through enterprise they discovered social virtue.
The virtue of fragmented government
The Phoenician diaspora teaches another important lesson, first advanced by David Hume: political fragmentation is often the friend, not the enemy, of economic advance, because of the stop which it gives ‘both to power and authority’. There was no need for Tyre, Sidon, Carthage and Gadir to unite as a single political entity for them all to prosper. At most they were a federation. The extraordinary flowering of wealth and culture around the Aegean between 600 and 300 BC tells the same story. First the Milesians then the Athenians and their allies grew wealthy by trading among small, independent ‘citizen states’, not by uniting as an empire. Having copied the Phoenicians’ ships and trading habits, Miletus, the most successful of the Ionian Greek cities, sat ‘like a bloated spider’ at the junction of four trade routes, east overland to Asia, north through the Hellespont to the Black Sea, south to Egypt and west to Italy. But though it established colonies all over the Black Sea, Miletus was not an imperial capital: it was first among equals. The city of Sybaris, a preferred trading partner of Miletus on a fertile plain in the toe of southern Italy, grew to perhaps several hundred thousand people and became a byword for opulence and refinement