Neville Morley - Trade in Classical Antiquity

As I was completing this book, in the weeks after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, the price of petrol in some parts of the United Kingdom reached 1 per litre; this was, in part, because the destruction of refining facilities in the Gulf of Mexico meant that American oil companies were seeking to buy up supplies in Europe, while the price of crude oil on the global market passed $70 per barrel. This can be seen as an indication of the awesome power of the modern world-trade system to mobilise goods from across the globe; there is a shortfall in supply leading to a price rise, the news is communicated almost instantaneously and the market responds, shipping oil thousands of miles to where the demand is greatest. The demands of resentful road hauliers that the government should intervene to lower prices and protect their profits are based on a complete misunderstanding of basic economics; the market simply reflects the hard realities of supply and demand, and petrol subsidies or a reduction in fuel tax could defeat their own object by stimulating demand and pushing prices up even further. Such developments emphasise the relative powerlessness of states, let alone individuals, in the face of market forces; they are a forcible reminder that, within a globalised economy, even the basic rhythms of everyday life can now be affected by events thousands of miles away an experience which, as a regular buyer of Fairtrade products, I naively tend to associate more with downtrodden coffee and cocoa producers in the Third World. Connectivity, it is clear, affects us all; however much the rules of the game are rigged in favour of certain players, no one is wholly insulated from the effects of the global market.

Over the last decade, as I have been working on this book, the terms in which trade, markets and globalisation are discussed have been changing. There remain many adherents of the conventional view of trade as indispensable and unequivocally desirable, the lifeblood of economic development and the sole hope for lifting millions out of poverty; the market, it is argued, is the only efficient way of allocating and distributing limited resources. Some governments, above all those of the United States and the United Kingdom, continue to follow the advice of such economists, working to free world trade from its remaining constraints and to extend the reach of market forces further into social life. Increasingly, however, more critical voices have made themselves heard, not least in protests at meetings of the World Trade Organisation and G8 summits. Far from being a cure for poverty, trade is seen to be widening the gap between rich and poor. The globalised market creates misery for agricultural producers in Africa and South America, sweatshop workers in Asia and unemployed steel workers in South Wales; consumer demand for strawberries in December, perfectly round red tomatoes (however tasteless) and dirt-cheap meat (however toxic) destroys eco-systems and racks up the food miles; the relentless pursuit of profit undermines local social and economic structures, while even culture and knowledge become commodities. These developments are attributed not to trade per se but to the conditions under which it currently takes place depending on the commentator, the blame lies with systems of agricultural tariffs, the dynamics of capitalism or dependence on carbon-based energy but there is a general sense that more trade is not necessarily the answer to everything.