Kennedy - The Economist

Negotiation as a social transaction between humans has a long history. It developed slowly from fairly primitive bargaining between pairs of people as human societies evolved from small hunter-gatherer bands of a few dozen people living in the vast expanse of the earths continents through to the revolution in agriculture and pastoral practices about 8,00011,000 years ago. Villages and little towns began to appear in the northern Eurasian land mass and spread south-east to India and east to China as farming was imitated and landlords congregated for protection. The history of agriculture for several millennia continued with a mixture of hunter-gathering and small-scale farming in western Europe and the great agricultural empires of Egypt, Babylon, India and China, based on proximity to large rivers and large-scale irrigation schemes.

European trade spread among villages and small towns and their rural hinterlands, creating traders, artisans and marketplaces, which slowly created the commercial economies of Europe. These were followed eventually by the so-called industrial revolution in Britain in the 19th century on the back of technologies (some of them known to, but not exploited by, China centuries earlier). The inhabitants of the cities were now counted in tens of thousands and national populations in a few million (tens of millions in China).

With industrialisation, markets matured on scales unknown even in the earliest commercial societies of the Greek and Roman Mediterranean and the long-distance trading routes between Arabia, India and China. Manufacturing and the division of labour on an increasingly global scale brought negotiation to its most refined and complex forms by the 20th century. Contact among neighbouring populations refined negotiating diplomacy at government levels, and in the formulation of state policies towards neighbours and within systems of justice. Wars were ended in outright victory or peace negotiations and future accommodations between victors and vanquished. Treaties of peace, marriage treaties between rulers and complicated succession and inheritance disputes brought negotiation practice into all aspects of civil government.