There remains “market mode.” It may seem strange to assign it third place only, for in a primary sense it denotes all effective demand, whether overall or for a single commodity. It exists universally, without specific institutions of exchange, or coinage, or “merchants,” and can be theorized satisfactorily even within a single household, within the subsistence mode, or within craftsman-patron relations. Moreover, if intangible but socially real returns such as “honor” and “protection” are factored into an exchange function, even transactions located within the command mode, such as bribes or gifts to social superiors, can be incorporated within a wider market mode as relationships of “negative reciprocity.” All the same, in practical terms it is useful to be able to distinguish transactions which are currently analyzed, for the more archaic societies of antiquity, as being “embedded” within the same social orbit from those where distance precludes the exercise of power or direct producer-consumer contact. It is this latter category which has generated the long-running debate, for given the prevalence throughout antiquity of the subsistence and command modes as sketched above, the scope of application of a genuine price-setting market might seem to have been limited.
Not so, it appears, though its growth was spasmodic. True, from the eighth century bc onwards in Greece, festivals and sanctuaries had been providing safe passage for long-range, low-frequency gatherings which offered opportunities for exchange, while Herodotus’s sketch of Carthaginian “silent trade” on the west African coast (4.197) portrays a mode of ritualized but undeniably commercial exchange which had a long future and probably a long past. However, it was the emergence of identifiable “towns,” many of whose inhabitants did not work directly on the land, which drove the development of high-frequency (e. g. monthly or weekly), short-range markets: detectable in Athens by 500, gradually elsewhere, and in Rome by the late third century bc, such markets eventually spread widely, reaching central Anatolia and lowland Britain by the second century ad and changing the meaning of the words agora and forum on the way. Coined money helped (though Mesopotamia had used market-based exchange systems for centuries without benefit of coin), but the effective driving force was the purchasing power wielded by town-and especially capital city-based elites. Their appetite for elegance and display fuelled a network of supply which lasted for many centuries, already Mediterranean-wide for certain commodities by the eighth century bc, and extending far into the Indian Ocean and beyond by ad 100. It was assisted by the later development of the transport and support systems by land and sea, ranging from harbors and lighthouses to Roman roads, which the (largely military) needs of the command mode had stimulated, for they allowed transaction costs to fall substantially. Correspondingly, to judge from the vertiginous drop in the number of Mediterranean shipwrecks after c.200 ad, use of the network seems to have fallen back drastically once the supply of silver could no longer provide sufficient lubrication, and once immigrant landlords with different tastes had taken over much of the Roman empire in the West, but its skeleton survived for use by pilgrims and diplomats and by a core of long-distance trade.
World History
