Trade originated from human communication in prehistoric times. Prehistoric peoples exchanged goods and services with each other in a gift economy before the innovation of modern-day currency.
People from the Neolithic period traded in spices, obsidian, sea shells, precious stones and other high-value materials as early as the 10th millennium BC. The first to mention the trade in historical periods are the Egyptians.
Adam Smith is widely regarded as the father of modern trade and the free market. His avant-garde ideas are presented in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, a masterwork of political and economic analysis published in 1776.
Trade has existed for a very long time, driven by both necessity and its utility. Paleoanthropologists believe that long-distance trade networks existed some 300,000 years ago. This was perhaps 100,000 years before Homo sapiens, our species, first walked the Earth.
One of the oldest trades documented was that of shells used as tools, with evidence dating as far back as 3200BC. Without documentation, trade is believed to have begun well before recorded trade. One example is the bartering of food: if one person had pigeons and wanted wheat, they would have traded pigeons for wheat.
Long-range trade routes first appeared in the 3rd millennium BCE, when Sumerians in Mesopotamia traded with the Harappan civilization of the Indus Valley. The Phoenicians were noted maritime traders, traveling across the Mediterranean Sea and as far north as Britain for sources of tin to manufacture bronze.
From their beginnings more than 7,000 years ago, the Chaldean-Babylonian, Assyrian, and Sumerian civilizations produced some of the earliest surviving business records. Various types of small industries and service businesses and extensive trade soon developed both within and outside the Mesopotamian valley.
The first humans emerged in Africa around two million years ago, long before the modern humans known as Homo sapiens appeared on the same continent. There's a lot that anthropologists still don't know about how different groups of humans interacted and mated with each other over this long stretch of prehistory.
Trading began as a direct exchange of goods and services, known as the barter system. In ancient societies, individuals traded items they had in surplus for items they needed. For example: Farmers exchanged crops for tools.
To explain, barter trade is the oldest form of commerce where two or more parties—such as individuals, businesses, and nations, exchange goods, products, and services evenly without using a monetary medium.
Herodotus has been called the “father of history.” An engaging narrator with a deep interest in the customs of the people he described, he remains the leading source of original historical information not only for Greece between 550 and 479 BCE but also for much of western Asia and Egypt at that time.
The Greek God, Poseidon, is referred to as the Father of Commerce because as the God of the Sea, he governed the primary trade routes of ancient civilizations, which were mainly via the sea.
Firstrade CEO John Liu Reflects on 40 Years of Democratizing Investing. When John Liu founded Firstrade in 1985, the brokerage landscape was starkly different from today's digital-first, zero-commission environment.
The United States is the 2nd largest goods exporter in the world, behind only China. U.S. goods exports to the world totaled $2.1 trillion in 2022, up 17.5 percent ($307.3 billion) from 2021.
The Lords of Trade and Plantations was a permanent administrative body formed by Charles II in 1675 to provide consistent advice to the Privy Council regarding the management of the growing number of English colonies.
Spot trading with immediate currency exchange, transparent terms, minimal speculation, and a genuine economic purpose can be considered halal. Conversely, practices involving interest, excessive leverage, margin trading, and speculative transactions that resemble gambling are decisively classified as haram.
Trade creation is the process of creating economic welfare and new trade opportunities between two or more countries or regions. Trade creation typically occurs when there is a reduction in trade barriers, such as tariffs or quotas. This can lead to increased competition for businesses and lower prices for consumers.
A new survey of genomic evidence suggests our unique language capacity was present at least 135,000 years ago. Subsequently, language might have entered social use 100,000 years ago. Our species, Homo sapiens, is about 230,000 years old.
Donald Johanson, a paleoanthropologist, the Museum's former Curator of Physical Anthropology, and a current Museum Research Associate. Astoundingly, Dr. Johanson and his team found about 40% of Lucy's skeleton and later determined her fossils to be approximately 3.2 million years old.
Dozens of different studies using everything from chromosome evolution over time to ancient fossils have boiled it down to two candidates: sponges and comb jellies. Some of the best information about early animals comes from fossils dating back to the Cambrian period, which started around 541 million years ago.
Bikky Khosla (born 30 July 1960) is an entrepreneur and founder of tradeindia.com (Infocom Network Limited). He is the younger brother of Vinod Khosla, an Indian venture capitalist.
Probably the greatest single trade in history occurred in the early 1990s when George Soros shorted the British Pound, making over $1 billion on the trade. Most of the greatest trades in history are highly leveraged, currency exploitation trades.
Silk Road. The Silk Road was one of the first trade routes to join the Eastern and the Western worlds. According to Vadime Elisseeff (2000): "Along the Silk Roads, technology traveled, ideas were exchanged, and friendship and understanding between East and West were experienced for the first time on a large scale.
