Merchants - a definition

Merchants function as professionals who deal with trade, dealing in commodities that they do not necessarily produce themselves in order to produce a profit. Credit cards are a classic example.

A merchant class characterises many pre-modern societies. Its status can range from high - achieving titles like that of merchant prince - to low, such as found in Chinese culture.

With few natural resources of our own, the wealth of the UK over the centuries is attributed largely to the fact that we have been a successful nation of Merchants.

Merchants can be categorised into two types:

• A wholesale merchant operates between the producer and the retail merchant. Some wholesale merchants only organise the movement of goods and services rather than move these themselves.
   
• A retail merchant sells commodities to consumers. For example a builders merchants shop owner is a retail merchant, as is a Plumbers merchants shop. However, some may only deal with trade and are therefore more commonly thought of as wholesalers.

Merchants Trade routes - an overview

Long-distance trade played a major role in the cultural, religious, and artistic exchanges that took place between the major centres of civilisation in Europe and Asia during antiquity. Some of these Merchant trade routes had been in use for centuries, but by the beginning of the first century A.D., merchants, diplomats, and travellers could (in theory) cross the ancient world from Britain and Spain in the west to China and Japan in the east. The trade routes served principally to transfer raw materials, foodstuffs and luxury goods from areas with surpluses to others where they were in short supply.
 

Some areas had a monopoly on certain materials or goods. China, for example, supplied West Asia and the Mediterranean world with silk, while spices were obtained principally from South Asia. These goods were transported over vast distances either by pack animals overland or by seagoing ships along the Silk and Spice Routes, which were the main arteries of contact between the various ancient empires of the Old World. Another important trade route, known as the Incense Route, was controlled by the Arabs, who brought frankincense and myrrh by camel caravan from South Arabia.

Cities along these trade routes grew rich providing cleaning and other services to merchants and acting as international marketplaces. Some, like Palmyra and Petra on the fringes of the Syrian Desert, flourished mainly as centres of trade supplying merchant caravans and policing the trade routes. They also became cultural and artistic centres, where peoples of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds could meet and intermingle.

The trade routes were the communications highways of the ancient world. New inventions, religious beliefs, artistic styles, languages, and social customs, as well as goods and raw materials, were transmitted by removals from one place to another to conduct business. By the end of the first century B.C., there was a great expansion of international trade involving five contiguous powers and their traders:

• Merchants of the Roman empire,
• Merchants of the Parthian empire,
• Merchants of the Kushan empire,
• Merchants of the Xiongnu,
• Merchants of the Han empire.

Travel was arduous and they had no access to Carers as we do today to look after kids and the elderly, knowledge of geography imperfect, numerous contacts were forged as these empires expanded—spreading ideas, beliefs, and customs among heterogeneous peoples—and as valuable goods were moved over long distances through trade, exchange, gift giving, and the payment of tribute.  Transport over land was accomplished using river craft and pack animals, notably the sturdy Bactrian camel. Travel by sea depended on the prevailing winds of the Indian Ocean, the monsoons, which blow from the southwest during the summer months and from the northeast in the autumn.

A vast network of strategically located merchants trading posts (emporia) enabled the exchange, distribution, storage and improvement of property. Other routes through the Arabian desert may have ended at the Nabataean city of Petra, where new caravans travelled on to Gaza and other ports on the Mediterranean, or north to Damascus or east to Parthia. A network of sea routes linked the incense ports of South Arabia and Somalia with ports in the Persian Gulf and India in the east, and also with ports on the Red Sea, from which merchandise was transported overland to the Nile and then to Alexandria.

Into the modern era and firstly the arrival of commercial shipping, air freight and the era of a flat pack assembly or disposable 'I want it now' culture, it opened the entire globe to merchant traders and entrepreneurial phase that is sometimes referred to as the bootstrapping culture. More latterly the internet is creating a similar evolution.