ABSTRACT
Trade diasporas in the classical world became familiar to modern western European scholars through Homer’s writings. Surprisingly, both the Iliad and the Odyssey contain generally negative views about the role of commerce. The Greeks (rather like the Romans later) preferred the “noble” ideals of military conquest, plunder and colonization to trade. They relied for commercial affairs on the Phoenicians, the legendary “Bedouin of the sea”, who exchanged products and knowledge as far afield as Spain, the British Isles, Greece, Babylon, Persepolis and Thebes. Used of the Phoenicians in early modern history, the expression diaspora was revived to allude to networks of proactive merchants set up to buy and sell their goods along established trade routes. This drew the meaning of the word closer to the Phoenician prototype. Curtin (1984: 2-3) argues that trade diasporas can be traced back even further, providing the “most common institutional form” after the coming of urban life. Merchants from one community would live as aliens in another town, learn the language, the customs and the commercial practices of their hosts then starting the exchange of goods. He continues:
At this stage a distinction appeared between the merchants who moved and settled and those who continued to move back and forth. What might have begun as a single settlement soon became more complex. . . . The result was an interrelated net of commercial communities forming a trade
network, or trade diaspora – a term that comes from the Greek word for scattering, as in the sowing of grain. . . .Trade communities of merchants living among aliens in associated networks are to be found on every continent and back through time to the very beginning of urban life.
