ABSTRACT
Trade, broadly defined by economic anthropologist Karl Polanyi as 'the mutually appropriative movement of goods between hands', is a basic human activity like production and reproduction. Trade in the premodern world was certainly not smooth sailing. People travelled and traded nevertheless, but to do so they needed to create an institutional infrastructure that provided a necessary minimum of security and predictability. This chapter aims to give an overview of how modern scholarship has sought to engage with this process by developing theoretical approaches to the study of trade in pre-state and early state societies. Hungarian-born Karl Polanyi, who can be credited with spurring the substantivist-formalist controversy in economic anthropology, also coined some of the more influential analytical models of premodern trade. Nodes in a network related to trade will often be places such as find-spots, archaeological sites, and known locations of harbours, markets, periodical trading fairs, production sites, settlements, elite residences or places of religious significance.
