3 - Commodities and consumption
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 December 2009
Summary
No one is allowed to import frankincense and similar foreign aromatics to be used in religious rituals, or purple and other such dyes not native to the country, or materials for any other purpose where imports from abroad are inessential.
(Plato, Laws 847)And the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her; for no man buyeth their merchandise any more: the merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious stones, and of pearls, and fine linen, and purple, and silk, and scarlet, and all thyine wood, and all manner vessels of ivory, and all manner vessels of most precious wood, and of brass, and iron … and fine flour, and wheat, and beasts, and sheep, and horses, and chariots, and slaves, and souls of men.
(Revelation 18.11–13)The limits of an exclusively ecological approach to the history of human society are quickly reached when considering the nature of demand. As we have already seen, the list of goods that might be considered essential in a given situation, the limited availability and uneven allocation of which might stimulate the development of systems of distribution, is long and varied. It is certainly not determined by nutritional requirements alone; except in famine situations, human diets reflect social and cultural preferences (Garnsey 1999). It can be useful to construct a model of the minimum volume of grain required for the basic sustenance of a given population, in order to estimate the carrying capacity of a region or to give an order of magnitude for the minimum level of redistribution required to keep people fed (Garnsey 1988; Hopkins 1983b).
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- Trade in Classical Antiquity , pp. 35 - 54Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007