One of the most extensive surviving archives of Old Babylonian writing consists of letters sent to Ea-nasir, an eighteenth-century-bc copper merchant from Ur. “You have offered bad ingots to my messenger,” complained one trading partner. “Who am I that you are treating me in this manner?” Another customer appears repeatedly in the archive, each time inquiring about a missing copper shipment. “Do you not know,” he wrote in his third missive, “how tired I am?”

In the eighteenth century, a cash-strapped French government began selling rente viagère, in which an investor paid an up-front sum pegged to someone’s life—sometimes the king or the pope—and received returns until death. A group of Genevan bankers diversified their portfolio in the 1770s by buying rente contracts on the lives of thirty wealthy young Genevan girls. The fund gained popularity; by 1789 a significant portion of French debt was owed on the lives of just these “thirty heads.”

A seventeenth-century rabbinical decision tells of a German town in which wealthy Jewish households kept chickens, while poorer women secretly milked gentiles’ cows early in the morning to sell the purloined milk on the street. One time, some chicks hopped into a tub of milk left on a doorstep and drowned. “Each side suffered a financial loss,” the text reads. “One from the milk, the other from the drowned chicks.”

When Arctic traveler Vilhjalmur Stefansson traded with the Inuit of Victoria Island in 1911, he found the metal of their knives to be of curious provenance: Inuit to the east had bought guns from the Hudson Bay Company and traded them westward; the firearms were then traded farther west, eventually reaching the Inuit he’d met—who, having no use for guns, had beat the metal barrels into knife blades.

“Why do you wrong the gods so much?” Greek poet Athenaeus asks a sober party guest in a late second-century work. “You’re no use to the city if you drink water, / because you’re hurting the farmer and the trader; / whereas I increase their income by getting drunk.”