A Byzantine general of “ignoble descent” oversaw the building of Petra, on the Colchian coast, and set up an import monopoly. “They are robbing us of all our gold as well as of the necessities of life, using the fair name of trade,” locals complained, according to Procopius. “There has been set over us as ruler a huckster who has made our destitution a kind of business.”

James Boswell recorded that during the sale of Henry Thrale’s brewery, Samuel Johnson—an executor of the business—“appeared bustling about, with an inkhorn and pen in his buttonhole, like an exciseman,” and was asked what he considered to be the true value of the property. “We are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats,” Johnson responded, “but the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice.”

In an 1846 math textbook from the Free Grammar School of King Edward VI, one exercise considers an exchange of 450 bags of potatoes for cash, 15 chests of oranges, and 185 bushels of carrots; the remainder is nuts. The question is posed: “How many bags of nuts did I receive?”

A hand’s primary function, Elias Canetti writes in Crowds and Power, is as “a claw to grasp whole branches” while climbing; both hands partner in “grasping” and “letting go.” This is like trade, he argues: “one hand tenaciously holds on to the object with which it seeks to tempt the stranger” while the other “is stretched out in demand.” Trading, then, offers “profound and universal pleasure” as “a translation into nonphysical terms of one of the oldest movement patterns.”

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?”