Abstract
I review what Western writers from ancient Greco-Roman times until the nineteenth century have said about the impact of Western trade on barbarians. My ultimate aim is to build on past aperçus to better understand how today's trade impacts indigenous peoples. Western writers said barbarians fell into two camps: Those who eschewed trade and those who flounced to it. The decision to remain autarkic has been attributed to barbarians' desire to protect a traditional lifestyle. The decision to move toward trade has been attributed to barbarians' desire to acquire deluxe and utilitarian goods, enhance status, and assuage addiction. The origins of these desires remain unexplained. Empires relied on inducements to pull and push recalcitrant barbarians to trade, a task made easier by barbarians' psychological myopia. The outcomes analyzed by writers have changed in line with the mores of the times. Trade has been implicated with changes in an astonishing assortment of outcomes among barbarians, including effeminacy (Herodotus), peace (Hume, Paine), addiction (Tacitus), conspicuous consumption (Caesar), wreckage of old orders (Marx), civilization (Say), and industriousness (Smith, Malthus). A few writers commented on the ambiguous effects of trade on barbarians. When viewed as a whole, the Western corpora is spotty for three reasons. Methodological: Trade has intertwined with politics, armies, acculturation, imperial taxation and subsidies, making it hard to pull apart how trade by itself changed barbarian societies. Tacitus and Caesar underscored the complexity of assessing trade's effects owing to barbarians' desire to fetch luxuries to trumpet status. Substantive: Xenophobia and disdained for people in " unpolished " lands contributed to the spottiness. Also, examining trade's impact on weaker customers paled next to mightier topics (e.g., religious conversion). Institutional: The threat of excommunication as a punishment for trading with heathens, the requirement that traders live in sequestered buildings, and reliance on innumerable jealous traders agonistically competing against each other to bring goods from the distant periphery to their empire's craw, all raised the costs of directly seeing how trade changed the lifestyle of people far away.