Economic News

Added: (Sun May 25 2008)

Pressbox (Press Release) - THE REVOLUTION IN COMMERCE
May 25, 2008
By. Didik Marjadi

It is important to realize that continous buying and selling which are charracteristic of modern commercial methods are developments of fairly recent date. Until the beginning of the eigteent century trade was mainly periodic ; that is to say , exchange transactions were for the most part confined to fixed times and places. This was inevitable. When communication was difficult and the volume of trade was slight, the thin and sluggish stream of commerce required to be banked up and cunducted through well defined channels. Under such conditions, the natural centres of traffic were the periodical gatherings of buyers and sellers at fairs and markets,and it was through these institutions that the bulk of commercial business was carried on. The transition to continuous buying and selling began in the late eighteenth century, but the movement made little progress until the development of the railway and the steamship broke down the physical barries to communication. There up on the stream of trade swelled and overflowed the banks which had been erected to confine it. The limitations of time and space within which the trader had hitherto worked were removed. The area over which commercial transactions took place expanded ; the time during which they took place extended ; periodic trading disappeared ; markets and fairs gradually lost their importance, and fresh commercial institutions were created to meet the new conditions. The result was a revolution in the methods of trade comparable in importance and to some extent in general character to the revolutions already described in agriculture and industry. Its main features will be briefly indicated in what follows.
During the greater part of the eighteeth century trade was still at the periodic stage, and the bulk of commercial business was transacted through weekly markets and annual or bi-annual fairs. The weekly market was a centre of local trade, and it should be remembered that nearly 75 per cent. Of the trading transactions of the eighteenth century were local in character. Each town had a market to which the farmers from the surrounding district brought their produce and sold it direct to the citizens. Food stuffs were the chief commodities traded in. The buying and selling were mostly retail and of the kind which would take place to-day in provision shops. But at the time we are speaking of, shops in the modern sense were almost unknown.
A few craftsmen, such as tailors or cobblers, might have stalls attached to their workshops, but there was nothing corresponding to the general retail shop of to-day. The joys of shopping were undiscovered by the housewives of the eighteenth century. They had to lay in their supplies of food at the weekly markets and to rely for most other things on an occasional visit to a fair or on a call from a travelling pedlar. As the opportunity to replenish stocks only came at intervals, it was necessary to keep fairly larges supplies on hand, and therefore storage facilities in the shape of roomy cellars and ample larders were a necessity in every respectable house of the time. As showing the change which has taken place since, it is only necessary to mention that modern houses are built without storage accommodation except for coal and, in a few cases, for wine, and that preserving processes like pickling, salting and curing no longer occupy the important place in domestic economy that they did in the eighteeth century.
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