Collaboration between unrelated strangers seems to be a uniquely human achievement. In no other species can two individuals that have never before met exchange goods or services to the benefit of each other, as happens routinely each time you visit a shop or a restaurant or a website. ... Yet human beings can treat strangers as honorary friends.
Measuring Trust
Precise measurement creates infrastructure for distant trust.
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For thousands of years before it jelled, people in some farming villages of the Fertile Crescent had been using clay tokens of various simple shapes for accounting purposes, such as recording numbers of sheep and amounts of grain. In the last centuries before 3000B.C., developments in accounting technology, format, and signs rapidly led to the first system of writing.
These networks of trust, in turn, were largely responsible for the spread of Islam over the caravan routes of Central Asia and the Sahara, and especially across the Indian Ocean, the main conduit of medieval world trade. ... At the same time, Islam gained a toehold in trade emporia from Aden to the Moluccas because Islamic courts were so perfectly suited to provide those functions that made such ports attractive: means of establishing contracts, recovering debts, creating a banking sector capable of redeeming or transferring letters of credit. The level of trust thereby created between merchants in the great Malay entrepĂ´t Malacca, gateway to the spice islands of Indonesia, was legendary.
Beyond this potential for human suffering, the global ignorance of longitude wreaked economic havoc on the grandest scale. It confined oceangoing vessels to a few narrow shipping lanes that promised safe passage. ... Since the sacrifice of a single one of these cargo vessels caused terrible losses, merchants yearned to avoid the inevitable. They wished to discover secret routes—and that meant discovering a means to determine longitude.
By allowing ships to know their positions and plot their voyages with efficiency, accuracy, and precision, these clocks and their successors enabled the making of untold trading fortunes. ... Precise-running clockwork made for precise navigation; precise navigation made for maritime knowledge, control, and power.
Now time could be either local or standard, and the distinction baffled most people. The railroads required standard time, and the telegraph made it feasible. ... When faraway places were coordinated in time, they could finally measure their longitude precisely. The key to measuring longitude was knowing the time someplace else and the distance to that place.
Large-scale commercial exchange and long-distance trade tend to promote common standards of measurement. ... Beyond a certain point, however, much of commerce is composed of long chains of transactions, often over great distances, between anonymous buyers and sellers. Such trade is greatly simplified and made legible by standard weights and measures.
We drive an automobile from coast to coast under uniform traffic signals. In Chicago we buy a tire that was made in Akron, and it will fit the wheel (made in Pittsburgh) of the car (built in Detroit) that we bought in New York. ... American mass production, made possible by standardization, was our number-one weapon in World War II.
What the conquistadors failed to understand is that money is a matter of belief, even faith: belief in the person paying us; belief in the person issuing the money he uses or the institution that honours his cheques or transfers. Money is not metal. It is trust inscribed.