They barter, we swap

Trading up by trading terms

Once upon a time, people didn’t have money. Life was hard. If you wanted some eggs and bacon you had to wander around the village.

Maybe I could repair your window for the bacon, but that seems like a lot of work for a couple of rashers. If I repair the whole window, maybe you could give me bacon for the next month? I don’t know if I actually want to eat bacon solidly for a month, but hey - we’re all illiterate anyway, so keeping track of anything more complicated could get a bit out of hand.

Okay, bacon sorted! On to the eggs…

The name of this mysterious once-upon-a-time even finds its way into a Mad Max movie. We know most of what we need to about a chaotic, post-apocalyptic hellhole (run by a magnificent Tina Turner) before our taciturn hero even arrives, simply from its name: Bartertown.

Bartertown: where everything is brown, the houses look like anthills, and Saturday night fun is watching people cage fight to the death! (For what it’s worth, I absolutely love the first three Mad Max movies, but they are also a goldmine for some casual stereotypes about civilisation and barbarism.)

To be fair to our own mythologising impulses, we do tend to give our distant ancestors enough credit to imagine that they could rustle up a bacon and egg sandwich without spending every day working out the relative merits of socks, sheep and sewing needles.

We assume they were either self-sufficient, at least for basics, or were just a bit nicer than us and wouldn’t mind giving their neighbour an egg or two here and there, knowing that some time or other they would get the favour back in hot tea or a knitted blanket.

But when it came to bigger things, from livestock to manufactured goods, let alone luxuries like gold, silver or rare spices, we’re back to barter. It is standard economic textbook fare that money had to be invented just to fix this intolerable reality.

These days, if particular communities go ‘back to barter’ it means one of two things. Either something has gone very badly wrong: war, famine, the collapse of normal social practices; or we’re looking at alternative lifestyles, often rooted in a romanticised ideal of simpler times.

Back in 2011, in a book I’ve already talked about here, the anthropologist and radical activist, David Graeber, debunked the ‘myth of barter’.¹ It is a fun read. Graeber presents plenty of examples from recent, modern societies that did not use money to demonstrate that nobody EVER wandered around the village asking if two fat sheep were worth the same as one skinny cow.

He also dug into the historiography of the myth of barter, tracing it back to the first scholars who proposed this cumbersome system of exchange. They were never, he demonstrated, trying to explain how people lived in the past. They were trying to explain why money must have been invented by imagining all of the ways in which their life would be harder if it were arranged identically, except for having money.

From there, Graeber whips pretty quickly through the invention of money, without spending too much time on the difference between money and coinage - mostly, he is talking about coinage. He describes it as a ‘Pandora’s Box’: a force of evil, which corrupted social relations.

Graeber, over the years that followed, backtracked from his complete denial that barter ever existed, but he was right about the power of its mythology. He was right that we collectively imagine barter as something specific, primitive and that other people do.

But what is barter?

One of the ‘aha’ moments that has stayed with me from reading Graeber’s Debt is that it is NOT an alternative to money: it is an element of a monetary system. In other words, there is no way to establish whether two fat cows are worth the same as one skinny cow unless you have some concept of value that is neither a cow nor a sheep, but that can be applied to both.

You can do this with pretty much anything - oranges, apples, cowrie shells, little lumps of gold or silver, numbers in a digital ledger... And you don’t actually have to have any of those things with you when you’re examining your sheep and cows.

As long as both parties agree that we’re working in peaches and that one fat sheep is worth 16 peaches and one skinny cow is worth 32 peaches then we’re in business, even if it’s the middle of winter and anyway, you’re in Yorkshire in the 15^th century, so neither of you has ever even seen a peach.

I’m not simply being glib here. The ancient and medieval world is full of these ideas of value - usually called ‘units of account’ - which were used to exchange all sorts of goods and services and we have examples of a unit of account being used, sometimes centuries after anybody had ever seen the physical thing itself.

So, barter is exchanging things decided to be of equivalent value based on an underlying unit of account.

And exchanging things on the basis of a shared unit of account (whether it is dollars or peaches) also means, theoretically, being able to exchange things without any other kinds of social ties having an effect: a fat sheep is worth 16 peaches. Full stop. It doesn’t matter if the person asking is your favourite aunt or your worst enemy.

I say theoretically, because even though this is often touted as one of the greatest advantages of money (the ultimate unit of account), the idea that economies work separately to other social ties, like trust, fear and lust, is an even bigger myth than barter. That is why sales techniques are about emotions and business networks matter.

Graeber was talking about this when he contrasted the invention of money, the opening of Pandora’s box, in which people could be reduced simply to units of value, with an idealised earlier state where everything hinged on mutual ties of community.

For many years I stewed on this. There is much in Debt that is brilliant. And yet, something felt… off.

Then a wonderful colleague joined us temporarily at Leeds, who works on medieval writings about barter. There are quite a lot of these. Here is an example from a text I study a lot, a sixth-century Greek work from the Roman Empire about how the Earth is flat and shaped like the Holy Tabernacle. It is a weird work, but includes some fantastic reminiscences from the author about his earlier days as a Red Sea trader. Here he is talking about a people, the Sasu, on the edge of the Aksumite empire, located in modern Ethiopia and Eritrea, roughly centred in the now-contested Tigray province.²

The country known as that of Sasu is itself near the ocean... The King of the Axômites accordingly, every other year, through the governor of Agau, sends thither special agents to bargain for the gold, and these are accompanied by many other traders... They take along with them to the mining district oxen, lumps of salt, and iron, and when they reach its neighbourhood they make a halt at a certain spot and form an encampment, which they fence round with a great hedge of thorns. Within this they live, and having slaughtered the oxen, cut them in pieces, and lay the pieces on the top of the thorns, along with the lumps of salt and the iron. Then come the natives bringing gold in nuggets like peas, called tancharas, and lay one or two or more of these upon what pleases them----the pieces of flesh or the salt or the iron, and then they retire to some distance off. Then the owner of the meat approaches, and if he is satisfied he takes the gold away, and upon seeing this its owner comes and takes the flesh or the salt or the iron. If, however, he is not satisfied, he leaves the gold, when the native seeing that he has not taken it, comes and either puts down more gold, or takes up what he had laid down, and goes away. Such is the mode in which business is transacted with the people of that country, because their language is different and interpreters are hardly to be found.

There are other accounts of barter from the ancient and medieval world and a lot of them look very alike. People bring goods to other people, often on the edge of the ‘known world’ (as far as the writer is concerned) and where there is privileged access to a rare product (in this case, gold). The people on the edge hide and wait for the others to go away. Negotiation is done by leaving goods to be exchanged, retreating, then seeing if the other side accepts the trade by taking the goods or wants an adjustment to the price.

My colleague, Nick Evans, had set about trying to figure out if any of these tales were true, in the sense that something like this actually happened, or if they are all part of a Eurasian reservoir of shared stories and legends.

His work (which I am skipping over lightly here) got me thinking again about Graeber and the myth of barter, of the Sasou, and of units of account. And suddenly, something clicked into place.

The problem was not deciding whether or not some people in the past ‘did barter’. It was that, from our earliest records, at least within the European tradition, people seem to have differentiated quite sharply between how they imagined and talked about what THEY did and what OTHER PEOPLE did.

The further away and more different those other people were (or seemed to be), the weirder the way they did business: hanging things in bushes, running away across rivers, only coming out at night…

It is such a deeply embedded cultural habit that we still do it without thinking much about.

Barter is actually big business, even with money all around us

We part exchange our cars. (Well, we do if our secondhand cars are worth anything by the time we get rid of them!)

In 1995, two huge UK companies, Tarmac and Wimpey did a deal. Wimpey took over Tarmac’s housing division and Tarmac took over Wimpey’s construction and mineral sections. It helped both of them to specialise more narrowly and corner their own parts of the market. What was exchanged was material and immaterial: sites, equipment, personnel and their expertise and networks. Presumably, an enormous amount of due diligence was done by both companies to figure out that they were both getting like-for-like in terms of value - that complicated wrangling over fat sheep versus skinny cows. The deal was announced as an ‘asset swap’.

For a while, ‘Swopped’ was an online clothing company that allowed people to exchange old clothes.

Shift swapping is common in lots of companies, raising all those same complicated questions. Is a Tuesday equivalent to a Friday? The last working day before Christmas equivalent to the first after Eid?

You may have noticed, though, that none of these things is, or was, described as ‘barter’ by the people doing it. It isn’t a conscious switch. We don’t think ‘instead of calling it barter, I’ll say I swapped it’.

We use the words differently, knowing without thinking about it which one to use where, in a way that usually suggests we conceive of the things differently, just like we don’t have to consciously think about whether to call a dog a cat.

THEY barter. WE swap.

It isn’t about what we actually do. That might be pretty much the same. It is about how habits of thought, ideas about ‘civilised’ places and places on the edge, give us words, with their own unique baggage, for those things.

And that poses a real problem for a historian. If we can look at the same process and call it completely different things, based on how it fits into our life and our myths about the world, how do we even start to frame questions about comparative economies in the past? How do we unpick that in the experiences of people we can’t talk to directly, whose sources often only tell one side of any story and that with lots of gaps?

Can we figure out where used barter and where (or when) was monetised or is that the wrong question?

I increasingly think it is.

Beyond Barter

Wherever we look in history, and in modern anthropological case studies, people seem completely capable of doing three things:

1. working out the value of very different things in relation to each other using shared units of value

2. exchanging things (and services) on that basis

3. balancing that ‘pure’ exchange with a million and one complicated considerations that have nothing directly to do with specific value: mates rates, charitable impulses, business vendettas, moral considerations…

If we just assume that point 1, which we might call ‘monetisation’, and 2, which we might call ‘barter’ and 3, which might call ‘life’ have always been around, then we can start asking different questions:

• When and why do we trade words for the same thing and when don’t we?

• Who do we put into that category of ‘other’ for this particular thing?

Having a brief go at those questions for barter is getting out into areas I’m currently writing about for a research paper, so treat them as work in progress, but how about this?

(‘We’ in all of the following sentences refers to ways that media, education and popular stereotypes within majority cultures in the west tend to talk about these things.)

• We trade words for exchanging stuff because, for centuries, European cultures have thought about how people handle doing business as a key marker for whether they are ‘civilised’ or not. By contrast, how they parent their children or train animals, for example, might be different or similar, but doesn’t fit into a binary ideal of ‘civilised’ versus ‘barbarian’.

• We put people into the category of other, or ‘people who barter’, instead of us, or ‘people who swap’, when their material life and social structures are perceived as radically simpler and poorer than ours.

Because we are culturally conditioned to see ‘civilised’ to ‘barbarian’ as a progression through time, we also tend to put barter on a timeline as ‘backwards’. Thus, we talk about barter in relation to faraway people living in low-technology societies; to people who seem to have had complexity or wealth taken away from them, like people in prison or in war zones; and some people define themselves as doing barter as a way of signalling a desire for something simpler and ‘long-ago’: think hippies and communes.

What if we trade our terms?

Well, in this case, we may be seeing exactly that happening. Type ‘barter’ into the search bar of your preferred mainstream news platform (I tend to go for the BBC) and you’ll find a slew of articles talking about the future of barter.

Whether it is ways to make the economy more circular and community oriented, for communities to preserve their traditional ways, or advice about ‘bartering to kickstart your business’, backwards barter is having a comeback. My favourite for leaning into the dissonance is from the Financial Times: ‘How Big Tech Brought Back the Barter Economy’.

I guess there are two things going on here. On one hand, lots of people really are starting to think about ways to reduce production and resource costs, to reduce, recycle and make economies more resilient. That inevitably means finding better ways to get things that already exist to people who need them. It probably also means diversifying the ways we do business.

On the other hand, lots of these things aren’t really new. One of them is, explicitly, a traditional practice. And doing favours for people in return for other favours isn’t exactly revolutionary advice when starting a new business when you’ve got limited capital and networks to build. The idea of bringing back the barter economy is a bit like bringing back the tradition of wearing clothes.

The key in all of these articles is really the surprise: ‘barter’ and ‘big tech’; a CEO (if any concept screams ‘modernity’ louder I don’t know what it is) talking about bartering. They catch the eye because they upset our expected sense of time.

Progress may not be what it was, but in figuring out new futures, the past isn’t just a source of ideas. It is a chance to hold a mirror to our values. Upending the centuries-old convention that they barter and we swap is opening up fresh conversations and throwing a spotlight on options we’ve had all along.

1. Graeber, David, Debt: the first 5,000 years (Melville House, 2011)

2. The author of the work is often referred to as Cosmas Indicopleustes (or, transliterated more closely to the Greek, Kosmas Indikopleustes) but this name was probably a later attribution. The most easily available translation is McCrindle, John Watson, The Christian Topography of Cosmas, an Egyptian Monk, 1st edn (Hakluyt Society, 1897), which can also be found online in various places. I have used and abbreviated the one provided by the wonderful https://www.tertullian.org/fathers/. To find this text, scroll through the menu to Cosmas.