>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’.
In german, we would call both of these "tauschen". So unless we arent "europeans", that wording propably isnt strong evidence of anything.
Thanks so much for this comment! You are absolutely right in raising the issue of language, both modern and historic. I'm still very much learning the shift from academic writing to writing in a slightly different, often shorter and freer, way and this is an occasion when I have skated over too much.
By 'Europeans' here I was very clumsily expressing that tricky sense of a 'west' (also a clumsy term), which is defined to a very great extent by having a peculiar relationship to the idea of the Roman Empire (and by extension, what is termed Ancient Greece).There still isn't a good agreed terminology for this, in academic literature or outside it.
Here I definitely would include Germany: even though all European nations have their own distinctive cultures and histories, a sense of the ancient Romans and Greeks as a cultural fountainhead is a shared reference point in architecture, political culture, literature etc., which has been cultivated for centuries.
Linked to this, in German writing about different kinds of trade, there is also a common sense that 'barter/Tauschhandel' is something different and, for the most part, something that other people do, and, until recently, something inferior. I think this is coming out of that long tradition that can be traced back to Greek and Latin depictions of trade. Some of the early and most important theoretical works presenting the invention of money as a response to the problems of barter come out of the German-language tradition of the 18th and 19th centuries, and directly refer to Antiquity (meaning Greek and Roman antiquity) as part of the origin of modern European monetary practice.
You are absolutely right though, that when I come to the modern switch of barter for swapping, I am only talking about an English-language context. I would love to study how this works in other European languages, or for somebody else to and to read the results, but I haven't and should have been clear about that.
The shift in English has been very noticeable and I think is doing cultural work, but only within that linguistic sphere. Within that sphere, I completely agree with you: the unconscious level of choice-making is what makes it powerful. We don't think 'instead of calling this barter, I'll say I swapped it'. I think we use words like 'swap' because it would never occur to us to describe what we do as barter, because that is what other people do (often in worse circumstances). That is, I think, why we sometimes see the surprised tone in news media, etc., when somebody says, 'Hey, look, [big well-known company] is doing barter!' They expect this to be attention-grabbing because it catches those unconscious currents of language use.
In terms of ancient terminology, there is no equivalent word in e.g. Latin or Greek which directly translates as barter. There are actually very few words which map onto modern economic terms. (Neither Latin nor ancient/medieval Greek has a word that covers the same ground as 'the economy', for example.) However, it seems very clear to me from ancient and medieval stories of how people do trade (here drawing heavily on Nick Evans' work to collect these stories) that there are a distinctive set of tropes concerning a type of exchange that would now be called barter/Tauschhandel (i.e. stuff for stuff, without establishing emotional or obligatory ties), that sets it up as something strange, 'backwards' and that other people do. It is described as happening on the geographical edges of known or familiar space, with people whose lives are described as being simple or mysterious and with whom the reporter does not imagine any other social dealings. The idea that they do not understand money or even the notion of value is frequently invoked. This kind of exchange is not something that is ever, as far as I know, described as happening within the society describing it, e.g. between two Roman provinces or cities, even though exchange off stuff for stuff almost certainly was happening. Again, I think this points to an unconscious separation between how 'we' exchange things and how 'they' exchange things, even if this is not done using specific terminology.
I will take this as due encouragement to talk more about linguistics in future and, once again, thank you so much for calling this out!
>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’.
In german, we would call both of these "tauschen". So unless we arent "europeans", that wording propably isnt strong evidence of anything.
Thanks so much for this comment! You are absolutely right in raising the issue of language, both modern and historic. I'm still very much learning the shift from academic writing to writing in a slightly different, often shorter and freer, way and this is an occasion when I have skated over too much.
By 'Europeans' here I was very clumsily expressing that tricky sense of a 'west' (also a clumsy term), which is defined to a very great extent by having a peculiar relationship to the idea of the Roman Empire (and by extension, what is termed Ancient Greece).There still isn't a good agreed terminology for this, in academic literature or outside it.
Here I definitely would include Germany: even though all European nations have their own distinctive cultures and histories, a sense of the ancient Romans and Greeks as a cultural fountainhead is a shared reference point in architecture, political culture, literature etc., which has been cultivated for centuries.
Linked to this, in German writing about different kinds of trade, there is also a common sense that 'barter/Tauschhandel' is something different and, for the most part, something that other people do, and, until recently, something inferior. I think this is coming out of that long tradition that can be traced back to Greek and Latin depictions of trade. Some of the early and most important theoretical works presenting the invention of money as a response to the problems of barter come out of the German-language tradition of the 18th and 19th centuries, and directly refer to Antiquity (meaning Greek and Roman antiquity) as part of the origin of modern European monetary practice.
You are absolutely right though, that when I come to the modern switch of barter for swapping, I am only talking about an English-language context. I would love to study how this works in other European languages, or for somebody else to and to read the results, but I haven't and should have been clear about that.
The shift in English has been very noticeable and I think is doing cultural work, but only within that linguistic sphere. Within that sphere, I completely agree with you: the unconscious level of choice-making is what makes it powerful. We don't think 'instead of calling this barter, I'll say I swapped it'. I think we use words like 'swap' because it would never occur to us to describe what we do as barter, because that is what other people do (often in worse circumstances). That is, I think, why we sometimes see the surprised tone in news media, etc., when somebody says, 'Hey, look, [big well-known company] is doing barter!' They expect this to be attention-grabbing because it catches those unconscious currents of language use.
In terms of ancient terminology, there is no equivalent word in e.g. Latin or Greek which directly translates as barter. There are actually very few words which map onto modern economic terms. (Neither Latin nor ancient/medieval Greek has a word that covers the same ground as 'the economy', for example.) However, it seems very clear to me from ancient and medieval stories of how people do trade (here drawing heavily on Nick Evans' work to collect these stories) that there are a distinctive set of tropes concerning a type of exchange that would now be called barter/Tauschhandel (i.e. stuff for stuff, without establishing emotional or obligatory ties), that sets it up as something strange, 'backwards' and that other people do. It is described as happening on the geographical edges of known or familiar space, with people whose lives are described as being simple or mysterious and with whom the reporter does not imagine any other social dealings. The idea that they do not understand money or even the notion of value is frequently invoked. This kind of exchange is not something that is ever, as far as I know, described as happening within the society describing it, e.g. between two Roman provinces or cities, even though exchange off stuff for stuff almost certainly was happening. Again, I think this points to an unconscious separation between how 'we' exchange things and how 'they' exchange things, even if this is not done using specific terminology.
I will take this as due encouragement to talk more about linguistics in future and, once again, thank you so much for calling this out!