The task

The following essay is a fast jog through an extremely complex and diverse set of subject matters. I identify a commercial/monetary problem, and allow the search for an explanation to unfold an unexpected route from merchant books into language dictionaries and ‘creationist’ philosophy, thence into peasant agronomy and the evolution of botanical descriptions and classifications, and finally into the unending problems of biology's attempts to understand its object field, before returning to the problems of interpreting contemporary perspectives on monetary and commercial order. This journey astonished me at every stage and brought forth a train of unexpected dissonances and findings, only some of which can be touched upon here. Given strict editorial guidelines, I give maximum space to the argument, omit detailed references, and refer only to examples or types of source.

The marketing continuum

The central concern is with the names, terms and categories encountered by participants in market-places right across the Old World between Ningbo and Nantes, Riga and Onitsha. What was their relationship to the physical world of traded goods and moneys that was the central concern of producers and traders?