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Karl Polanyi's Concept of Non-Market Trade

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

Abraham Rotstein
Abraham Rotstein
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Extract

Karl Polanyi's studies in economic history were concerned with an unusually wide range of economies and societies. Aristotle's Greece, the ancient Near East and Hammurabi's Babylonia, pre-colonial West Africa, and the laissez-faire economy of the nineteenth century were among the areas which he explored. The main focus of his work might well be summed up by the title of the present conference, “The Organizational Forms of Economic Life and Their Evolution,” and equally well by the subtitle, “Non-Capitalistic Organization.” To talk of organizational forms (in the plural) and of non-capitalistic organization is to focus attention on different kinds of economic institutions and on ways of distinguishing among them. To raise this question in an evolutionary context is to suggest a departure from a notion of unilineal development that would tend to see earlier economies as miniature replicas or potential versions of our own market economy.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 30 , Issue 1 , March 1970 , pp. 117 - 126
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1970

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References

1 I am indebted to my colleague, Melville H. Watkins, for helpful comments on this paper.

2 The best general discussion of Karl Polanyi's work is the article by Humphreys, S. C., “History, Economics, and Anthropology: The Work of Karl Polanyi,” History and Theory, VIII, 2 (1969), 165–212CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Polanyi sets out his conceptual framework in the essay “The Economy As Instituted Process,” in Polanyi, K., Arensberg, C. M., and Pearson, H. W. (eds.), Trade and Market in the Early Empires (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press and The Falcon's Wing Press, 1957), pp. 243–70Google Scholar. This volume will be referred to here as Trade and Market. Domestic economic patterns or “forms of integration” were originally set out by Polanyi in The Great Transformation (New York: Rinehart, 1944; Boston: Beacon Press, paperback, 1957). See chap. 4, “Societies and Economic Systems,” pp. 43–55. See also, Dalton, George (ed.), Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economies: Essays of Karl Polanyi (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1968)Google Scholar where both of the aforementioned chapters are reprinted, pp. 3–25, and pp. 139–74.

3 The foregoing discussion may appear reminiscent of the debate about imperfect competition which has been conducted by economic theorists for several decades. This debate, however, has been confined to “imperfections” of the market institution itself, and along a single dimension only, namely the spectrum between pure competition and monopoly. The question of non-market trade has not been raised in this debate.

4 Trade and Market, pp. 257–58.

5 Ibid., pp. 262–63, for a description of the three main types of trade.

6 Ibid., Karl Polanyi, “Marketless Trading in Hammurabi's Time,” pp. 12–26. The quoted passage is on p. 22. Polanyi makes a brief reference to two other cases of non-market trade: caravan trade in the second millenium B.C. between Pharaonic Egypt and Kassite Babylonia, and, in more modern times, between the Western and Central Sudan. Karl Polanyi, “The Early Development of Trade, Money, and Market Institutions,” in Year Book of the American Philosophical Society, 1960, p. 336.

7 Trade and Market, p. 128 where the passage from Sahagun is quoted. This discussion follows Anne Chapman's paper, “Port of Trade Enclaves in Aztec and Maya Civilization,” pp. 114–53.

8 Cf. Rosemary Arnold, “A Port of Trade: Whydah on the Guinea Coast,” and “Separation of Trade and Market: Great Market of Whydah,” in Trade and Market, pp. 154–76 and 177–87 respectively. See also, Karl Polanyi in collaboration with Rotstein, Abraham, Dahomey and the Slave Trade: An Analysis of An Archaic Economy (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966).Google Scholar

9 Gourg, M., “Ancien Mémoire sur le Dahomey,” Mémorial de l'Artillerie de la Marine, 2e Serie, Tome XX (1892), p. 769.Google Scholar

10 Berbain, S., Le Comptoir Français de Juda (Ouidah) au XVIIIe Siècle, Mémoire No. 3 (Paris: Institut Francais d'Afrique Noir, 1942), p. 68.Google Scholar

11 Rich, E. E., “Trade Habits and Economic Motivation Among the Indians of North America,” The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, XXVI (Feb. 1960), pp. 49 and 42Google Scholar respectively. Further evidence on this point may be found in my unpublished dissertation, “Fur Trade and Empire: An Institutional Analysis,” University of Toronto, 1967, pp. 61–66 and pp. 89–98.

12 The statistical tables for this study have been completed, and the work will be ready for publication shortly under the title, “The Two Economies of the Hudson's Bay Company.” Temptations to revert to “kinks in the supply curve” or to similar geometrical ingenuities to explain this phenomenon should, in my opinion, be avoided. “Supply” in this analysis is chiefly linked to security conditions and related political factors rather than to price, cf. Rich's statement about the absence of the price mechanism cited above. In any case, a clear distinction should be made between the economy and economics.

13 Trade and Market, p. 257.

14 Ibid., pp. 264–66. See also, K. Polanyi, “On the Comparative Treatment of Economic Institutions in Antiquity with Illustrations from Athens, Mycenae and Alalakh,” in Kraeling, C. H. and Adams, R. M. (eds.), City Invincible: A Symposium on Urbanization and Cultural Development in the Ancient Near East (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1960), pp. 329–50Google Scholar. Reprinted in George Dalton (ed.), Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economies.

15 Trade and Market, p. 261.

16 Polanyi, K., “Ports of Trade in Early Societies,” The Journal Of Economic History, XXIII (March 1963), 30–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 Trade and Market, p. 263.