The Romance of Commerce

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PHOENICIA The world has not always been as keenly alive to the value of history as it is to-day. To us, accustomed to the lavish wealth of detail to be found in the records of the last few centuries, those of earlier ages seem woefully inadequate as we search in vain for information as to the lives and...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PHOENICIA The world has not always been as keenly alive to the value of history as it is to-day. To us, accustomed to the lavish wealth of detail to be found in the records of the last few centuries, those of earlier ages seem woefully inadequate as we search in vain for information as to the lives and acts of those people who built and maintained the empires of the Far East which flourished thousands of years before Christ. Of China, for instance, we know much, but our knowledge is far from complete. We have all looked upon China until very recently as a nation soundly asleep and hardly capable of awakening; yet China must have made much history in Commerce, and the Chinese merchant still stands at the head of the list of Oriental traders. He is scrupulously honest; his word is as good as his bond; he is bold and full of big ideas. He is often very rich, though the impossible system of taxation, or rather of semi-confiscation, which has prevailed in China, has made it necessary for him to hide his wealth lest it be taken from him. It is not difficult to look ahead and see the Chinese merchant becoming again a great power in Commerce. But of his very early commercial history we know practically nothing. We see in the British Museum an example of Chinese printing from movable types executed hundreds of years before Gutenberg and his contemporaries gave this, perhaps the greatest of all discoveries, to the world. We read that the Chinese also discovered gunpowder, the making of paper and the mariner's compass. But they seem to have failed to make the most of their discoveries, and the world was allowed to forget these and probably many other equally important things of which we have no record, until some more enterprising or tenacious people came along to rediscover them for ...