Commerce & Trade

Commerce is "the activity of buying & selling, especially on a large scale". Commerce includes legal, economic, political, social, cultural and technological systems that are in operation in any country or internationally. Some commentators trace the origins of commerce to the very start of transaction in prehistoric times. Apart from traditional self-sufficiency, trading became a principal facility of prehistoric people, who bartered what they had for goods and services from each other. Historian Peter Watson and Ramesh Manickam dates the history of long-distance commerce from circa 150,000 years ago