Spencer Heath Archive

Item 536..

Dictation taken by Spencer MacCallum from conversation about the time when pirates began to trade and founded the commerce that ended the medieval period

..because there is what modern civilization is. It grew like a mustard seed from the freedom that men found in the ruins left by Rome. No world sovereignty kept them enslaved. Not even national governments existed. Men, free to own themselves, could own other things. Not until then could the generality of men serve other men by the reciprocal rule of voluntary contract.

The seas were free, except for pirates, and the pirates were free from governments, free to make their own laws and rules. Thus they became, for the most part, merchants. Because there were no governments to prevent them, they discovered that they could live better and longer lives by trading than they could by raiding. While all the agricultural communities on land were frozen for the most part to the rigid relationship of baron and serf and living on meager products of the soil, the rovers of the sea developed trade and industry.

In the coastal regions, cities and towns grew up richer than the domains of the feudal lords, whose people were dependent immediately on the soil. Commerce and manufacture made the towns vastly richer, created opportunities for serfs to become free men and highly productive. The towns were owned by great lords of commerce who fought for freedom from the feudal sovereigns of the land while enticing servile men into a freer life. Thus were the lords impoverished as the cities grew in wealth and power. They fought among themselves until only a few sur­vived. The strongest became kings, and under them national sovereignties arose and the cities became tributary to them as they are today.

But the trading relationship was too fruitful to be destroyed. It extended to the ends of the earth, still tributary to the sovereign powers, and great colonial systems arose to bring on modern rivalries for world dominion, as the great lords of the land three centuries before had struggled for the kingly power.