Commerce

Commerce relates to 'the exchange of goods and services, especially on a large scale'. It includes legal, economic, political, social, cultural and technological systems that operate in a country or in international trade. Commerce relates to 'the exchange of goods and services, especially on a large scale'. It includes legal, economic, political, social, cultural and technological systems that operate in a country or in international trade. The English-language word commerce has been derived from the Latin word commercium, from cum ('together') and merx ('merchandise'). Some commentators trace the origins of commerce to the very start of transactions 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 (the barter system was popular in ancient times where one could get goods and services by offering the other person some other good and service according to their need instead of paying with monetary systems, which developed later). Historian Peter Watson and Ramesh Manickam date the history of long-distance commerce from circa 150,000 years ago. In historic times, the introduction of currency as a standardized money facilitated the wider exchange of goods and services. Numismatists have collections of tokens, which include coins from some Ancient-World large-scale societies, although initial usage involved unmarked lumps of precious metal. The circulation of a standardized currency provides a method of overcoming the major disadvantage to commerce through use of a barter system, the 'double coincidence of wants' (which means if someone wants something from a person, that person should also be in need of a thing or a service which they can provide), necessary for barter trades to occur. For example, if a person who makes pots for a living needs a new house, he/she may wish to hire someone to build it for him/her. But he/she cannot make an equivalent number of pots to equal this service done for him/her, because even if the builder could build the house, the builder might not want many or need any pots.