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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5599002" data-attributes="member: 4937">That's how I was using the term.  I wasn't loading it up.  Anywhere you find cities, you find long distance - and often indeed global - trade.  Isolation is the exception, not the expectation.   Even in pre-Columbian North America, which we don't normally think of as civilized (possibly because small pox and horses tipped the balance between the agarian city dwellers and their nomadic competitors) we find continent spanning trade - Michigan copper and wild rice turns up in the desert southwest.  Colorado obsidian turns up in the northeast.   There is this undocumented vast, for lack of a better term, capitalist network of trading going on prior to the development of written language or the wheel.  In the rest of the world, with writing, wheels, and sailing ships it's even more so.  Lately there has been this fad for 'locally grown food'.   But even the notion that global trade in food is a recent phenomenom turns out not to be completely true.  Whereever you find cities, you find trade in food and it turns out that a not insubstantial amount of that food is coming from somewhere other than the local farmland.   Indeed, pretty much any city bigger than 'village' turns out to have had a food network extending hundreds of miles going all the way back to Roman times, and if we had records probably before that.</blockquote>