Volume 32, Number 2 · February 14, 1985
Date Palms and Elephant Tusks
By Geoffrey Barraclough
Cross-cultural Trade in World History
by Philip D. Curtin
Cambridge University Press, 304 pp., $9.95 (paper)
Some time around the middle of the twelfth century, perhaps in AD 1160, the Welsh tenant of an English (or more accurately Anglo-Norman, and probably French-speaking) landlord agreed to pay an annual rent of three ivory dice for his holding of five acres.[1] What, if you stop to think about it, an extraordinary agreement! Dice, the perennial remedy for human boredom, are commonplace enough. They turn up among the debris of frontier stations along the Roman Wall, and anywhere else, no doubt, where a dispirited soldiery is garrisoning a crumbling empire. But ivory dice are something different. Where in the backward, heavily wooded fastnesses of Gwent in AD 1160 did you find ivory dice to pay your rent? There was certainly no Harrods or Macy's near at hand. And where did the ivory come from? Not from Zaire, of which the inhabitants of Gwent were blissfully unaware, but from Lapland, and not from elephant tusks but from walrus tusks. But how did it get from the walrus hunters of Lapland to the tenant farmers of Wales, across well over a thousand miles of wintry seas? And where on the way was the ivory made up into dice? Who, in short, were the manufacturers and middlemen, and how did they operate?
Review, 2066 words
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