TYPICAL COMMERCIAL CENTERS Types of Commercial Centers.—(1) Primitive Centers.—The commercial center is mainly engaged in the exchange of products. Such centers exist in every part of the inhabited world, but differ greatly according to geographical conditions. In places like the Amazon Basin, where the damp, steady beat keeps people backward, the savages gather at recognized places at special seasons to exchange their slight surplus for knives, beads, or cloth. In many semi-arid regions such as central Anatolia and parts of Turkestan, where the population is sparse and often semi-nomadic, the commercial center takes the form of a bazar. An oriental bazar is a sort of fair held per haps once a week either out in the. fields or in an open square in a town. There the people from the surrounding region gather to buy and sell. The region from which they bring goods is called the hinter land of the bazar town. In one form or another such bazars or open air markets are very widely spread in almost all regions where the absence of rain for long seasons makes them possible and where the population is so sparse that there is not business enough to warrant , many permanent shops or stores. In the most primitive kind of bazar few who take part are professional merchants or manufacturers. Each family of peasants or nomadic herders brings food or primitive manufactured articles of its own make, and sells or perhaps barters them for something produced by other families.
In slightly more complex communities this simple method gives way to a system where certain men, usually with more than the average energy, ambition, and ability, act as merchants. They not only buy goods from the frequenters of the market, but make purchases farther afield and thereby expand the town's hinterland. Other men of similar energy, ambition, and ability, but with tastes that tend toward mechani cal work and invention, find that by devoting all their time to manu facturing they can make a better living than by agriculture or herding. In that case it pays to live at the market town, for there they are easily able to buy the food that is brought from the hinterland and can sell • their primitive manufactures without being forced to transport them.
Moreover, if their wares acquire a reputation, merchants from other centers can find them in the market town, but might not find them elsewhere. Thus a commercial center becomes also a manufacturing center even while still primitive. Hundreds of towns in China, India, and Russia, are of this type.
(2) The Simple Commercial City.—At a later stage of development the market town naturally engages in more complex business trans actions, and its hinterland is correspondingly enlarged. Occasionally
in backward regions, such a city may he almost purely commercial. Para and Callao are examples. They have practically no business other than the outward shipment of the products of the tropical forests and of the nitrate mines re spectively, and the in ward shipment of food and of such manufac tured goods as are needed by the sparse population of the in terior. Oftener the raw materials produced in the neighborhood of a commercial city give rise to simple manufac turing, such as the tin smelting and pineapple canning of Singapore. Such cities, however, still remain predomi nantly commercial, for their problems are those of shipment and trade rather than of manufacturing and labor. They are found in all parts of the world that have passed beyond the stage of barbarism, especially on the seacoasts. In fact simple commercial cities have been estab lished by people of European descent even on the coasts of the most backward regions, as at Georgetown, Paramaribo, and Cayenne in the Guianas. In more advanced regions some simple commercial cities, such as Rio de Janeiro, are of great size and importance. Hong Kong is an especially good example, for it assists in the trade of four con tinents.
3. The Complex Commercial City.—The highest type of commercial community is extremely complex because it carries on not only com merce but also complex manufacturing. This is attracted to the commercial cities by the facilities for transportation, the easy contact with people to whom goods can he sold, the dense population fro which a labor supply can be drawn, and the ease with which capit can be procured from the surplus arising from commerce as well a from other lines of business. Practically every such city is engaged 'in buying and selling articles which it. neither uses nor produces, but which are produced or used by its immediate hinterland. In addition to this many commercial cities located on seacoasts serve as entrepots, is, they bring products from many regions, chiefly across the orate and sell them not merely as imports but for re-export. London, for instance, has a great reputation for colonial and tropical products such as hemp, wool, and spices. It monopolizes the transportation routes to many regions where these products are raised, so that it is much easier for other cities to buy them from London than to get them direct., .even though the direct route may be shorter than via London. To stand their roundabout journey the goods must be non-perishable and of high value in proportion to their bulk. Antwerp and the Dutch cities also have a large entrepOt trade, the remnant of the commercial power once held by the Dutch East India Company.