Daily Inspiration Quote by Dudley North

Trade, in Dudley North's dryly elegant framing, is just civilized swapping: not a heroic engine of empire, not a moral crusade, but a practical exchange of "superfluities". The word choice matters. "Superfluities" strips the transaction of desperation and romance; it implies surplus, optionality, and a world in which parties can afford to say yes or no. North is quietly arguing that trade is voluntary coordination, not extraction. Even the syntax performs the point: "I give mine, what I can spare" emphasizes agency and restraint before desire enters the scene ("somewhat of yours, which I want"). Want is acknowledged, but domesticated.

The subtext is a rebuttal to the mercantilist mood of his century, when governments treated commerce as a zero-sum contest for bullion and colonies, and when regulation aimed to force "favorable balances" and protect domestic producers. North, writing in Restoration England amid rising global commerce and monopoly charters, offers a proto-liberal counterclaim: value doesn't reside in hoarded treasure but in the mutual satisfaction of preferences. It's a simple moral geometry: each side parts with what costs them least to obtain what benefits them more.

"Commutation" is the clincher. It's legalistic, almost bureaucratic, suggesting trade is ordinary, rule-bound, repeatable - closer to contract than conquest. North isn't just defining trade; he's shrinking it to human scale to make a political argument: if exchange is merely the circulation of surplus toward desire, the state has less justification to micromanage it. The radicalism hides in the calm.