Barter
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
the exchange of one kind of property for another without the use of money. The exchange of eggs for groceries is barter. Swapping jacknives or trading horses would hardly be called barter. Among primitive peoples, barter is the only form of exchange known. One who has a fish may give it to another in exchange for fruit. In his travels Dr. Livingstone speaks of a village tree on the branches of which the natives hung any article for which they had no immediate use. Each was at liberty to take away any article that he considered of equivalent value. John Smith bartered beads to the American Indians for corn. At the present time, barter is the only way of dealing with the natives of many parts of Africa who have no use for money. The great fur companies of the northwest built up their business by a system of barter. Guns, ammunition, knives, ribbons, beads, looking glasses, axes, and many other articles were transported at great expense to the trading posts where they were bartered for furs. A gun had its price, not in money, but in so many beaver skins. Country stores still do a great deal of bartering. Traders among the American Indians exchange goods for various roots, fruits, furs, oil, rice, and other articles brought in by the Indians for that purpose. A recent consular report speaks as follows of barter of native products for manufactured goods in Liberia, Africa: Currency is absent from this section. The natives bring their products--coffee, palm oil, palm kernels, palm wine, kasada, starch, piassava, ivory, skins, venison, camwood, rubber, beeswax, honey, gold, precious stones, sheep, goats, cattle, ginger, kola nuts, and other things--and for these they get from the merchant cloth, salt, tobacco, pipes, gin, cutlasses, brass kettles, iron pots, trinkets, beads, handkerchiefs, powder, caps, shot, stockfish, looking glasses, combs, Florida water, and other commodities, all of which are bartered at large profit. For instance, cloth purchased in England at 3 to 5 cents a yard is sold in trade for 24 cents. See Beads ; Wampum ; Liverpool
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 assertion that "among primitive peoples, barter is the only form of exchange known" is the part that has not survived. Fieldwork through the twentieth century found no society running on the eggs-for-groceries model the entry describes; Caroline Humphrey and later David Graeber, in his 2011 book Debt, argued that credit, tribute and gift-giving came first and that pure barter is mostly what happens when an existing money system breaks down — cigarettes in prisoner-of-war camps and in occupied Germany after 1945 being the standard examples. The trading-post world Aiton wrote about has also gone: cash and mobile money now reach the Liberian coast, and the country store's swap of butter and eggs for calico is a memory. What survives is organised and taxed — commercial barter exchanges and swap networks whose transactions the U.S. tax authorities treat as reportable income.
Written for this edition, 2026.