THE PERCY HISTORIES. OR Interesting Memorials OF THE RISE, PROGRESS, & PRESENT STATE of all THE CAPITALS OF EUROPE SHOLTO AND REUBEN PERCY, Brothers of the Benedictine Monastery, B LONDON: Printed for T. BOYS, Ludgate Hill. 1823. DA 677 R5471 The Percy Histories. LONDON. Commerce brought into the public walk The busy merchant; the big warehouse built; Chose for his grand resort! Thomson. COMMERCE OF THE METROPOLIS. NOTHING has contributed so much to the rapid advancement or permanent prosperity of states as commerce, and without it no country has been able to maintain its glory or its power. From the earliest period of which there is any record, commerce appears to have been more or less cultivated, and its origin is no doubt coeval with the formation of mankind into distinct communities. Arabia is supposed to have been the cradle of commerce; and, from its peninsular situation, bounded by the Arabian, Indian, and Persian seas, no country possessed equal advantages for carrying it on to as great an extent as the imperfect knowledge of navigation, and the consequent limited intercourse between states, would VOL. III.] B 1927705 i permit. It was to the Ishmaelites of Arabia that Joseph was sold by his brethren-not to a set of marauding adventurers who had made an incursion for plunder, but to a company of merchants, who " came from Gilead with their camels, bearing spicery, and balm, and inyrrh, going to carry it down to Egypt." The very articles of their traffic prove that they must have had a commercial intercourse with India, whence they had their spices. Tyre, "whose merchants were princes," and Sidon, rose to eminence by means of commerce; and it was by his intercourse with the Phoenicians, that Solomon, as the Scriptures beautifully express it, "made silver in Jerusalem as stones, and cedar trees as sycamores that grow in the plains." It was by means of commerce that this king drew forth the riches of Ophir and Tharsis, which probably were situated in the East Indies; and so lucrative was the traffic, that a single voyage to Ophir alone produced 450 talents of gold-an immense sum certainly; but the whole traffic of the universe was at that period limited to the Phoenicians and the Egyptians. The merchants of Tyre founded Carthage, a city which, in a short time, became of such power and importance as to have Spain, Sicily, and Sardinia, with three hundred cities, under its dominion; nor was it until after three exterminating wars, during a period of forty years, and when this rich city was lain in ashes by a fire of seventeen days duration, that Carthage fell, and with it commerce, which the Romans were loth to cultivate, considering all true greatness to rest in the success of arms. Alexandria, which, under the Ptolemies, had such ex |