Commerce

Commerce, city (1990 pop. 12,135), Los Angeles co., S Calif., a suburb of Los Angeles; inc. 1960. An important transportation hub for S California, Commerce is the home of several large corporations. There is food processing and diverse manufacturing. In 1927, Charles A. Lindbergh landed The Spirit of St. Louis at the old Vail Field in Commerce while on a nationwide tour following his transatlantic flight.

commerce, traffic in goods, usually thought of as trade between states or nations. Engaged in by all peoples from the earliest times, it has been carried on in some areas and by some peoples more than others, because of special geographical, technological, or economic advantages. The Egyptians, the Sumerians and later inhabitants of Mesopotamia, the Cretans, the Syrians, the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Arabs, and the Western Europeans have excelled in commerce, tapping the resources of the East, Oceania, the Americas, and Africa.

The Rise of Commerce in Europe

The Crusades did much to widen European trade horizons and prefaced the passing of trade superiority from Constantinople to Venice and other cities of N Italy. In the 15th and 16th cent. with the sudden expansion of Portugal and Spain the so-called commercial revolution reached a climax. In N and central Europe, the earlier supremacy of the Hanseatic League, the Rhenish cities, and the cities of N France and Flanders was eclipsed by the rise of national states. Antwerp began its long career of glory when the Spanish were losing hegemony, and the Dutch briefly triumphed in the race for world commerce in the 17th cent. The Dutch in turn gave way to a British-French rivalry that by 1815 left Great Britain paramount.

The rise of the chartered company under the auspices of the national state had much to do with the expansion of trade, as did the modern corporation, which later displaced the chartered company. The Industrial Revolution of the 18th and the 19th cent. also fostered the development of commerce, generating both products for trade and the means for trading them. World commerce was aided materially by the invention of the astrolabe, the mariner's compass, and the sextant; by the development of iron and steel construction; by the application of steam to both land and water transport; and by the more recent development of the telephone, telegraph, cable, radio, and the Internet, and of inventions such as refrigeration, the gasoline engine, the electric motor, the airplane, and the computer.

International Trade Today

The theory of commerce as imposed by the national state has varied from the mercantilism of the 17th and 18th cent. and the protective tariff of the 19th and 20th cent. to the free trade that Britain long upheld. After World War II the cold war limited trade between Communist and capitalist countries until the late 1980s, but the need for commercial expansion led to the creation of a number of international and regional systems designed to remove trade barriers. The International Monetary Fund was established in 1944 to help nations finance temporary trade deficits. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), signed in 1947 by 23 major industrial countries to reduce tariffs, evolved into an ongoing mechanism for reducing trade barriers, and after eight rounds of negotiations, the Uruguay Round (the last round, 1995) created the World Trade Organization.

In 1957 the European Economic Community was created, and in the 1980s and early 90s European leaders signed a series of agreements that created a unified West European economy in 1993 (see European Union). In 1992 leaders from the United States, Canada, and Mexico signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA); Mercosur was established a year earlier in South America. Nonetheless, national economic interests have been difficult to overcome, and a number of countries, including the United States, passed protectionist legislation and enacted retaliatory tariffs in the 1980s and 90s.

Commerce, United States Department of, federal executive department charged with promoting U.S. economic development and technological advancement. In Feb., 1903, the Congress established a Department of Commerce and Labor empowered to investigate and report upon the operations of corporations engaged in interstate commerce (with the exception of common carriers). The first secretary was G. B. Cortelyou. In 1913 the Department of Labor was established as a separate executive department, while the functions of the Department of Commerce were expanded; the chief officer of each department, the secretary, received cabinet rank. Among its tasks are taking of censuses, promotion of American business at home and abroad, establishing standard weights and measures, and issuing patents and registering trademarks. Agencies under control of the secretary of commerce include the Economics and Statistics Administration (comprising the Bureau of the Census and the Bureau of Economic Analysis), the Bureau of Export Administration, the Economic Development Administration, the International Trade Administration, the Minority Business Development Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the Patent and Trademark Office, and the Technology Administration (comprising the Office of Technology Policy, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the National Technical Information Service).

In the U.S., any commercial transaction or traffic that crosses state boundaries or that involves more than one state. Government regulation of interstate commerce is founded on the commerce clause of the Constitution (Article I, section 8), which authorizes Congress “To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with Indian Tribes.” The Interstate Commerce Commission, established in 1887, was originally intended to regulate the railroad industry; its jurisdiction was later expanded to include trucks, ships, freight forwarders, and other interstate carriers. The Sherman Act (1890), followed by the Clayton Act (1914), made illegal any act that tended to interfere with free competition between and among industries, businesses, and any interstate commercial venture. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was established by the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914, which gave the FTC powers—judicial, legislative, and executive—to administer the Sherman and Clayton acts. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was created to protect the right of the public to the airwaves through licensing and oversight of the practices of broadcasters in radio and television. In the 20th century, court decisions tended to interpret interstate commerce broadly, thus allowing Congress to regulate a wide variety of activities by which interstate commerce could be affected, even if they took place within the borders of a single state. One such decision was Heart of Atlanta Motel v. U.S. (1964), in which the Supreme Court upheld the prohibition of discrimination in public accommodations contained in the 1964 Civil Rights Act on the ground that the discriminatory practices of a business operating in only one state could affect interstate commerce.

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in full electronic commerce

business-to-consumer and business-to-business commerce conducted by way of the Internet or other electronic networks. E-commerce originated in a standard for the exchange of documents during the 1948–49 Berlin blockade and airlift. Various industries elaborated upon the system until the first general standard was published in 1975. The electronic data interchange (EDI) standard is unambiguous, independent of any particular machine, and flexible enough to handle most simple electronic transactions. In addition to standard forms for business-to-business transactions, e-commerce encompasses much wider activity—for example, the deployment of secure private networks (intranets) for sharing information within a company, as well as selective extensions of a company's intranet to collaborating business networks (extranets). A new form of cooperation known as a virtual company, actually a network of firms, each performing some of the processes needed to manufacture a product or deliver a service, has flourished.

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In the Constitution of the United States (Article I, section 8), the clause that authorizes Congress “To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with Indian Tribes.” It is the legal foundation of much of the U.S. government's regulatory authority. Seealso interstate commerce.

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or commercial association

Any of various voluntary organizations of business firms, public officials, professional people, and public-spirited citizens whose primary interest is in publicizing, promoting, and developing commercial and industrial opportunities in their local area, and usually also community schools, streets, housing, and public works. The International Chamber of Commerce (founded 1920) acts as the voice of the business community in the international field and runs a court of arbitration for settling commercial disputes. National chambers of commerce exist in most industrialized, free-enterprise countries. The first to use the name was founded in Paris in 1601; the first U.S. chamber of commerce was that of the state of New York, founded in 1768.

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(1887–1995) First regulatory agency established in the U.S. and a prototype for independent government regulatory bodies. An agency of the U.S. Department of Transportation, it was responsible for the economic regulation of interstate surface transportation, including railroads, trucking companies, and buslines. It certified carriers, regulated rates, oversaw mergers, and approved railroad construction. The ICC was dissolved in 1995.

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Commerce is a division of trade or production which deals with the exchange of goods and services from producer to final consumer. It comprises the trading of something of economic value such as goods, services, information or money between two or more entities. Commerce functions as the central mechanism which drives capitalism and certain other economic systems (but compare command economy, for example). Commercialization or commercialisation consists of the process of transforming something into a product, service or activity which one may then use in commerce.

Word usage

Commerce primarily expresses the fairly abstract notions of buying and selling, whereas trade may refer to the exchange of a specific class of goods ("the sugar trade", for example), or to a specific act of exchange (as in "a trade on the stock-exchange").

Business can refer to an organization set up for the purpose of engaging in manufacturing or exchange, as well as serving as a loose synonym of the abstract collective "commerce and industry". Compare with retailing.

History

Some commentators trace the origins of commerce to the very start of communication in prehistoric times. Apart from traditional self-sufficiency, trading became a principal facility of prehistoric people, who bartered what they had for goods and services from each other. Historian Peter Watson dates the history of long-distance commerce from circa 150,000 years ago.

In historic times, the introduction of currency as a standardized money facilitated a wider exchange of goods and services. Numismatists have collections of these monies, which include coins from some Ancient World large-scale societies, although initial usage involved unmarked lumps of precious metal. The circulation of a standardized currency provides the major advantage to commerce of overcoming the "double coincidence of wants" necessary for barter trades to occur. For example, if a man who makes pots for a living needs a new house, he may wish to hire someone to build it for him. But he cannot make an equivalent number of pots to equal this service done for him, because even if the builder could build the house, the builder might not want the pots. Currency solved this problem by allowing a society as a whole to assign values and thus to collect goods and services effectively and to store them for later use, or to split them among several providers.

Today commerce includes a complex system of companies that try to maximize their profits by offering products and services to the market (which consists both of individuals and other companies) at the lowest production-cost. There exists a system of　International trade, which some argue has gone too far (see main: Free trade).

See also

• Advertisement
• Agriculture
• Business
• Capitalism
• Commercial law
• Distribution (marketing)
• Wholesaler
• Eco commerce
• Finance
• Harvesting
• Retailer
• Industry
• Economy
• Electronic commerce
• Fair
• Fishery
• Laissez-faire
• Manufacturer
• Manufacturing
• Marketing
• Marketplace
• Mass production
• Merchandising

References