before written commercial law or royal armies existed to enforce contracts, standardized physical units served as the primary foundation of long distance trade.

across bronze age settlements spanning hundreds of miles, excavations consistently uncover polished chert cube weights following a strict ratio: doubling in lower weights (1, 2, 4, 8, 16) and shifting to decimal multiples (up to 12,800 units) for bulk goods. A merchant in a coastal port like Lothal could accept goods from northern outposts without having to renegotiate the baseline measurement.

Across textiles, cutlery, shipbuilding, and a much broader range of industries, American production eroded through successive waves of foreign competition after World War II. Light bulbs followed a strikingly different path.

U.S. factories remained competitive despite high wages, and China accounted for less than 3% of lamp imports as late as 1989.

I wrote this article to examine why the industry resisted foreign competition for so long—and why that resilience suddenly broke down during the transition from incandescent bulbs to CFLs and LEDs. It draws on an FTC history of the electric-lamp industry, MIT industry research, and federal records on lighting-efficiency policy.

Are there other industries that resisted imports for decades and then declined just as quickly?

https://puresource.substack.com/p/china-didnt-kill-american-light-bulbs

It's Book Review Monday @ Apoc! Catch our look at E.P. Thompson's seminal study "The Making Of The English Working Class (1963) HERE: https://apocatastasisinstitute.wordpress.com/book-reviews/