Entrepôt

An entrepôt (English: /ˈɑːntrəpoʊ/; French: [ɑ̃tʁəpo]) or transshipment port is a port, city, or trading post where merchandise may be imported, stored or traded, usually to be exported again. These commercial cities spawned due to the growth of long-distance trade.[1] Such centers played a critical role in trade during the days of wind-powered shipping. In modern times customs areas have largely made such entrepôts obsolete, but the term is still used to refer to duty-free ports with a high volume of re-export trade. This type of port should not be confused with the modern French usage of the word entrepôt, meaning warehouse.

The entrepôt dock of Amsterdam completed in 1830 as a warehouse to store goods "entrepôt", or tax-free in transit

History

Entrepôts were especially relevant in the Middle Ages and in the early modern period, when mercantile shipping flourished between Europe and its colonial empires in the Americas and Asia. For example, spice trade in Europe, coupled with the long trade routes necessary for their delivery, led to a much higher market price than the original buying price. Traders often did not want to travel the whole route, and thus used the entrepôts on the way to sell their goods. This could conceivably lead to more attractive profits for those who were suited to travel the entire route. The 17th-century Amsterdam Entrepôt provides an example of such an early-modern entrepôt.[2]

Examples

Examples of specific entrepôts at various periods include:

gollark: PETA will destroy you.
gollark: At least it has generics.
gollark: Oh, and it's not a special case as much as just annoying, but it's a compile error to not use a variable or import. Which I would find reasonable as a linter rule, but it makes quickly editing and testing bits of code more annoying.
gollark: As well as having special casing for stuff, it often is just pointlessly hostile to abstracting anything:- lol no generics- you literally cannot define a well-typed `min`/`max` function (like Lua has). Unless you do something weird like... implement an interface for that on all the builtin number types, and I don't know if it would let you do that.- no map/filter/reduce stuff- `if err != nil { return err }`- the recommended way to map over an array in parallel, if I remember right, is to run a goroutine for every element which does whatever task you want then adds the result to a shared "output" array, and use a WaitGroup thingy to wait for all the goroutines. This is a lot of boilerplate.
gollark: It also does have the whole "anything which implements the right functions implements an interface" thing, which seems very horrible to me as a random change somewhere could cause compile errors with no good explanation.

See also

References
  1. Pollard, Elizabeth (2015). Worlds TOgether Worlds Apart. W.W. Norton & Company. p. 343. ISBN 978-0-393-92207-3.
  2. Organized Markets in Pre-industrial Europe Archived 8 March 2008 at the Wayback Machine (draft chapter of The Origins of Western Economic Success: Commerce, Finance, and Government in Pre-Industrial Europe) – Kohn, Meir, Department of Economics, Dartmouth College, Hanover, 12 July 2003, p. 3
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