Medieval Europe inherited from Aristotle and the Church Fathers a deep unease about trade for profit — Aristotle's Politics distinguished natural household provisioning from "retail trade," which he judged unnatural because its aim was endless gain rather than need, and Christian moralists like Aquinas, citing Scripture, warned that a merchant "is hardly free from sins of the lips." In the Islamic world, the opposite instinct took hold: the Prophet Muhammad himself had been a caravan trader before his call to prophecy, the Quran explicitly distinguished lawful trade from forbidden usury ("Allah has permitted trade and forbidden interest," 2:275), and a widely circulated hadith promised that "the truthful, trustworthy merchant is with the prophets, the truthful, and the martyrs." In China, Confucian and Legalist thinkers of the Warring States period ranked society into four occupations — scholar, farmer, artisan, merchant — placing merchants last not because they lacked wealth, but because unchecked profit-seeking was seen as a threat to social order, even as merchants in practice often grew richer than the officials who ranked above them. Three civilizations, one recurring question: does the person who moves goods and makes a margin deserve honor, suspicion, or merely a fixed place at the bottom of the ladder?