I suppose there could be the opposite story. Maybe someone has a massive crop surplus one year and takes it to another community to trade for different resources, thereby creating the expanded trade opportunities.

Undisciplined

so he can say "trade intensified" while when what actually happened is that the presence of trade (= useful outlet for additional e.g., crops) changed incentives, and then farmers etc choose differently.

In a micro setting that change happens gradually, but from the purview of a historian a millennium later, the [add foreign trade] and [harder/better farm work] is going to look like they occurred at the same time.

Perhaps that granularity/zoom-in vs zoom-out is why presents the causality upside down?

BooksAndArticles

econ

Capitalism Book Club #2: CHAPTER 1, and the Historian Returns

denlillaapan

so he can say "trade intensified" while when what actually happened is that the presence of trade (= useful outlet for additional e.g., crops) changed incentives, and then farmers etc choose differently. 
In a micro setting that change happens gradually, but from the purview of a historian a millennium later, the [add foreign trade] and [harder/better farm work] is going to look like they occurred at the same time. 

Perhaps that granularity/zoom-in vs zoom-out is why presents the causality upside down?