the extended family as an economic unit. 34 In West Africa, all Lebanese businesses were family affairs. This “meant that outsiders (without really understanding them) could count on the continuity of the business. A son would honor the debts of his father and would expect the repayment of credits extended by his father. The coherence of the family was the social factor which was the backbone of the economic success of the Lebanese traders: the authority of a man over his wife and children meant that the business was run as resolutely [and as cheaply!] as by a single person and yet was as strong as a group.” Disaster insurance, expansion opportunities, different forms of credit, and social regulation were provided by larger kinship networks and occasionally by the whole Lebanese community. 35 Similarly, the Overseas Chinese gained access to capital, welfare, and employment by becoming members of ascriptive, endogamous, centralized, and mostly coresidential organizations based on surname (clan), home village, district, and dialect. These organizations formed rotating credit associations, trade guilds, benevolent societies, and chambers of commerce that organized economic life, collected and disseminated information, settled disputes, provided political protection, and financed schools, hospitals, and various social activities. The criminal versions of such entities (“gangster tongs”) represented smaller clans or functioned as fictitious families complete with elaborate rites of passage and welfare support. 36 (In fact, all durable “mafias” are either offshoots of service nomadic communities or their successful imitations.) Clannishness is loyalty to a limited and well-defined circle of kin (real or fictitious). Such loyalty creates the internal trust and external impregnability that allow service nomads to survive and, under certain conditions, succeed spectacularly in an alien environment. “Credit is extended and capital pooled with the expectation that commitments will be met; delegation of authority takes place without fear that agents will pursue their own interests at the expense of the principal’s.” 37 At the same time, clearly marked aliens are kept securely outside the community: “Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury.” Clannishness is loyalty as seen by a stranger. Economic success, and indeed the very nature of the Mercurians’ economic pursuits, are associated with another common and essentially accurate perception of their culture: “They think they are better than everybody, they are so clever.” And of course they do, and they are. It is better to be chosen than not chosen, whatever the price one has to pay. “Blessed art thou, O Lord, King of the Universe, who hast not made me a Gentile,” says the Jewish prayer. “It is good that I am a descendant of Jacob, and not of Esau,” wrote the great Yiddish writer,