Exchange Ideologies documents the social world of Aleppo's traders before the destruction of the city, exploring changing conceptions of commerce in . 's traders have been seen as embodying a timeless culture of the bazaar, or an ahistorical Islamic culture of trade. Other accounts portray them as venal figures, motivated only by profit, and commerce as a purely instrumental pursuit. Rejecting both approaches, Paul Anderson traces the diverse social structures, and notions of language, through which Aleppo's merchants understood and construed commerce and the figure of the merchant during a period of economic liberalization in the 2000s.