Merchants and traders typically depended on buying cheap in one market and selling dear in another, or on arbitrage and negotiating separate markets. If they withdrew investment from production, commercial activity could still carry on in its own traditional way. At the same time, producers such as peasants, who possessed the means of subsistence and were therefore largely shielded from competitive constraints, never depended fundamentally on satisfying market imperatives and could still produce to meet their own subsistence needs.