The trouble with thinking of services as an engine of global trade has long roots. Even today, even in multilateral bodies such as the World Trade Organization, the emphasis on trade still thinks first of merchandise, meaning physical goods. Writing in 1776, the Scottish economist Adam Smith, who pioneered market economics as a ruling global school of thought, considered "menial servants… unproductive of any value."

Smith wasn’t being mean. In the same paragraph from An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, he included in his dismissive evaluation the work of the sovereign (King George III in his case) and, for that matter, "all the officers of both justice and war who serve under him, the whole army and navy, are unproductive labourers."

Smith wasn’t very republican either. He wrote those thoughts simply because he couldn’t see a good way to price services in units of exchange, and therefore in trade. A service is delivered, it vanishes, and it couldn’t reliably be accounted for the way a piece of merchandise could. Services couldn’t really go overseas.

Smith couldn’t have foreseen what happened in the centuries that followed. First, postwar peace tore down barriers to immigration and international remittances. Now, menial servants – and nurses and attorneys and tech giants – could trade their services.

Then, technology transformed the global economy, and with that came the age of data. Now services not only can be priced and accounted for by data, data itself increasingly can be traded.

Data today underpins a US$4 trillion services sector that accounts for two-thirds of the global economy, half of global trade in value-added terms, and half of global employment. None of the services trade happens without data, and none of it happens without a quiet globalization that is still happening – and growing – in the world of services, in plain sight of political leaders flinging tariffs at each other.

In a deep dive that we commissioned from Vancouver-based Visual Capitalist, as part of the Hinrich-IMD Sustainable Trade Index, we lay out an essay on data’s evolution, its modern commoditization, and how AI and geopolitics are driving data to become a decisive pivot of global power.

As nations now fight over how to contain and control the best technology, data continues to pulse through some 600 submarine cables under our oceans. Data shuttles across our skies to and from satellites orbiting Earth. Data takes an increasing share of power and water from all other resources.

Gone are the days when Adam Smith wrote of how the value of servants "perishes in the very instant of its production." In the age of data, the servant could wind up becoming the master.

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