Indeed, it seems unlikely that Barth's accounts tell the whole stories of trust in these two societies. For example, because there was presumably no good legal system covering the vast regions in which they traded, the Omani must have been able to trust one another in their commercial dealings; otherwise they could not have been such successful traders. Their society might have been organized to secure trust in some areas while lacking it in many other areas. In this, their pattern was not so different from much of commercial relations in many other societies or of various other relations. We trust one another with respect to some matters but not with respect to all.

Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, loc. 464