In my setting I want the giants and humans to have a trade relationship...

In my setting I want the giants and humans to have a trade relationship. The only thing is I can't think of a commodity humans could offer a giant that a giant couldn't do themselves. What are some things smaller races could do or offer that giants couldn't do or would find hard to get?

Jewlery and fine metalwork.
Also clockwork. Can't make a clock with those big meaty paws.

Clocks.

How many clocks does a giant need?

Considering the size of normal plants, simple farm work might be somewhat harder for the giants.
So, grain?

The giants seem like they'd be great lumberjacks though so that could easily be their resource.

You could just do something really simple and have the material traded be rare in the other's region.

>How many clocks does a giant need?

Time keeping is important for navigation over large bodies of water right?

Giant Explorers.

>One small step for man, one great leap for giantkind

Giant-sized Warhammer "miniatures"

The gods are assholes.
That's why you have mountains,bogs and oceans.
It's all to slow down giants, just so happens it fucks the other races over more.

So to overcome their handicaps the non-giant races got really good with technology but giving that technology to giants is screwing with the order of things.

Slaves, livestock, furs (hunting would be a lot harder for a giant) fish, fine crafts that require dexterous hands

Sewing. Even big clumbsy stitches would be detailed as all hell for them. So scraps? Humans can make into a whole piece.

Also! Doctoring, medical care. Pulling out the proverbial spinter and sewing them back up.

Why is there trade in the real world between normal humans?
Just because everyone can make something, doesn't mean they aren't willing to pay someone else to do it for them

Says you.

What about bigger clockwork? It's not like it needs to be miniaturized if you're a giant anyway.

Food. If they're Mountain/Hill giants, they probably don't have a lot of arable land and mostly raise sheep/cattle/goats etc.
Also:Threshing grain is probably a bitch at giant sizes. Not to mention all the back breaking labor tending fields bent over, or on you hands and knees.

Bread and baked goods too maybe.
You can only scale loaves up so large, before you have problems with uncooked do in the centers and burnt edges.

I imagine the major exchanges are going to be labor related. Things big people do easier/better in exchange for things small people do eaiser/better.

Logging vs finely woven textiles for example.

This. Also art, fine clothes and the usual "this person lives in a different place they have access to different resources".

Related to the above, there's also cultural stuff to exchange - I doubt there's a lot of giant art of human gods and vice versa.

I have a question about this - do the giants and humans live in segregated communities/settlements or is there some crossover? Do humans live in giant villages? Do giants live in human villages?

Most of the best ideas are taken, slaves, surgery, fine crafts, etc. I'd imagine certain kinds of mining, in dangerous strata or that requires an eye precise for details, would be off limits to giants as well.

Information would be seriously valuable as well, since a giant spy would be a tad obvious.

Drugs

>surgery
That's one I hadn't thought off. If I have an arrow stuck in my leg, I'd definitely prefer tiny hands poking around my wounds.

I'd think once they establish long lasting trade relations, you'd see a lot of cross over, as long as neither side tried conquering the other.

At this point, we have to ask what the giants can offer the humans.

Trade doesn't require that one party can't do it themselves. It can be beneficial to both parties even if one is strictly superior to the other at everything.

Consider Tolkien-style "human plus" elves who are better at everything.
Let's say that elves farm twice as well as a human and forge magical artifacts ten times better. The goods possessed by both parties are maximized if the elves trade artifacts for farm products.

The only case where trade wouldn't occur is if elves were better at every craft by exactly the same ratio.

Labor intensive stuff, that isn't particularly skilled. Logging was mentioned.
Housing/building would be easier for giants.

I think mercenary work would be a big one too.

Maybe furs, giants might hunt deer like a human would rabbits.

They'd be good at quarrying too.

Okay yeah, then you'd have all the normal human services (pun not intended) as economic interaction. Giants employing humans and humans employing giants. Wait staff, accountants, administrators, etc etc.

Like other anons have said, the cross species trade economy would most likely be full of services that giants are simply unequipped to handle. Nuances like plumbing, farming, surgery, fine metalworking, not being pulverized underfoot in the middle of a street, etc. If they're going to live together there need to be systems in place that lessen the effects of disharmony. In a good setting you'll also see instances of those systems failing, common nomenclature that describe these failures, and perhaps some social turmoil surrounding that (Small Lives Matter, The Crusades and perhaps a point in time where peace was made).

Judging by your pic, we could sell them booze. And giants would be the bestest of bros.

>What are some things smaller races could do or offer that giants couldn't do or would find hard to get?
Fannypacking.

Spices that don't grow where the giants live. Good fallback option for any similar question.

Judging by the thread, most optimal route would be humans and giants living together, with rare human-only or giant-only places that are practically native reserves.
You need big warriors, but those big warriors need to be armed with swords that use iron the small miners mine. You also like good woven fabrics and big castles that big men can easily build. You like the bread the small men make and you like the elephant meat that the big man can heard.
Natural selection, if they cooperated, would make it that man+giant would've been the best choice and man+giant tribes would've easily overtaken only tribes of men (which are small) or tribes of giants (which aren't as well armed).

Kinda like man+dog; dogless clans don't survive, dogless hunters usually don't hunt anything.

Consider novelty. Giants might think owning human made items is fashionable or a status symbol. A Giant chieftan might commission a fine greatsword to give to his son as an ornamental knife. Largely it depends on how sophisticated the giants in your setting are.

Besides what has been mentioned so far, mercenary work. A giant with a club is a line-breacher perhaps better than an elephant.

A giant with a staff sling is a highly mobile catapult which can fire over his companions' heads and defend itself. You invent the equivalent of field artillery much earlier.

The term you're looking for is "comparative advantage"

Comparative advantage. Humans don't have to be better than giants at anything, just be relatively less inefficient. If say giants were really good at making weapons and are good at farming, while humans are ok at both, it makes sense for humans to farm while giants specialize in weapons because the humans are giving up less to spend time farming.

Have you seen a clock on the inside? It's hard to believe the things are man made and predate electricity.
Even a huge clock would have a shitload of tiny parts that a giant would have a hard time even holding.

If person can make microscopic sculptures, a giant can make clock parts.

Pendulum clocks scale perfectly with size, so it's a non-issue. Hell, I'd say it is remarkable humans can build the larger ones.

A balance wheel clock would be harder, but a giant could certainly manage the needed tolerances assuming they could make good spring steel. The hardest to make clocks are the ones where shitty springs necessitate everything being built very small indeed.

At this point why would a kingdom enlist anyone but giants?

It depends a lot on how big the giants are. Farming humans-hunting giants makes a lot of sense for, like, 5-meter giants in the classic D&D sense, while if they're much bigger it's implausible that they could have survived pre-agriculture except with very broad ranges so you could see economies based on the opposite: a 20m giant fed herds of domesticated animals in exchange for digging irrigation canals and "plowing" fields with the drag of a to-scale rake.

the same laundry list of reasons people have for why to justify giant robots you need military doctrine with only paratrooping marines in a world with fusion but no radios. It only takes one dude with a battleaxe to chop those achilles tendons.

Too expensive for regular militia and probably too few/expensive for patrols, skirmishes. Also unsuitable for scouting, baggage train, supply lines, navy crew, sapping and ambushes.

The core of your field army might be a bunch of giants, but field battles are usually few and far between.

Combined arms, motherfucker.

Logistics. A single giant eats as much as a team of knights or a squad of footmen, their weapons and armor are mostly wood and leather, and if there aren't big rocks around they lose their ranged advantage.
Also, accuracy! Giants are great for sieges, breaking walls and throwing big rocks inside cities, but they need specialized training to properly thump a human sized target, while humans find them easy targets, they just need the proper tool to fell them, like atlatls instead of bows.

Currency and credit.

There are more human nations and more humans than there are giants and giant nations. In order to have successful international relations or to travel the world, giants need access to human currencies and credit with human institutions.

It's a human world, were all just living in it.

picrelated?