FITZPATRICK (2011) Indian Ocean Trade Network and Roman Imperialism

Provincializing Rome:
The Indian Ocean Trade Network

and Roman Imperialism*
matthew p. fitzpatrick
Flinders University
Whether it be the Latium-threatening Parthians that he leads

in deserved triumph, or whether it be conquered Chinese and
Indians from eastern shores, hell justly rule the earth.
Horace, In Praise of Augustus, Odes 1.12
I
In 1984, an exasperated Moses Finley was driven to write:
The mere presence of trade over long distances is of course a necessary condition for interdependence but it is not a sufficient condition.
After all, long-distance trade has existed ever since the Stone Age.
That trade of itself does not warrant such jargon as a large unified
economic space . . . A large unified economic space is no more than
a fancy way of saying that goods were exchanged within that area, and
then I see no reason for not including China, Ceylon and Malaysia in
the same economic space as Rome because the latter received its silks
and much of its spices from eastern Asia.1
* I would like to thank the editors of the Journal of World History, Peter Brennan,
Robert Fitzsimons, Ralph Schlomowitz, and the Flinders History Seminar Group for their
valuable comments on earlier drafts of this article.
1
M. I. Finley, The Ancient Economy, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1985), pp. 177178.
Journal of World History, Vol. 22, No. 1
2011 by University of Hawaii Press
27
28
journal of world history, march 2011
His aim was to point to the absurdity of the idea of Rome, India, and
China all belonging to the same economic space and to pour scorn on
the notion of an ancient world market,2 which he saw as being as
fanciful as the idea of ancient economics.3
Despite Finleys attempts to separate trade from economics and both
from Roman imperialism, it seems sensible to treat seriously not only the
commercial endeavors of antiquity as a form of economics, but also to
value their own reflections on these, in order that the economic interaction between Rome, India, Africa, Arabia, the Malay peninsula, and
China might properly be seen as a classical form of globalization that,
in the Roman case, helped shape their economic and military trajectory. That this might be done without employing anachronistic modern
schematics is a result of not only the valuable guide to Roman trade that
is the Periplus Maris Erythraei,4 but also other forms of archaeological and
textual evidence which attest to the economic and strategic importance
of the trading centers emanating from the Indian Ocean littoral. Given
that the effects of this Eastern trade on imperial economics, politics,
and warfare were well documented by ancient writers, the notion of an
expansive classical world economy is not one that should be dismissed
simply because it does not conform to historical meta-narratives that
posit epochal stages of economic development that privilege the recent
history of Europe over that of other eras and regions.5
Finleys portrait of a primitive classical economy has been a controversial one, sparking numerous studies into the nature of Roman commerce.6 It is fair to say that even scholars sympathetic to its argumenta-
Ibid., p. 34.
Ibid., pp. 2223. For a more recent understanding of the intricacies of Roman economics, see P. Temin, A Market Economy in the Early Roman Empire, Journal of Roman
Studies 91 (2001): 160181. See also E. Lo Cascio, The Role of the State in the Roman
Economy: Making Use of the New Institutional Economics, in Ancient Economies, Mod
ern Methodologies: Archaeology, Comparative History, Models and Institutions, ed. P. F. Bang,
M. Ikeguchi, and H. G. Ziche (Bari: Edipuglia, 2006), pp. 215234.
4
L. Casson, ed., The Periplus Maris Erythraei. Text with Introduction, Translation and
Commentary (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989). Following Roberta
Tomber, Roman trade here refers to private sector trade emanating from the zone where
political and military power stemmed from the apparatus of the Roman Empire, rather than
trade undertaken exclusively by people from the city of Rome. R. Tomber, Indo-Roman
Trade: From Pots to Pepper (London: Duckworth, 2008), p. 152.
5
Early attempts at refuting Finley-esque or Wallersteinian chronologies of economic
development include A. G. Frank and B. K. Gills, The World System: Five Hundred Years or
Five Thousand? (London: Routledge, 1993); J. L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony:
The World System AD 12501350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
6
It is beyond the scope of this article to enter into a detailed discussion of the mechanics of the primitivist/modernist debate about the Roman economy. For this, see the intro2
3
Fitzpatrick: Provincializing Rome
29
tive trajectory, such as Peter Fibiger Bang, have had to modify Finleys
argument substantially, coming to speak less guardedly of the role of
market mechanisms within the Roman Empire.7 However, at bottom,
such recastings of the primitivist argument continue to underplay the
extent to which we are justified in referring, as Michael Rostovtzeff
did, to the economic unity of the civilised world. Rostovtzeff correctly
presented Romes coming to the pre-existing trade-based Indian Ocean
oikumene as dating back to the Hellenistic period and charted its growth
until the period when even those parts of the ancient world which
politically and culturally stood outside itChina and India, parts of
Germany, the Iranians of the Northeasttook part in it.8 Although
Rostovtzeffs anachronistic determination to find classical capitalists operating as if they were Adam Smiths modern bourgeois homo
oeconomicus remains problematic,9 his geographically expansive and
inclusive approach and emphasis on market mechanisms have been
vindicated by successive waves of scholarship on classical trade, which
have filled in many blanks about the depth and intensity of Romes
trade with the East and the extent of its commercial networks.10 The
research is now at a point where it is difficult to contest Jean-Franois
duction to W. Scheidel, I. Morris, and I. P. Saller, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of the
Greco-Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 112.
7
P. F. Bang, The Roman Bazaar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); P. F.
Bang, Trade and EmpireIn Search of Organising Concepts for the Roman Economy,
Past and Present 195 (2007): 354.
8
M. I. Rostovtzeff, The Hellenistic World and Its Economic Development, American
Historical Review 41, no. 2 (1936): 248249. Emphasis in the original. See also M. I. Rostovtzeff, The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1963), 2:576577.
9
Rostovtzeff, Hellenistic World, p. 250.
10
See in particular M. G. Raschke, New Studies in Roman Commerce with the East,
Aufstieg und Niedergang der Rmischen Welt II, 9.2, 1978; S. E. Sidebotham, Roman Eco
nomic Policy in the Erythra Thalassa, 30 b.c.a.d. 217 (Leiden: Brill, 1986); J. Thorley, The
Roman Empire and the Kushans, Greece and Rome 26, no. 2 (1979); J. Thorley, The Silk
Trade between China and the Roman Empire at Its Height, circa A.D. 90130, Greece and
Rome 18, no. 1 (1987); J. I. Miller, The Spice Trade of the Roman Empire, 29 B.C.A.D. 641
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969); F. de Romanis and A. Tchernia, Crossings: Early Mediter
ranean Contacts with India (New Delhi: Manohar, 1997); W. Scheidel, ed., Rome and China:
Comparative Perspectives on Ancient World Empires (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009);
G. K. Young, Romes Eastern Trade: International Commerce and Imperial Policy, 31 BCAD
305 (London: Routledge, 2001); V. Begley and R. D. De Puma, Rome and India: The Ancient
Sea Trade (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991); Tomber, Indo-Roman Trade; G.
Woolf, World-Systems Analysis and the Roman Empire, Journal of Roman Archaeology 3
(1990): 53. On Roman literary approaches to the geography of this zone, see G. W. Bowersock, The East-West Orientation of Mediterranean Studies and the Meaning of North
and South in Antiquity, in Rethinking the Mediterranean, ed. W. V. Harris (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005), pp. 167178.
30
Salless assertion that the Rome-India trade of the Periplus period is

a unique window on a long-established (from the fourth millennium
for Oman), extremely dynamic and complex system of circulation and
exchanges in the Indian Ocean from East Africa to Sri Lanka through
Arabia, southern Iran, and India.11 In the light of this research, it is
time to recast the picture of Roman economics in terms of both market
exchange and a form of archaic globalization that did not center on
Rome.
How Rome conducted itself as a part of this Indian Ocean oikumene
is another field of contention between the various accounts of Romes
Eastern trade, as historians have sought to discern the extent to which
the dynamics of Roman imperialism were responsive to eastern economic and trade imperatives. For example, Gary Youngs Romes East
ern Trade, which neatly foregrounds the role of markets in creating and
sustaining transcontinental linkages between Rome, Africa, and Asia,
has argued that there is not one major policy initiative of the Roman
government in the period under consideration that can be attributed
to the needs of this commerce.12 Although Youngs sense of the importance of eastern commerce to the Roman world accords with Jeremy
Patersons stress upon the role of commerce and traders in the Roman
Empire,13 it is poles apart from Patersons other central claim that
commerce deserves to be reinstated among the major factors involved
in imperialism.14
Given the enormous discrepancies between accounts of the interrelationship between Roman imperialism and the post-Actium forms
of Roman commercial expansion, the following attempts two things:
first, to demonstrate that during the late Republican and early Empire
periods material considerations pertaining to Eastern trade influenced
political decisions regarding military expeditions, infrastructure projects, and the trajectory of imperial expansion in a way that belied professed concerns about eastern luxuria; second, to position the Roman
Mediterranean within an Indian Ocean trading network, thereby
11
J. F. Salles, paraphrasing David Whitehouse, Review: Rome and India, Journal of
Interdisciplinary History 25, no. 1 (1994): 106.
12
Young, Romes Eastern Trade, p. 219. Young here echoes Raschkes judgement that
commercial motives were alien to the spirit of Roman government. Raschke, New
Studies in Roman Commerce with the East, pp. 646650.
13
J. Paterson, Trade and Traders in the Roman World: Scale, Structure, and Organisation, in Trade, Traders and the Ancient City, ed. H. Parkins and C. H. Smith (London:
Routledge, 1998), pp. 157158.
14
Ibid., p. 150.
31
integrating the familiar picture of Romes economic dominance over

the Mediterranean world into a less familiar picture of Rome as one of
several critical nodes in the first-century global economy. The result
will be a sense of how Rome fitted into its broader economic context
and to assess the extent to which Eastern trade affected the trajectory
of Romes imperial history.
II
With Rome having wrested control of the centuries-old eastern maritime trade routes from Cleopatra, the last of Egypts Ptolemaic rulers,
Roman trade with the East via the Red Sea accelerated markedly.15 It
does not necessarily follow, however, that Roman elites always professed approval of this commercial boom, with the trade in Eastern
commodities most often narrated in terms of fiscal ruin and moral
danger. According to Pliny, trade with India was conducted on terms
extremely deleterious to the Roman economy during the first century
c.e. At the risk of using Plinys indicative figures too literally, Rome
was said to have been running a trade deficit to the East of 100 million
sesterces per year, half of which went to India.16 This should be seen
against the backdrop of a recent estimate of Roman GDP of 10 billion
sesterces in the first century c.e.17 Many have assumed that Pliny must
be mistaken in his figures;18 however, it is worth pointing out that this
leakage from Romes Mediterranean economy is only in the region of
one percent of GDP and as such was a sustainable trade deficit. Yet the
15
Casson, Periplus Maris Erythraei, p. 11. This chronology antedates by some five hundred years John Hobsons argument that the West and East have been . . . interlinked
through globalisation ever since 500 ce. J. M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civili
sation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
16
Pliny the Elder, Natural Histories, XII:84. Raschke has characterized Plinys figures
as the snare of the gullible and innocent; however, his scepticism is not what it seems.
Raschke continues it is not my intention to deny that Rome had an adverse balance of
trade with India. See Raschke, New Studies in Roman Commerce with the East, pp.
634637. Richard Duncan-Jones argues that Romes trade deficit was serviced with gold and
other precious metals mined in Romes provinces. See R. Duncan-Jones, Money and Govern
ment in the Roman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 103105.
17
P. Temin, Estimating GDP in the Early Roman Republic, in Innovazione technica e
progresso economico nel mondo Romano, ed. E. Lo Cascio (Rome: Edipuglia, 2007), pp. 3154.
18
See, for example, N. K. Rauh, Merchants, Sailors and Pirates in the Roman World
(Stroud: Tempus, 2003), p. 101. Young, Romes Eastern Trade, p. 25; P. Veyne, Rome
devant la prtendue fuite de lor: mercantilisme ou politique disciplinaire? Annales 34, no.
2 (1979): 211244.
32
perception of the effect of Eastern trade was much more pronounced

than this modest figure suggests, particularly given that the consumption (and therefore cost) of these commodities, as well as the lending
associated with their procurement, was clumped within the imperial
(particularly senatorial) aristocracy rather than spread evenly across
the empire. When it is also considered that Pliny suggests that the
domestic markup from wholesale to retail was drastic (one hundred
times the wholesale price), then Romes marginal propensity to import
was not the serious economic problem it appeared to be, particularly for
the importers of Eastern commodities and those elite Roman financiers
that loaned the requisite capital to Romes merchant fleet and then
reaped a sizeable return on their investment.
Even if the markup on Eastern commodities was nowhere near as
drastic as Pliny suggests, the sense of alarm pertaining to Eastern trade
does not necessarily suggest that the imperial aristocracy misconstrued
these outflows from the empire as being dangerous for economic reasons. More plausibly, the periodic expressions of alarm reflect the ethical connotations of particular Eastern commodities for adherents to
the luxury (but not wealth) adverse philosophy of Stoicism among the
gilded aristocracy of Rome.19 The problem was not necessarily the volume of Eastern trade but the type of commodities that it garnered for
wealthy Romans. As the immensely wealthy Roman philosopher Seneca made clear in De Vita Beata, wealth and luxury were not the same
thing for a Stoic Roman, and immense wealth (even if gained from
Eastern trade) was perfectly acceptable for a Roman who was neither
controlled by this wealth nor used it to live in a debased fashion.20 For
Stoic Romans, ostentatious commodities such as silk and precious gemstones, for example, were far more problematic than pepper, emblematic as they were of precisely the decadence that Stoicism sought to
deflect.
Reflecting Stoic cultural attitudes rather than expounding an economic theory, Pliny presented his suspicion of decadent Eastern commodities in overtly gendered terms. Romes fiscal weakness, manifest
in the millions of sesterces he argued were had flowing eastward, was
19
For the classic statement of Stoicisms aversion to luxury, see Seneca, Epistles, 87. For
Plinys Stoicism, see Mary Beagons introduction to The Elder Pliny on the Human Animal:
Natural History Book 7 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 15. On Strabos links to
Stoicism, see D. Dueck, Strabo of Amasia: A Greek Man of Letters in Augustan Rome (New
York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 62ff.
20
Seneca, De Vita Beata, 20, 22. For a pithy discussion of this, see A. L. Motto, Seneca
on Trial: The Case of the Opulent Stoic, Classical Journal 61, no. 6 (1966): 254258.
33
linked for Pliny to the ostentatious consumption patterns of women.21

Tacitus too, in his Annals, offered a gendered sense of the extent of
the demand for Indian goods in the imperial capital. In 16 c.e., he
related, a decree was promulgated that men should not wear the disgraceful silken clothes from the East that were currently in vogue.
Unsurprisingly, this gendering of silk had little effect on Romes actual
Eastern trade, even if it might have bolstered the seemingly fragile
moral sensibilities revealed by the senators Quintus Haterius and Octavius Fronto in the face of Eastern luxuria.22 It simply moved the moral
opprobrium from men to women. Silk and precious gems from the East
remained eagerly sought after commodities among Romes elites, bringing Tiberius to complain just six years later of that womanish peculiaritythe export of our currency to foreign or enemy countries for
precious stones.23 Perhaps not surprisingly, the emperor Caligula wore
silk as a part of his repertoire of transgressionflaunting both legally
imposed gender conventions and the more usual ostentatious Stoic
modesty that characterized the behavior of earlier emperors.24
Although this anti-Eastern sentiment was indeed linked to the
much proclaimed but seldom practiced aristocratic aversion to luxu
ria,25 it is questionable whether any significant economic decisions
were made that were aimed at actually cutting off either the supply of
or demand for Eastern goods. On the contrary, the trajectory of Roman
foreign policy and trade policy in the East suggests a desire to facilitate
and control the terms of this Eastern trade, despite its putative effects
on Romes moral fiber. At any rate, the types of commodities that troubled Stoic Romans were only a subset of Eastern imports. The bulk of
Romes trade with the East did not consist of silk and gemstones, but
of more mundane if nonetheless quite expensive commodities, such
as pepper, spices, incense, and aromatics, items that, while expensive, hardly fit the rubric of luxury commodities in the way that silk,
Pliny the Elder, Natural Histories, VI:26, XII:41.

Tacitus, Annals, II:31. It is clear here that the debate between Octavius Fronto and
G. Asinius Gallus was one on the morality, not the cost of luxuries obtained through the
expansion of the empire.
23
Tacitus, Annals, III:53.
24
Suetonius, Life of Caligula, 52. The link between silk and luxuria was an enduring
one, with the third-century emperor Aurelian also apparently rebuking his wife for her
yearnings for a garment that cost its weight in gold. See Vopiscus, Life of Aurelian, 45.
25
G. Parker, Ex Oriente Luxuria: Indian Commodities and Roman Experience, Jour
nal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 45, no. 1 (2002): 4095. Young, Romes
Eastern Trade, p. 205.
21
22
34
pearls, and diamonds obviously did.26 That Eastern trade appears in the
sources as a luxury trade in a few elite, feminine commodities has to do
with the preoccupations of sources situated within a Stoic philosophical tradition rather than the actual nature of foreign trade and its role
in Roman politics and economics.
The Roman economy was uniquely well equipped to deal with some
externalizing of its revenues through trade, given that it continually
appropriated the wealth of the Mediterranean basin in its own treasury and citizenry through the mechanism of empire.27 Conquests were
obviously profitable, with the massive influx of gold and silver after the
Punic Wars; the conquests of Spain and Greece; and the conquests of
Egypt, Jerusalem, Parthia, and Dacia producing astronomical inflows
of gold and silver that profoundly affected the Roman economy.28 It
has been estimated that the treasure that Augustus brought back from
Egypt saw interest rates drop 60 percent, and Caesars plunder from
Gaul resulted in a sharp slump in the price of gold.29 Key assets such
as gold and silver mines throughout the empire were also crucial here,
directly contributing to the income of the Roman state.30 This was the
income that not only enabled Roman military and infrastructure expenditure within the empire,31 but also allowed Rome to service its external trade deficit in perpetuity. Well-bred Romans may have averted
their eyes from the vulgar topic of financial gain through empire, but
it was impossible for the imperial aristocracy of Rome to have ignored
the extent to which major wars and previous imperial conquest had
resulted in major inward flows of precious metals and commodities into
the Roman economy, as well as a stable source of taxation and trade
26
M. G. Raschke, Papyrological Evidence for Ptolemaic and Roman Trade with
India, Proceedings of the XIV International Congress of Papyrologists (Oxford: British Academy, 1974), p. 245.
27
As Keith Hopkins and Peter Temin have shown, this wealth did not simply lay idle,
but became part of a complex financial web between Rome and the provinces. K. Hopkins,
Taxes and Trade in the Roman Empire (200 BCAD 400), Journal of Roman Studies 70
(1980): 101125; P. Temin, Financial Intermediaries in the Early Roman Empire, Journal
of Economic History 64 (2004): 726727.
28
C. Howgego, The Supply and Use of Money in the Roman World, 200 BCAD
300, Journal of Roman Studies 82 (1992): 45.
29
Duncan-Jones, Money and Government in the Roman Empire, p. 21. Walter Scheidel
offers the best figures on the relative purity of Roman coinage during different periods. W.
Scheidel, The Monetary Systems of the Han and Roman Empires, in Scheidel, Rome and
China, pp. 170ff.
30
Duncan-Jones, Money and Government in the Roman Empire, pp. 103105; Scheidel,
Monetary Systems of the Han and Roman Empires, p. 179.
31
Hopkins, Taxes and Trade in the Roman Empire.
35
income. The time-honored nexus between wealth, politics, trade, and

empire was certainly well understood by the Augustan period, although
not often articulated in giddy speeches and poems on glory and duty.
Senators were of course only eligible to be senators because of their
immense wealth,32 a situation exacerbated by Augustuss formalizing of
the division between the senatorial and equestrian classes. Although
much aristocratic Roman wealth might have had its origins in property
rather than trade, it was through trade that this wealth was sustained
and increased.33
The notion that the Roman senatorial elite were above mercantile and economic considerations in their deliberations on politics
and empire also appears to be ascribing to them loftier motivations
than those hazarded by their own historians. Commerce and trade had
never been absent from senatorial politics and decision making even
during the Republican era, with the Lex Claudia of 218 b.c.e. aimed
at curbing the proverbial avaritia of senators by restricting senatorial
maritime trade, a measure greeted with much outrage by the senatorial class.34 Even Cato the Elder, that paragon of Roman virtue and
austerity, the Roman least likely to be considered in thrall to luxuria,
had relied upon a portfolio of shares in maritime loans as his source of
personal wealth.35 Prior to Augustus, as all senators were well aware,
private debts incurred during expensive election campaigns were regularly financed through the mechanism of exploiting sources of wealth
from the imperial periphery.36
With regard to foreign policy, a clear example of the interconnectedness of imperial and economic interests just prior to the Augustan
era is to be found in Ciceros Pro Lege Manilia, which warned that the
economic effects of Mithridatess campaign in Asia in 66 b.c.e. would
be devastating if Pompey was not placed in charge of the campaign.
32
Ryan Geraghty argues that even in the period immediately prior to Augustus, senators generated 200 times more income than a peasants subsistence wages, which he
explicitly links to economic opportunities presented by imperial expansion. See R. M. Geraghty, The Impact of Globalization in the Roman Empire, 200 BCAD 100, Journal of
Economic History 67, no. 4 (2007): 10511052.
33
Raschke, New Studies in Roman Commerce with the East, pp. 646647.
34
Livy, Histories, XXI.63.
35
Plutarch, Cato the Elder, XXI:5-6, W. V. Harris, On War and Greed in the Second
Century BC, American Historical Review 76, no. 5 (1971): 1379.
36
M. W. Frederiksen, Caesar, Cicero and the Problem of Debt, Journal of Roman Stud
ies 56 (1966): 128131. Frederiksen coyly suggested that financial indebtedness and the
whole complex of credit and loan which accompanied many a senatorial career, must have
sometimes compromised a political position and tempered ideal convictions.
36
In attempting to urge special powers for Pompey, Cicero, the great

defender of abstract imperial justice and universal law in De Re Publica,
openly argued how crucial the business interests of Romans in Asia
were to the empire. Beyond the more usual appeals to glory and treaty
obligations, Cicero warned of the effects that a defeat for Rome in Asia
would have on the credit market.37 The empires military policy, Cicero
argued, needed to be formulated in accordance with the economic
realities of an empire in which the financial markets of Rome and Asia
were inextricably linked. A loss in Asia meant ruin in Rome. Here
the subterranean mercantile currents among Roman senators that John
DArms stressed appear openly as a very public discussion of the commercial concerns that underwrote imperial military action.38
This however, is all prior to Augustus. What about thereafter?
Augustuss battle for control of Egypt was partially framed by the
sources in terms of control over the wealth of foreigners. Virgils depiction of the Battle of Actium on the shield of Aeneas is revealing in
this respect, depicting Antony as being allied against Rome with
the wealth of the barbarian world, further specified as being from
the Red Sea, and the people of the dawn (the East).39 Virgil also
invoked a time when Augustus would extend the Roman empire to
beyond India, as did the Augustan writers Propertius and Tibullus,
with Horace even hazarding that Rome would one day be victorious
over China.40 Similarly, Cassius Dio and Plutarch both reported that
the dispute between Antony and Octavian stemmed not merely from
personal insult and Antonys embrace of Eastern luxuria, but Antonys
holding and parceling out of the spoils of the eastern provinces.41 They
similarly reported the enormous wealth and resources that Antony
and Cleopatra commanded prior to Actium, describing ships so richly
decorated as to be worthy of a triumphal procession.42 For his part, Flo-
37
Cicero, Pro Lege Manilia, VII:19. See also S. E. Smethurst, Cicero and Roman Imperial Policy, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 84 (1953):
216226.
38
J. DArms, Commerce and Social Standing in Ancient Rome (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981).
39
Virgil, Aeneid, VIII:685ff. James Zetzel (in Saidian terms) describes this part of the
shield as depicting the victory of the West over the East, of order over disorder, of civilization over barbarism; however, a far more straightforward material reading of this scene is
equally plausible. See J. E. G. Zetzel, Natural Law and Poetic Justice: A Carneadean Debate
in Cicero and Virgil, Classical Philology 91, no. 4 (1996): 309.
40
Virgil, Aeneid, VI:792. On the other Augustan writers and a desire for Eastern expansion, see Sidebotham, Roman Economic Policy, pp. 139ff.
41
Cassius Dio, Histories, L:1; Plutarch, Antony, 5455
42
Cassius Dio, Histories, L:16; Plutarch, Antony, 61.
37
rus specifically linked this naval wealth to the Sabaeans and Arabia.43
Prior to Actium and his Parthian expedition, Antony was also said to
have used the flimsiest of pretexts to plunder Palmyra on account of the
citys enormous wealth garnered from Indian and Arabian trade.44 After
Actium, the arterial trade routes and centers of Arabia and Africa were
the target of renewed Roman attention, as the campaign for Axumite
Africa by Cornelius Gallus, Sabaean Yemen by Aelius Gallus, and the
movement into the Gulf of Aqaba by Gaius Caesar all demonstrate.45 It
is worth pondering whether there might be a connection between the
plans and attempts to subdue Parthia, Egypt, Africa, and Arabia, the
major gateways to Eastern trade, within a short period, or whether they
were simply victims of a Schumpeterian war machine that ostensibly
had no guiding principle beyond objectless expansionism.46
A major factor in this Eastern intervention was the interrelationship, not to say enormous overlap, between Romes political and economic elites.47 By the time of Tiberius, Tacitus records, not only was
every senator a usurious moneylender, but the pecuniary interests of
senators were more important to them than the public good. When
the practice of senatorial moneylending was halted briefly by Tiberius,
the Roman economy suffered a massive liquidity crisis and almost collapsedeven after the emperor had given the Senate an eighteenmonth amnesty to get their financial affairs in order.48 The liquidity
43
Florus, Abridgement of all the Wars over 1200 Years, II:21:7, in Cleopatra: A Sourcebook,
P. J. Jones (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006), pp. 163164.
44
Appian, Civil Wars, V:9.
45
Pliny, Natural Histories, VI:141, VI:160. For Cornelius Gallus, see F. Hoffman, M.
Minas-Nerpal, and S. Pfeiffer, Die dreisprachige Stela des C. Cornelius Gallus (Berlin: Walter
de Gruyter, 2009), pp. 5ff. On Aelius Gallus in Arabia, see G. W. Bowersocks judgment
that it is quite clear that Augustus had some kind of expansionist interest at that stage in
controlling the rich trade in spices and perfumes. G. W. Bowersock, A Report on Arabia
Provincia, Journal of Roman Studies 61 (1971): 227.
46
J. Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social Classes, trans. H. Norden (New York: August
M. Kelley, 1951), pp. 83ff. On the application of Schumpeter to Roman imperialism, see W.
V. Harris, War and Imperialism in Republican Rome, 32770 BC (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1979).
47
Raschke, New Studies in Roman Commerce with the East, pp. 646650. Raschke
contended that although Roman aristocratic elites were heavily involved in trade, this did
not affect their political or military decision making. See esp. p. 648 n. 927.
48
Tacitus, Annals, VI:1617. Maria Jaczynowska has attempted to quarantine this usury
to a subsection of the senatorial class (the piscinarii) that she says founded their riches on
the profits from the provinces and different sources of income like money-speculation. At
least for the imperial period, Tacitus is unequivocal that the practice is far more widespread.
M. Jacznowska, The Economic Differentiation of the Roman Nobility at the End of the
Republic, Historia: Zeitschrift fr Alte Geschichte 11 (1962): 494.
38
crisis in the Roman economy lasted until Emperor Tiberius engineered

a stimulus package whereby he pumped 100 million sesterces into the
public banks of Rome and eased the restrictions on senatorial lending. Despite his hardline on senatorial avarice, Tacitus suggests that
Tiberius was not above the economic motive in his own actions in the
Roman periphery, when he had the richest man in Spain executed on
a trumped up charge of incest and then confiscated his Spanish gold
and copper mines.49
Other emperors too did not neglect the trade of the Indian Ocean
littoral and its hinterland. Consolidating earlier commercial ties,
Claudius received high-ranking envoys from Taprobane (Sri Lanka),
who informed him that Taprobane was far richer than Rome.50 For
his part, Nero considered possible avenues for expanding Roman control over the important trading and strategic centers in Armenia and
between the Upper Nile and the Red Sea, sending a reconnaissance
expedition to Axumite Africa south of the old commercial capital
of Meroe, a region that had sought to challenge Roman control over
southern Egypt at the time of Aelius Galluss Arabian campaign, possibly in response to Cornelius Galluss 29 b.c.e. Nubian incursion. Nero
decided against a campaign in the region when his military intelligence
made it clear that the shift from trade along the Nile to trade along the
Red Sea coast had left Meroe a backwater.51
Vespasians eastern expansion of the empire, Tacitus reports, incorporated the whole of Syria, including the territory of the client kings
Sohaemus and Antiochus, whose primary attribute was that they were
enormously wealthy, with Antiochus singled out as the richest of
all the client kings.52 In his account, Josephus further hints that the
ostensible reason for the overthrow of Antiochus, namely collusion
with Parthia, was a mere pretext used by the Roman governor of Syria
Tacitus, Annals, VI:19.

Pliny, Natural Histories, VI:8491. For archaeological confirmation that the embassy
to Claudius and the trip of Annius Plocamuss freedman to Taprobane were separated by
some years, see D. Meredith, Annius Plocamus: Two Inscriptions from the Berenice Road,
Journal of Roman Studies 43 (1953): 3840; Sidebotham, Roman Economic Policy, pp. 3233.
The comments on the wealth of Taprobane come in the context of Pliny railing once again
against luxuria, but also in the context of a discussion of the trade that the island carried out
with both the Roman world and China. See Pliny, Natural Histories, VI:8889.
51
Pliny, Natural Histories, VI:181. W. Schur, Die Orientpolitik des Kaisers Nero, Klio
(Beiheft) 15 (1923). For the movement of the trade network to the coast and its effects,
see D. A. Welsby, The Kingdom of Kush: The Napatan and Meroitic Empires (Princeton, N.J.:
Markus Wiener, 1998), p. 70; L. P. Kirwan, Rome beyond the Southern Egyptian Frontier,
Geographical Journal 123, no. 1 (1957): 1319.
52
Tacitus, Histories, II:81.
49
50
39
to conquer this rich kingdom that straddled the Euphrates trade route
and bordered Romes military and commercial rival, Parthia.53 That
Antiochus was not paraded through Rome in chains by Vespasian but
rather was allowed a quiet retirement in Sparta with his family heightens the sense that the rumors of Antiochuss treachery covered motives
more aligned with Tacituss material explanation of Vespasians consolidation of the region. With regard to infrastructure projects, Fergus
Millars argument that it was Vespasian who authorized the canalization of the Orontes so that it was accessible from Antioch and Seleucia
also suggests the type of infrastructure work necessary not merely for
military control, but for the invigoration of trade.54
With Trajan, efforts to control the major trade networks of the East
reached something of a peak. With more of a whimper than a bang, the
Nabataean trading kingdom was acquired (rather than conquered) by
Trajan after the death of the Nabataean client king Rabbel II in 106
c.e. This saw not only the historical mercantile center of Petra fall
under complete Roman control, but, more importantly now that Eastern trade routes were beginning to run farther north, the increasingly
important commercial center of Bostra was also capturedat a time
when it was threatening to reinvigorate the Nabataean economy.55
This enabled Trajan to complete the important new Eastern trade
and military artery, the Via Nova Traiana, that linked Bostra and Petra
with the Gulf of Aqaba. This piece of trade and military infrastructure served as a useful precursor to Trajans Parthian campaigns, which
pushed Roman control over the Eastern markets and trade routes of the
Parthians to an extent that would not be duplicated until the time of
Emperor Septimius Severus.56 Having reached the Persian Gulf in his
conquest of Parthia and the trading networks of Mesopotamia, a wistful Trajan is said to have wished to follow merchant vessels from the
Josephus, The Jewish War, VII:7.

F. Millar, The Roman Near East, 31 BCAD 337 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 8688.
55
Cassius Dio, Roman History, LXVIII:14. G. W. Bowersock, A Report on Arabia
Provincia, pp. 228ff. W. Ball, Rome in the East: The Transformation of an Empire (New York:
Routledge, 2001), pp. 198200; L. A. Bedal, The Petra Pool-Complex: A Hellenistic Paradeisos
in the Nabataean Capital (New York: Gorgias Press, 2004), pp. 1415. All cite numismatic
evidence and the lack of the honorific Arabicus in Trajans title to argue for a lack of a
major campaign to incorporate the Nabataean territories.
56
On Trajans conquest and Eastern trade, see J. Ferguson, China and Rome, Aufstieg
und Niedergang der Rmischen Welt II 9, no. 2 (1978): 594. The period of Septimius Severuss
expansion into the east lie outside of the purview of this article. See Cassius Dio, Roman
History, LXXVI:913.
53
54
40
Persian Gulf to wealthy India. According to Xiphilinuss epitomized

version of Cassius Dio, Trajan only held back from further conquest of
economically important eastern territories south of Parthia because he
considered himself too old to do so successfully. Cassius Dio specifically
mentions that Trajan had the conquest of India in mind.57 The later
(and admittedly problematic) Eutropius too confirms this, going so far
as to announce that Trajan had actually prepared a Persian Gulf fleet
to ravage India.58
Trajans Alexander-inspired dreams of Indian plunder aside, it is
true that at no time between 31 b.c.e. and the mid second century did
any member of the Roman aristocracy personally sail to India to enrich
themselves. They of course had no need to become sailors to become
personally involved in Eastern trade, with a significant proportion of
the serious loans made available in the Roman economy stemming
from the private, interest-accumulating moneylending activities of the
imperial aristocracy.59 Voyages to India required a formidable amount
of capital.60 The Muziris papyrus, for example, deals calmly with a
single business loan for almost 7 million sesterces for overseas trade
(seven times the amount of wealth required to qualify as a senator).61
Christopher Howgego has suggested that the only banking mechanism
available for the geographical transfer of truly large sums of money
without recourse to the physical transportation of coin throughout the
empire lay with the Roman senatorial elite, who were able to mobilize
empire-wide networks of associates to cover business loans,62 perhaps
through the buying and selling of fully assignable loans that simply
specified that they be repaid to whomever was holding the loan on the
day it fell due.63 It is worth remembering Peter Temins argument, however, that loans from the households of Romes leading families and
indeed the emperor were also funneled through financial intermediar-
Cassius Dio, Roman History, LXVIII:2829.

Eutropius, Breviarum, VIII:3. In mari Rubro classem instuit, ut per eam Indiae fines
vastaret.
59
That the aristocracy were involved in financing eastern trade does not alter the
fact that this is nonstate private sector enterprise. See Casson, Periplus Maris Erythraei, pp.
3233, esp. n. 50.
60
L. Casson, Romes Trade with the East: The Sea Voyage to Africa and India, Trans
actions of the Philological Association 110 (1980): 35.
61
Temin, Financial Intermediaries in the Early Roman Empire, p. 720.
62
Howgego, Supply and Use of Money in the Roman World, pp. 2829. See also W.
V. Harris, The Nature of Roman Money, in The Monetary Systems of the Greeks and the
Romans, ed. W. V. Harris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 174207; S. Mrozec,
Zum Kreditgeld in der frher rmischer Kaiserzeit, Historia 34 (1985): 310323.
63
Temin, Financial Intermediaries in the Early Roman Empire, p. 721.
57
58
41
ies, that is banks, such as that of the Sulpicii of Puteoli who profited
through the deposits of elite wealth left with them on a fixed term by
loaning that wealth to Roman traders with interest, underwriting the
risk of the loan themselves.64 Similarly, numerous wealthy aristocratic
Roman families are known to have been involved in financing trade
and transport in Egypts eastern desert and port regions.65
Irrespective of whether elite Roman wealth was loaned through
direct business contacts, financial institutions, or even the shares in
societates publicanorum that Cato the Elder had preferred as a means
of spreading risk through diversified interests,66 the Roman senatorial
elite consistently supported policy decisions that safeguarded their personal investments in trade alongside the states taxation interestsboth
of which were sensitive to the volume and velocity of external trade.
When Nero briefly considered abolishing the lucrative trade excises
early in his reign, the 25 percent portorium was retained through the
intervention of more business-savvy senators who instead arranged for
merchant ships to be exempt from the assessment of property tax.67 In
this way, state revenues from customs were retained while the costs of
overseas trade to merchants were reducedthereby facilitating the volume and velocity of trade, and generating more customs revenue and
more personal wealth for those involved in trade and its financing. In
earlier instances too, by suppressing piracy under Pompey,68 upgrading
trading and military infrastructure in Egypt after Actium,69 sending the
right general to fight Mithridates in the East (Pompey again), or seeking
imperial control over the entry points of Eastern goods (such as Palmyra,
Petra, and Egypt), Rome consistently followed an Eastern policy that
64
Ibid., p. 723, contra Richard Duncan-Jones, who imputes an overwhelming prejudice against trade and traders under the Principate. R. Duncan-Jones, Structure and Scale in
the Roman Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 4647.
65
C. Adams, Land Transport in Roman Egypt: A Study of Economics and Administration in
a Roman Province (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 232234.
66
Temin, Financial Intermediaries in the Early Roman Empire, p. 728. Temin suggests
that their role in shipping outlasted their role in taxation in the post-Republican period.
67
Tacitus, Annals, XIII:50. See also Bang, Trade and Empire, p. 30. For the 25 percent
import duty, see Periplus, 19. I follow Raschkes argument that this section of the Periplus
refers to a Roman garrison protecting its customs monopoly rather than Cassons argument
for a Nabataean tax outpost at Lueke Kome. See Raschke, New Studies in Roman Commerce with the East, pp. 663664; Casson, Periplus Maris Erythraei, p. 145.
68
Manuel Trster makes clear the importance of the grain route in the decision to
suppress piracy, and that the corn prices tumbled simply with the naming of Pompey as the
leader of the expedition. M. Trster, Roman Hegemony and Non-State Violence: A Fresh
Look at Pompeys Campaign against the Pirates, Greece and Rome 56, no. 1 (2009): 22ff.
69
Adams, Land Transport in Roman Egypt, pp. 233234.
42
made good economic sense from both an abstract imperial perspective

and a private wealth perspective. For all of these commercially astute
decisions to have been a mere unintended consequence rather than a
central consideration in imperial decision making appears unlikely.
Romes wars in the East (and indeed elsewhere) were not exclusively due to the empires thirst for silk, pepper, incense, pearls, spices,
ivory, and tortoise shell, although the direct and indirect financing
of Roman commerce through the personal wealth of Romes imperial
aristocracy suggests that it was too important a factor to simply disregard. Similarly, the creation of an Eastern empire was not entirely
a product of a determination to open up, control, or at the very least
tax all of the regions arterial trade routes and sources of raw materials and precious commodities, with treaty obligations and the hardwiring of military expansionism into Roman political life also important.
However, what the treatment of Eastern trade centers and routes demonstrates is that the desire for control over the lucrative trade in commodities coming from the East was not disconnected from the military and political practices of Rome. The preoccupation of Pompey
and his supporters with ridding the Mediterranean of pirates and supporting Romes Eastern merchants, Antonys campaign against (then
Parthian) Palmyra; Augustus campaign against independent Egypt,
Africa, and Arabia; Nero in Axumite Africa; Vespasian in Syria; and
Trajans Eastern campaigns against the Nabataeans and the Parthians
all suggest that Roman expansion was far from objectless. Rather it
was consistent with a policy that sought to both facilitate trade and
investment in these regions for Roman subjects and to incrementally
take possession of those trading centers that were within reach. Both
the accretion of wealth through interest on loans to Roman merchants
engaged in foreign trade and the immediate liquidity provided by plunder were temptations that aristocratic Romans were unwilling to resist,
their Stoic aversion toward the decadence connoted by some Eastern
commodities notwithstanding.
III
How extensive was this trade network that had so deeply affected the
trajectory of Roman imperialism after Actium, and what was Romes
position within it? Central to the most compelling recent narrations
of intercultural trade and exchange within a pre-Columbian exchange
system is the notion of an Afro-Eurasian oikumene that was the site for
material and cultural exchanges along a system that stretched from the
43
Mediterranean world in the West through to China in the East.70 IndoRoman trade very easily fits into this picture. Some commodities were
arriving in the Roman Empire from the trans-Eurasian Silk Roads, via
Bactria and Parthia71 (a significant factor in the perpetual struggle over
Armenia with the Parthians), with Chinese sources suggesting that this
was one of the routes west for their commodities, although not the most
favored one.72 The largest amount of East-West exchange flowed not
via the difficult and often dangerous trans-Eurasian overland route, but
rather via the comparatively fast and safe oceanic trade route, as Fergus
Millars detailed work has made clear.73 Most Eastern goods arriving in
Palmyra, that is, were making their way from the northwestern Indian
coastline to Parthia and Mesopotamia, via the Persian Gulf, rather
than from Bactria toward the Caspian Sea and thence south.74
According to Chinese sources, the east-west trade route between
China and Bactria dated back to the second century b.c.e., although
this dating relies upon the dubious Shi ji tale of the Han imperial envoy
Zhang Qian coming across Chinese commodities in todays Afghanistan,75 a tale that has been credibly disputed.76 That Zhang Qian sent
initial envoys to Bactria, India, the Indo-Scythians, and Parthia with
the co-operation of the Wusun, prior to courtly contact between the
Han and these Western states in the late second century b.c.e., seems
more plausible,77 although this does not preclude the possibility of
70
See, for example, A. G. Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998); Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony; D. Christian, Silk Roads or Steppe Roads? The Silk Roads in World History, Journal of World
History 11, no. 1 (2000): 126. More recently, see Philippe Beaujard, From Three Possible
Iron-Age World-Systems to a Single Afro-Eurasian World-System, Journal of World History
21, no. 1 (2010): 143.
71
Christian, Silk Roads or Steppe Roads?
72
Yu Huan, The Peoples of the West, from the Weilue, trans. J. E. Hill, http://depts
.washington.edu/silkroad/texts/weilue/weilue.html (last viewed 20 December 2010).
73
F. Millar, Looking East from the Classical World: Colonialism, Culture, and Trade
from Alexander the Great to Shapur I, International History Review 20, no. 3 (1998): 507
531. F. Millar, Caravan Cities: The Roman Near East and Long Distance Trade by Land, in
Modus Operandi: Essays in Honour of Geoffrey Rickman, ed. M. Austin et al. (London, 1998).
See also V. Begley, Introduction, in Begley and De Puma, Rome and India, p. 3.
74
Thorley, Silk Trade between China and the Roman Empire, pp. 7180; I. A. Richmond, Palmyra under the Aegis of Rome, Journal of Roman Studies 53 (1963): 43.
75
Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian: Han Dynasty II, trans. B. Watson (Hong
Kong: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 235236. C. F. Schwitter and C. F. Cheng,
Bactrian Nickel and Chinese Bamboo, American Journal of Archaeology 66, no. 1 (1962):
8792.
76
S. Cammann, On the Attempts to Revive the Bactrian Nickel Theory, American
Journal of Archaeology 66, no. 1 (1962): 9294.
77
Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian, pp. 239240.
44
frontier trade prior to this. For the first century c.e., the sources mention two possible bridges between China and India, and consequently
Rome. The first was via the ports of Parthia (Chinese Anxivia the
Persian Gulf) and the pre- and early Kushan period port cities of the
Indus Valley (Chinese Tianzhu),78 which linked the southwestern Chinese overland trade routes with Indias rivers, thereby assisting with the
transportation of Chinese commodities to the series of Indian entrepts
that serviced Arab and Roman trading vessels. The Hou Han-shu testifies to Indian envoys and traders using this route in the first century
c.e., with the commodity of silk mentioned in relation to the famous
Parthian desire to keep Han China and Rome apart so as to maintain
their trade advantage. The third-century c.e. Chinese source, the Wei
lue by Yu Huan also refers to not one but three first-century trade roads
west, with the first terminating in the territory of the Kushans, while
the others hugged a more northerly trajectory to arrive in Xinjiang,
and thence onward to the Pamir Mountains in present day Tajikistan,
thence through Kapisa (Alexandria of the Caucasus, Bagram), before
joining up with the route south to Parthia.79 This east-west route has
been verified archaeologically with finds of Indian, Chinese, and Mediterranean goods at Kapisa.80
A more bustling route, however, was the Indian Ocean trade route
that played the key role in sustaining the unified economic space that
stretched from the Roman world in the West through to Han China in
the East, enabling economic exchanges between the terminal metropoles of the Mediterranean and the Pacific, as well as the significant trading regions in between. Europe, Africa, Arabia, India, and East Asia
were linked by a network that saw the Indian subcontinent in the pivotal role of the linchpin of the classical world economy, connecting the
otherwise disparate economies of the Mediterranean and East Asia.81
Romes main supply of Eastern commodities via the Red Sea route to
India (described in the Periplus) was connected to an equally extensive
78
J. E. Hill, trans., The Western Regions according to the Hou Hanshu, 2nd ed.,
http://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/texts/hhshu/hou_han_shu.html (last viewed 20
December 2010). For this dating, see Thorley, Roman Empire and the Kushans, p. 183.
79
Yu, The Peoples of the West.
80
Rauh, Merchants, Sailors and Pirates, p. 96.
81
This is consistent with Schaffers understanding of the later role of India in global
trade. See L. Schaffer, Southernization, Journal of World History 5, no. 1 (1994): 121.
45
route traveling east from India, as Pliny suggests.82 Crucially, the Chinese Hou Han-shu also confirms the existence of this maritime route for
Sino-Indian (and indirectly Sino-Roman) tradea route which was
oceanic and largely aimed at avoiding the increasing Parthian control over the overland routes. According to Ying-shih Y, the maritime trade of Han China included not only important Western ports
in Burma and on the island of Sri Lanka, as well as southeastern and
southwestern India, but also Sumatra, Korea, and Japan, all prior to
Romes Principate period. The role of commodities from these regions
within the commerce of the broader Indian Ocean oikumene remains
underexplored.83 The Sung Shu and Liang Shu also confirm that the
major means by which trade was conducted between China and India
was via the maritime routes to southern India, with Westerners who
might be identified as originating from the Roman Empire reputed to
have traveled to Cambodia and Annam during the Han period.84
The Periplus offers perhaps the most thorough insight into how
the Roman economy interlocked with antiquitys broader economic
network. The document itself was produced, it is generally accepted,
between 40 and 70 c.e., as Romes trade in the Indian Ocean was nearing its peak.85 Interestingly, this places it firmly within the window
suggested by the world system theorists Andre Gunder Frank and Barry
Gills for an A phase in global economic cycles, when trade linkages
between various regions within the Indian Ocean oikumene were at
their peak.86 While their B phase, beginning in the third century
82
See Pliny, Natural History, VI:88. On the question of the balance of overland and
sea trade, I. A. Richmond suggests that Palmyran silk came both overland from Bactria and
via the oceanic route. Richmond, Palmyra under the Aegis of Rome, pp. 5253. Any
other heavier commodity may have been difficult to transport across Eurasia in profitable
quantities.
83
Y. S. Y, Trade and Expansion in Han China: A Study in the Structure of Sino-Barbarian
Economic Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 173ff. One important study that has taken the commodities seriously is J. I. Miller, The Spice Trade of the
Roman Empire, see esp. chap. 3.
84
Y, Trade and Expansion in Han China, p. 175.
85
Casson, Periplus Maris Erythraei, pp. 67; C. Robin, The Date of the Periplus of
the Erythraean Sea in the Light of South Arabian Evidence, in de Romanis and Tchernia,
Crossings: Early Mediterranean Contacts with India, pp. 4165.
86
B. K. Gills and A. G. Frank, World System Cycles, Crises, and Hegemonic Shifts,
1700 bc to 1700 ad, in Frank and Gills, World System, pp. 164167. Greg Woolf, following
Immanuel Wallerstein, has declared it remains to be proven that world-economies were at
all significant in their effect before the 15th c. AD. Woolf, World-Systems Analysis and
the Roman Empire, p. 54. Given Wallersteins work is hardwired with Polanyis and Fin-
46
c.e., coincides with the hitherto assumed date of the dwindling use of
the Indian Ocean artery by Roman traders linked to the disruption to
Sino-Indian trade triggered by the warfare occasioning the end of the
Han Empire in the early third century, recent archaeological evidence
has suggested that Roman trade continued, albeit at a reduced level,
into the sixth century.87
In a pithy but thorough fashion, the Periplus elucidates how the
east coast of Africa, the southern coast of the Arabian peninsular, the
Persian Gulf, and the Indian subcontinent as far as Sri Lanka were
navigated by merchants setting out from Roman Egypt, as well as
describing what commodities might be traded en route and the cultural
hallmarks of the various peoples living in the region described. Along
the east coast of Africa, the works guidance reaches as far south as the
ivory and tortoise shell trading town of Rhapta (presently considered
to be on the coast of todays Tanzania88), a tribute-paying subject of the
Arabian merchant town of Muza.89 Rhapta, it was reported, was not as
important as a trade center as the port of Adulis, which was the closest port to the main East African ivory entrept of Axum, some eight
days travel inland. It was largely via the port of Adulis (rather than
across the Sahara) that Roman trade with the interlinking economies
of Africa occurred.90 This Egypt-African trade route was accessible for
leys understanding of antique economics, it is perhaps not surprising that Wallersteins and
subsequently Woolfs sense of a world system does not fit the Roman case. See Woolf, p. 47.
87
X. Liu, Ancient India and Ancient China: Trade and Religious Exchanges AD 1600
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 31. Although Gills and Frank read these A
and B phases as part of an overarching world system that continues over five thousand
years, it is more likely that Janet Abu-Lughod is correct in viewing the Red Sea trade of the
era of the Periplus as constituting in and of itself a discrete world system, one that was not
renewed through successive cycles of A and B phases but replaced by later world systems.
See Gills and Frank, World System Cycles, pp. 167174; Abu-Lughod, Before European
Hegemony, p. 43. On the persistence of Roman trade with India, see R. Tomber, Rome and
MesopotamiaImporters into India in the First Millenium AD, Antiquity 81 (2007): 979.
88
F. Chami, Roman Beads from the Rufiji Delta, Tanzania: First Incontrovertible
Archaeological Link with the Periplus, Current Anthropology 40, no. 2 (1999): 237241.
89
Periplus, 16.
90
For representative positions on the question of trans-Saharan trade, see the enthusiastic R. C. C. Law, The Garamantes and Trans-Saharan Enterprise in Classical Times,
Journal of African History 8, no. 2 (1967): 181200; Pekka Masonens Trans-Saharan Trade
and the West African Discovery of the Mediterranean, in Ethnic Encounter and Culture
Change, ed. M. Sabour and K. S. Vikr (London: Hurst, 1997), pp. 116142; and the more
skeptical J. T. Swanson, The Myth of Trans-Saharan Trade during the Roman Era, Inter
national Journal of African Historical Studies 8, no. 4 (1975): 582600; T. F. Garrard, Myth
and Metrology: The Early Trans-Saharan Gold Trade, Journal of African History 23, no. 4
(1982): 443461.
47
smaller scale merchants, unlike the more complex Egypt-India route,

which demanded both stronger vessels able to negotiate monsoonal
conditions and more significant capital investment to purchase the
costly spices, pearls, and silks on offer in ports such as Barigaza, Tyndis,
Comara, and Sopatma.91 Although some Roman goods were traded
with India in exchange for Eastern commodities,92 the majority of Eastern trade was conducted in exchange for gold and silver coins, which
was a significant source of silver and gold bullion for (now untraceable)
Indian purposes.93 At Barigaza, Roman merchants could import, among
other things, wine, copper, tin, lead, and topaz. However, in a sign of
the existence of a simple foreign exchange market, the Periplus urged
them to trade gold and silver Roman coins to capitalize on the favorable
exchange rate that would enable them greater purchasing power within
India.94 In exchange, they received ivory, pepper, semiprecious stones,
cotton, and other types of cloth, including silk.95 Tyndis and the other
ports of Limurika in southwestern India were important as sources of
spices, precious and semiprecious stones, pearls, ivory, and silk, again in
exchange for Roman metals, wine, and coin,96 while Comara, Poduka,
and Sopatma on the east coast of India were trading hubs for virtually
all of the goods produced both in the East and the West. Beyond these
ports was the land of Thina (China), the origin of Romes silk.97
Using the Periplus, along with other archaeological and written
sources from India and China, it is possible to elucidate not only the
dimensions of classical global trade, but also to confirm the centrality of India to the global economy during the same period, enabling
the provincializing of Rome within the global classical economy.
Although Rome was clearly the economic and military hegemon of the
Mediterranean basin, and, in a fictitious hermetically sealed Roman
imperial system, would have played the role of core in any peripherycore transfers of surplus from its provinces, this was not the complete
Casson, Romes Trade with the East, pp. 2136.

Rauh erroneously views this barter trade as constituting the predominant share of
Roman Indian Ocean trade. Rauh, Merchants, Sailors and Pirates, p. 102.
93
Casson, Periplus Maris Erythraei, pp. 2931. Thorley, Roman Empire and the
Kushans, p. 184. M. Vickers, Nabataea, India, Gaul, and Carthage: Reflections on Hellenistic and Roman Gold Vessels and Red-Gloss Pottery, American Journal of Archaeology
98 (1994): 242. See also E. Lo Cascio, State and Coinage in the Late Republic and Early
Empire, Journal of Roman Studies 81 (1981): 82.
94
Periplus, 49.
95
Ibid., 4849.
96
Ibid., 56.
97
Ibid., 6466.
91
92
48
nature of the Roman economy.98 Romes capacity to extract surplus

from a periphery via taxation, through the control of valuable assets
such as mines, and from the sporadic spoils of conquest was of course
limited to its empire. Wealth was transferred from its provinces in two
directionsdirectly to trading partners external to Roman control,
and to metropolitan Rome, and thence to zones external to Roman
control through loans to merchants engaged in Eastern trade. As such,
it is arguable that, if the core of a world system is defined by its capacity
to extract surplus from a peripheral zone, the Roman Empire lacked the
capacity to act as the core of the global economy in its trade relations
with its external trading partnersincluding the various commercial
hubs of India, Parthia, Sabaean Arabia, and Axumite Africa. Rome
was unable to dictate the terms of trade with the East and, as a result,
Rome continued to leach a proportion of its imperial surplus to Indian
Ocean trading hubs. If the envoys to the emperor Claudius from Taprobane are to be believed, the upshot of this was that gaudy Rome was
not as rich as industrious Sri Lanka.99
In terms of the direction of trade, it appears that, while Arabia and
India represented important destinations for Roman traders, Roman
(and before that Ptolemaic) Egypt was of less direct significance for
Indian merchants. Notwithstanding the unidentified envoys from
India mentioned by Augustus in the Res Gestae, Claudiuss envoys
from Taprobane, the sprinkling of Indians harangued by Dio Chrysostom, or the Indian merchant prince Psammis in Xenophons Ephesian
Tales, the written evidence for a thriving Indian trade colony in the
Roman world is modest.100 The Periplus suggests that Indian traders had
traditionally halted at Aden, but at the time of the Periplus did continue on to Egypt,101 and archaeological evidence suggests that there
was a limited presence in the port towns;102 however, as excavations at
Berenike have illustrated, Romes Indian Ocean commerce during the
98
The best versions of this hermetically sealed Roman economy model include Hopkins, Taxes and Trade in the Roman Empire, pp. 101125; and Geraghty, Impact of
Globalization in the Roman Empire.
99
Pliny, Natural History, VI:89.
100
Augustus, Res Gestae, 31; Dio Chrysostom, Discourses, 32.40; Xenophon Ephesus,
Ephesian Tales, III:11.
101
Periplus, 26. J. Whitewright, Roman Rigging Material from the Red Sea Port of
Myos Hormos, International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 36, no. 2 (2007): 290.
102
Raschke, Papyrological Evidence, pp. 241243, contra R. Salomon, Epigraphic
Remains of Indian Traders in Egypt, Journal of the American Oriental Society 111, no. 4
(1991): 731736. R. Tomber, Indo-Roman Trade: The Ceramic Evidence from Egypt,
Antiquity 74 (2000): 630. Whitewright, Roman Rigging Material, pp. 290291.
49
first century was more usually handled by a cosmopolitan assortment

of polyglot intermediaries from the southeast of the Roman Empire
who used Greek as a common lingua franca.103 These were the Western traders of various ethnicities that are present in first- and secondcentury c.e. Tamil literature as the Yavana.104 These Yavana were
depicted not in terms of commodity exchange but simply as bringers
of gold, traders who purchased rather than bartered for Indian commodities. The beautiful large ships of the Yavana bringing gold come
splashing the white foam on the waters of the Periyar and return laden
with pepper is how Roman trade looked from the other end. Sacks
of pepper are brought from the houses to the market; the gold received
from the ships in exchange for articles sold is brought to shore in barges
at Muziris.105 This lucrative trade was valuable enough to be a source
of conflict, the Tamil source Cankam Ilakkiyam suggests, with military
campaigns waged in India to monopolize the trade with the Yavanar echoing Romes own attempts to control eastern trade in its own
region.106
Archaeologically speaking, the evidence for widespread and regular
Roman trade with India in the first century c.e. is becoming increasingly abundant. It is surprisingly strong on the east coast of India, with
Vimala Begley having argued that the material remains of Mediterranean trade on the east coast of India mean that it is difficult to accept
the proposition that direct trade to and from Arikamedu [Pondicherry]
did not exist before the third quarter of the first century c.e. Importantly, Begley stresses that Arikamedu was a hub for two trade networksan Indian eastern seaboard trade network and another trading
with the Mediterranean directly.107 Finds of glass beads and gemstones
at Berenike also attest to strong trade links with Barbarikon (Pakistan),
Taprobane (Sri Lanka), southern India, and even Vietnam and Java,
103
S. E. Sidebotham, M. Hense, and H. M. Nouwens, The Red Land: The Illustrated
Archaeology of Egypts Eastern Desert (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2008), pp.
189192. Raschke, New Studies in Roman Commerce with the East, p. 645.
104
Thapar, The Image of the Barbarian in Early India, Comparative Studies in Society
and History 13, no. 4 (1971): 419420. K. V. Zvelebil, The Smile of Murugan (Leiden, 1973),
p. 35; Rauh, Merchants, Sailors and Pirates, p. 101.
105
Kanakasabai, cited in Vickers, Nabataea, India, Gaul, and Carthage, pp. 242243.
106
F. de Romanis, Rome and the Ntia of India: Relations between Rome and Southern India from 30 BC to the Flavian Period, in de Romanis and Tchernia, Crossings: Early
Mediterranean Contacts with India, pp. 107108.
107
V. Begley, Arikamedu Reconsidered, American Journal of Archaeology 87, no. 4
(1983): 479480, 481. See also L. Gorelick and A. J. Gwinnet, Diamonds from India to
Rome and Beyond, American Journal of Archaeology 92, no. 4 (1988): 547552.
50
while remnants of teak at Berenike also attest to trade (whether direct

or indirect) with South Asia.108 Amphora finds in Muziris (Pattanam)
and elsewhere confirm that the Romans brought with them wine and
to a lesser extent olive oil,109 which served as ballast commodities for
the outward trip; however the absence of other materials suggests that
the major commodities that the Romans offered were metal110particularly the precious gold and silver coins and bullion that they were
exchanging in Muziris and Barigaza, but also quantities of tin, lead, and
copperall of which are difficult to trace archaeologically, given their
utility to Indian secondary industry.
As important as Indo-Roman trade was in terms of setting the
outer parameters of trade regularly plied by Roman subjects, it is worth
remembering the significant role of trade with Arabia during the
same time. During the Roman era, southern Arabia was more than a
mere way station along the path to India. Often left unnoticed until
the Islamic period, the commercial importance of classical-era Arabia and its African periphery requires urgent revision. As has already
been mentioned, East African ports such as Rhapta were subject to the
hegemony of Arab cities such as Muza by the time of the Periplus,111
and a large section of the Periplus is dedicated to delineating the political and economic contours of commerce in Arabia. Muza itself, the
Periplus states, was teeming with Arabs, shipowners and sailors . . . it
is alive with commercial activity to which Rome was now directly
linked, courtesy of its conquest of Egypt.112 Muza, like Adulis for Axu-
108
Sidebotham, Hense, and Nouwens, The Red Land, pp. 178182. See also W. Z.
Wendrich, R. S. Tomber, S. E. Sidebotham, J. A. Harrell, R. T. J. Cappers, and R. S. Bagnall,
Berenike Crossroads: The Integration of Information, Journal of the Economic and Social
History of the Orient 46, no. 1 (2003): 5962. See also Sidebotham and Wendrichs sixvolume edited series Berenike (Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Publications,
2007; Leiden: CNWS Special Series, 1995, 1996, 1998, 1999, 2001).
109
K. P. Shajan, P. J. Cherian, R. Tomber, and V. Selvakumar, The External Connections of Early Historic Pattanam, India: The Ceramic Evidence, Antiquity 82, no. 315
(2008), Project Gallery, http://antiquity.ac.uk/projgall/tomber/index.html (last viewed 20
December 2010). See also P. J. Cherian, G. V. R. Prasad, K. Dutta, D. K. Ray, V. Selvakumar, and K. P. Shajan, Chronology of Pattanam: A Multicultural Port Site on the Malabar
Coast, Current Science 97, no. 2 (2009): 236240. A. S. Gaur, Sundaresh, and S. Triparti,
Evidence for Indo-Roman Trade from Bet Dwarka Waters, West Coast of India, Interna
tional Journal of Nautical Archaeology 35, no. 1 (2006): 120.
110
Exceptions to this include yellow peridot and the mineral realgar used for paint pigment and medicine. See Wendrich et al., Berenike Crossroads, pp. 5356.
111
Periplus, 16. See also D. Whitehouse, Epilogue: Roman Trade in Perspective, in
Begley and De Puma, Rome and India, p. 216.
112
Periplus, 21.
51
mite Africa, and Barigaza and Limurika in India, operated as the ocean
outlet for an interior commercial center in Arabia, namely Saphar.
Underlining the importance of the Arabian peninsular in the first
century is the timing of Romes attempted military conquest of Arabia25/24 b.c.e.in the post-Actium decade, after the Egyptian campaigns had created an opportunity for Rome to become directly commercially active in the Indian Ocean. Augustuss impulse, it appears,
was to establish a firm hold on the Red Sea commercial bottleneck
by conquering its African and Arabian shores. As Strabo relates, economic considerations were of utmost importance:
The expedition of the Romans against the Arabians, under the command of Aelius Gallus, has given us much information about the
region. Augustus Caesar sent this general to investigate these places
and their inhabitants, as well as those of Ethiopia . . . . It was his [Galluss] intention either to make peace with or conquer the Arabians. He
was also influenced by the very longstanding reputation that they were
very wealthy, and exchanged their aromatics and precious stones for
silver and gold, but never spent with foreigners any part of what they
received in exchange. He hoped to gain either opulent friends, or to
overcome opulent enemies.113
Strabo is here pointing to a large Arabian trade surplus with Rome in

the lucrative and sizeable114 incense market important for Roman religious and funerary practices (which Pliny characteristically described
as the luxuria of the dead enriching Arabia).115 Far from destroying the
South Arabian economy, Romes large-scale entry into the already
long-established Indian Ocean trade route led to an economic expansion in South Arabia.116 This is consistent with the picture Strabo
provides of a massive expansion in Red Sea trade in the post-Actium
period.117 Coupled with this commercial expansion was (albeit unsuccessful) military action. Although Aden was probably not destroyed
113
Strabo, Geography, XVI:4:22. For details of the expedition see G. W. Bowersock,
Roman Arabia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 47ff.
114
Young, Romes Eastern Trade, p. 17.
115
Pliny, Natural Histories, 12:41. See also Young, Romes Eastern Trade, pp. 1617.
Contra Pliny, Young correctly argues that incense should not be considered a luxury item,
as it was not prohibitively expensive in small quantities to many Romans, who would have
considered it a necessity for religious observance.
116
G. F. Hourani, Did Roman Commercial Competition Ruin South Arabia? Journal
of Near Eastern Studies 11, no. 4 (1952): 291295.
117
Strabo, Geography, II:5:12.
52
by the Romans, as the Periplus puzzlingly asserts it was,118 campaigns

against Arabia Felix, the Nabataeans, and others further south after
31 b.c.e. have been accurately described as blatant Roman economic
imperialism.119 Indeed, Steven Sidebotham has gone as far as to say
that these expansionist tendencies were the subject of enthusiastic
discussion among the Augustan literati (as evinced by Virgil, Horace,
Propertius, and Tibullus), who saw imperial expansion over not only
the lucrative Red Sea trade route but also over India as a logical next
step. Their enthusiastic statements of Roman claims to India, Sidebotham suggests, were not mere flattery, but possibly reflections of military discussions within the governing circles of Rome.120
Nonetheless, these plans proved illusory. Rome could not forcibly
reposition itself as the preeminent Indian Ocean power as Horace
dreamed, indeed it could not even secure neighboring Arabia in the
hope (which in the event was frustrated) of capturing the incense trade
at its source.121 Even the African ports closest to Romes new Egyptian
territories, such as Adulis, proved to be too difficult for Rome to control
easily. Adulis was linked to the African Axumite exchange network,122
to the South Arabian trading zone, and (at least at the elite level) to
the Greek cultural world.123 Like Arabia, it remained outside of the
domain of Roman rule, despite several military attempts to consolidate
Roman control over the African Red Sea coast. As the port city of the
lucrative African ivory trade that had coalesced around Axum, and a
crucial Indian Ocean gateway to Lower Egypt, Adulis represented a
major prize, which was not won in the Nubian campaigns of Cornelius
Gallus in 29 b.c.e., when Meroe was subdued and made a tributary to
Rome. It still lay outside of the Roman area when the borders of the
empire were refixed at Hierosycaminos in 21 b.c.e.124 Ivory, Jacke
Phillips tells us, was an increasingly important commodity and Rome
Periplus, 26. On the controversy over this, see Casson, Periplus Maris Erythraei, p.
118
160.
Sidebotham, Roman Economic Policy, p. 140.

Ibid., p. 139.
121
A. F. L. Beeston, Some Observations on Greek and Latin Data Relating to South
Arabia, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 42, no. 1 (1979): 10.
122
K. W. Butzer, Rise and Fall of Axum, Ethiopia: A Geo-Archaeological Interpretation, American Antiquity 46, no. 3 (1981): 472473; J. Phillips, Punt and Aksum: Egypt
and the Horn of Africa, Journal of African History 38, no. 3 (1997): 449452.
123
Periplus, 5.
124
J. Thorley, The Development of Trade between the Roman Empire and the East
under Augustus, Greece and Rome, 2nd ser., 16, no. 2 (1969): 211; Phillips, Punt and
Aksum, p. 450.
119
120
53
could not get enough of it.125 Yet, as with Arabian incense, Indian
spices, or Chinese silk, the trade in African ivory was one that Rome
could only tax, not control through direct military or political means,
despite the efforts of Cornelius Gallus.
IV
While Rome was an important terminus for commodities along one
arm of the world trade network that spanned across Africa, Arabia,
India, and Asia, the story of the classical world economy does not
reflect the contention that Rome came to monopolise the western
end of the East-West trade routes, if the term monopolise has any
reference to the ability to regulate the scope, direction, and conditions
pertaining to the flow of commodities, or indeed if it refers to an ability
to financially benefit from the extraction of surplus from other regions
via trade. Rome at no point controlled Indian Ocean trade, even if
its demand for Eastern commodities provided a massive stimulus to
it.126 While encouraging the vigorous economic activity throughout
the Indian Ocean oikumene by its voracious appetite for Eastern commodities and its seemingly endless capacity to export precious metals,
these resources were available to Rome only because they had been
won through conquest or redistributed from its imperial peripheries.127 Rome was able to continuously service its appetite for Eastern
commodities by using the gold and silver spoils of empire that flowed
through its economy.
Romes trade deficit and lack of control over Eastern trade conditions impacted most heavily on the imperial aristocracy, which both
consumed a disproportionate share of these commodities and were the
predominant source of the capital required for the Eastern trade that
secured them. This trade pulled the imperial aristocracy in two seemingly mutually exclusive directions. On the one hand, there was the
Stoic aversion to Oriental luxuria and a moderate concern over the
Phillips, Punt and Aksum, p. 450.

S. E. Sidebotham, Ports of the Red Sea and the Arabia-India Trade, in Begley and
De Puma, Rome and India, p. 15.
127
Consider the salutary effects of Trajans Dacian campaigns on the Roman economy.
See Cassius Dio, Histories, 68:14. See also M. Griffin, Nerva to Hadrian, in The Cambridge
Ancient History Vol IX: The High Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p.
114. John Thorley explicitly links the proceeds of this war to an increase in trade with the
Kushan empire. Thorley, Roman Empire and the Kushans, pp. 184185.
125
126
54
terms of trade. On the other hand, there were the heightened pecuniary possibilities that came from expanding investment in trade, as well
as the potential imperial benefits stemming from any future control of
the trade emporia of the Red Sea and beyond. This contradiction found
its resolution in the maintenance of a discursive animosity toward the
Orient and the values ostensibly represented by eastern commodities,
at the same time as the material processes of imperial expansion and
private economic endeavor moved inexorably closer to the sources of
this trade. This explains not only the gendering and regular disavowals
of Eastern commodities in the sources, but also Romes eastern strivings in the pre- and post-Actium era. It even explains some of the more
bellicose suggestions of Horace and other Augustans that India was a
potential target for Romes future military attentions.
This relocation of the Roman economy within the trading network
of the Indian Ocean oikumene problematizes previous modeling of
Roman economics that presume a hermetically sealed Roman economy.128 It is also a reminder of the need to abandon Polybiuss rhetorical positioning of Roman history as the focal point of the forces of a
universal history.129 Polybius was half correct, insofar as he recognized
that events in Italy and Africa are interwoven with those in Asia
and Greece; however, his attempt to see events converging towards
one end, namely universal Roman hegemony, simply overemphasized
Romes place in the classical world system.130 Irrespective of its position as a Western political and military hegemon, a percentage of the
surplus that Rome had garnered from its Mediterranean empire was
consistently transferred to Arabia, India, and to a lesser extent Africa
in the first and second centuries c.e.131 This extraction of surplus from
the Mediterranean world and the depositing of a proportion of it in
the economies of the extra-Roman world was only one strand in an
Indian Ocean exchange network that provided Rome with not only
slightly tastier food and silky clothes, but also an impetus and object for
imperial action, and a handsome return on the investments of Tacituss
usurious senators.
128
See Hopkins, Taxes and Trade in the Roman Empire, and Geraghty, Impact of
Globalization in the Roman Empire.
129
W. Schmitthenner, Rome and India: Aspects of Universal History during the Principate, Journal of Roman Studies 69 (1979).
130
Polybius I:3 cited in Schmitthenner, Rome and India, p. 90.
131
Salles acutely points out that examples such as the Phoenicians demonstrate that
geopolitical power and economic preponderance were not necessarily interrelated. See
Salles, Review: Rome and India, p. 104 n. 2.
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Provincializing Rome:

The Indian Ocean Trade Network

Whether it be the Latium-threatening Parthians that he leads

journal of world history, march 2011

Fitzpatrick: Provincializing Rome

journal of world history, march 2011

Salless assertion that the Rome-India trade of the Periplus period is

Fitzpatrick: Provincializing Rome

integrating the familiar picture of Romes economic dominance over

journal of world history, march 2011

perception of the effect of Eastern trade was much more pronounced

Fitzpatrick: Provincializing Rome

linked for Pliny to the ostentatious consumption patterns of women.21

Pliny the Elder, Natural Histories, VI:26, XII:41.

journal of world history, march 2011

Fitzpatrick: Provincializing Rome

income. The time-honored nexus between wealth, politics, trade, and

journal of world history, march 2011

In attempting to urge special powers for Pompey, Cicero, the great

Fitzpatrick: Provincializing Rome

journal of world history, march 2011

crisis in the Roman economy lasted until Emperor Tiberius engineered

Tacitus, Annals, VI:19.

Fitzpatrick: Provincializing Rome

Josephus, The Jewish War, VII:7.

journal of world history, march 2011

Persian Gulf to wealthy India. According to Xiphilinuss epitomized

Cassius Dio, Roman History, LXVIII:2829.

Fitzpatrick: Provincializing Rome

journal of world history, march 2011

made good economic sense from both an abstract imperial perspective

Fitzpatrick: Provincializing Rome

journal of world history, march 2011

Fitzpatrick: Provincializing Rome

journal of world history, march 2011

Fitzpatrick: Provincializing Rome

smaller scale merchants, unlike the more complex Egypt-India route,

Casson, Romes Trade with the East, pp. 2136.

journal of world history, march 2011

nature of the Roman economy.98 Romes capacity to extract surplus

Fitzpatrick: Provincializing Rome

first century was more usually handled by a cosmopolitan assortment

journal of world history, march 2011

while remnants of teak at Berenike also attest to trade (whether direct

Fitzpatrick: Provincializing Rome

Strabo is here pointing to a large Arabian trade surplus with Rome in

journal of world history, march 2011

by the Romans, as the Periplus puzzlingly asserts it was,118 campaigns

Sidebotham, Roman Economic Policy, p. 140.

Fitzpatrick: Provincializing Rome

Phillips, Punt and Aksum, p. 450.

journal of world history, march 2011

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