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A review by buermann
The Roman Empire and the Indian Ocean: The Ancient World Economy & the Kingdoms of Africa, Arabia & India by Raoul McLaughlin, Raoul McLaughlin
4.0
In 118 BC an Indian mariner, shipwrecked, found himself in the Egyptian court of Physcon and teaching the Greco-Roman navigator Eudoxus of Cyzicus about the monsoon trade winds over the Indian ocean, setting off a quarter-millennium of expanding Roman ocean-going trade to the east. For whatever reason that mariner's name is lost to us, while we remember the Romans named those trade winds after Hippalus.
These Greco-Roman traders expanded their trade networks across the Indian ocean and managed to make contact with Han China right around the same time as the Antonine Plagues started in 165 AD, a catalyst for the whole venture falling apart and reshaping the classical world -- not just the Romans but the Han and everyone in between -- reversing an age of elite globalization that entailed annual imports of about a pound of luxuries per Roman citizen, paid for largely in bullion and, presaging later medieval patterns of expanding European trade, woolen textiles from Britannia.
It is light on the details of the commercial contracts (were they partnerships? societas? what kind of debt instruments were used?) between Roman merchants plying these trade routes and the source and nature of the capital invested in large ocean-going trade ventures. One gets the impression it wasn't a terribly important aspect of a trade network largely managed as a series of interlocking state monopolies. Various empires were imposing extremely high tariffs in and out of their territories at state-managed entrepots. The description does not strike me as all that different from the state-chartered trade monopolies of later European mercantilism (you can't even say the Romans were less self-conscious of the limits of relying on precious metal exports, as the author documents in a later chapter many Romans were highly critical and the trade deficit was a big political issue in a way that would seem almost foreign to Americans born after 2000).
In between, and what are certainly the most interesting sections of the book, are the reports of who else was trading across the Indian ocean and controlling those entrepots. The author gives the Roman perspective, of course, but also goes through some fascinating strolls through the literature trying to understand who the Romans were trading with. It seems to be everybody who had access to the Indian ocean was trading across it, both before and after Rome exported most of its bullion to buy non-durable luxuries. The innovation of a globe-spanning empire run on unlimited confidence in a fiat reserve currency would have to wait.
The appendices might be very fascinating to data nerds and I have to join the chorus about some repetitive sections that could have been better organized. You might be in for a bit of a drag if you want to hang in there for the many good parts.
These Greco-Roman traders expanded their trade networks across the Indian ocean and managed to make contact with Han China right around the same time as the Antonine Plagues started in 165 AD, a catalyst for the whole venture falling apart and reshaping the classical world -- not just the Romans but the Han and everyone in between -- reversing an age of elite globalization that entailed annual imports of about a pound of luxuries per Roman citizen, paid for largely in bullion and, presaging later medieval patterns of expanding European trade, woolen textiles from Britannia.
It is light on the details of the commercial contracts (were they partnerships? societas? what kind of debt instruments were used?) between Roman merchants plying these trade routes and the source and nature of the capital invested in large ocean-going trade ventures. One gets the impression it wasn't a terribly important aspect of a trade network largely managed as a series of interlocking state monopolies. Various empires were imposing extremely high tariffs in and out of their territories at state-managed entrepots. The description does not strike me as all that different from the state-chartered trade monopolies of later European mercantilism (you can't even say the Romans were less self-conscious of the limits of relying on precious metal exports, as the author documents in a later chapter many Romans were highly critical and the trade deficit was a big political issue in a way that would seem almost foreign to Americans born after 2000).
In between, and what are certainly the most interesting sections of the book, are the reports of who else was trading across the Indian ocean and controlling those entrepots. The author gives the Roman perspective, of course, but also goes through some fascinating strolls through the literature trying to understand who the Romans were trading with. It seems to be everybody who had access to the Indian ocean was trading across it, both before and after Rome exported most of its bullion to buy non-durable luxuries. The innovation of a globe-spanning empire run on unlimited confidence in a fiat reserve currency would have to wait.
The appendices might be very fascinating to data nerds and I have to join the chorus about some repetitive sections that could have been better organized. You might be in for a bit of a drag if you want to hang in there for the many good parts.