Global economic history

SITTA VON REDEN

Economics and empire

The world in this chapter refers to the Afro-Eurasian landmass from China and the islands of the Southeastern Pacific in the east to the Strait of Gibraltar in the west, the Baltic and North Sea coasts in the north, and the northern parts of Africa, Egypt, and down to ancient Ethiopia in the south.

We have to be aware, however, of the narrative we give to the develop­ment. Some scholars attracted by world-systems analysis and later approaches to globalization have looked for the development of interregional trade, core­periphery hierarchies, and a clearly defined division of labor in a worldwide trade network. For such approaches the growth of economic connections is of prime importance, while the zones in which they developed are divided into different functional units.¹ However, such approaches underestimate a crucial ^[26] difference between pre-modern and modern world economies. In ancient societies long-distance trade responded to the desires and interests of only very small, if highly visible, social groups. Arguably, the aggregate value of their demand was massive, but never was local production, and politics, oriented toward a world market so as to lay foundations for a culturally or economically homogeneous space.

Nor can we assume linear or lateral economic progress within this period. Empires were at different times conducive or disruptive to economic develop­ment, though in general the political and economic integration they fostered can be regarded as positive for their economies.³ In the long run, the world from i2oo bce to 900 ce developed considerably, possibly at estimated growth rates in the range of up to o.i percent per year. Yet it was a world of vast inequalities. This does not refer just to inequality of wealth and standards of living but also to the extent to which individuals and communities partici­pated in economic and technological progress. The processes that we can identify as increasing productivity and market development took place at some levels of empire and not at others; empires formed without all regions in their territory being affected by it, or at the same pace. Social, political, and economic networks could be formed by small numbers of participants and for a very limited range of consumers. Monetization, market formation, and inter­regional exchange were never complete and socially encompassing. Here is another crucial difference between ancient and modern world economics: the structural inequality of economic opportunities that is built into agrarian societies led to deeply hybrid economies in which different economic practices not only coexisted, but were combined in surprising ways.

We finally need to allow for shifting agents in the narrative of develop­ment. The Neo-Assyrian Empire of the first quarter of the first millennium

“Provincializing Rome: The Indian Ocean Trade Network and Roman Imperialism,” Journal of World History 22 (2011): 27-54.

2 Greg Woolf, “World Systems Analysis and the Roman Empire,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 3 (1990): 44-58.

3 Peter R. Bedford, “The Persian Near East,” in Walter Scheidel, Ian Morris, and Richard P. Saller (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World (Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 310. bce was a different political formation from the Chinese and Roman empires 700 years later. The Assyrian Empire was a royal family at the top of relatively strong local aristocracies and temple elites who were tied to the king by ritual and the obligation to render gifts in precious metal or in kind. The wealth and level of consumption of the royal palaces at Niniveh and Nimrhud depended on the wealth and productive capacity of the regions from which gift-tribute was gathered, and on the interregional exchange networks local aristocracies maintained in order to serve the interdependent needs of themselves and the dominating kings. Both trade and taxation in the Roman Empire, by contrast, involved a broader social base, and the consumption regimes of aristocracies and emperors began to play a less exclusive part in the nature of exchange. While the tastes and preferences of provincial elites and emperors remained important, a broader range of consumption groups, cities, markets, and the interests of an increasingly professional group of merchants and financiers became important engines in the commercial process. In imperial China, following a different path, bureaucratic and family networks mobilized goods for reasons other than imperial consumption. There was competition within and between such networks, and they became, up to a degree, quite inde­pendent from the imperial center. Looking at agents in the global economy, we thus gradually need to introduce bottom-up dynamics into the top-down model of economic history over 2,000 years.

Our account starts from consumption. All ancient empires rested on three pillars: military power, self-representation, and taxation.

This chapter is subdivided into four sections: the first section deals with agriculture and its development under imperial conditions; the second with monetization; the third considers the impact of governance structures and taxation on ancient economies, while in the final section I shall turn to the growing connection of the world in the four centuries either side of the Common Era divide.

Agriculture under imperial conditions

The world outlined above encompassed several ecological zones, which affected local economic behavior and performance.^[28] Sedentary agriculture dominated over nomadic and semi-nomadic cultures, but was not suitable to all soils, nor was it everywhere equally productive.

Politically more powerful were agrarian states that gained control over agrarian and social resources across ecological zones. The best example is the Near Eastern region, controlled successively by the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, and Seleucids (successor dynasty of Alexander III “the Great”) between the eighth and the middle of the second centuries bce.^[31] The Neo­Assyrian Empire comprised the territory of Southern and Northern Mesopotamia, northern Syria, the Levant, and the south Syrian desert and steppe region, while under the Persians, Asia Minor and Egypt were also included. During the Neo-Assyrian period significant numbers of people were shifted into Northern Mesopotamia. A sizable proportion of urban residents of Syria-Palestine, urban Babylonians, Arameans, and Chaldeans were deported from their homeland, settled in new cities, and put to agricultural work in underdeveloped areas. Resettlement was not an eco­nomic scheme, but aimed at punishing recalcitrant vassals and pacifying their territories, as the Assyrian royal annals have it. Yet by the time of the Persian period there was a clear economic outcome of the policy of deportation: a marked increase in the amount of land under cultivation in Northern Mesopotamia with a resulting increase in agricultural production in that region.^[32] Partly because of the highly productive irrigated landscapes in Southern Mesopotamia and Egypt, the Near Eastern empires created wealth in an order of magnitude unknown to the Western world down to the Roman imperial period when Gallia, for example, to judge from its tribute, became just as productive as Egypt. Another asset was their power to administratively and socially reorganize and pacify a vast ecological space.

Agrarian organization

Both peasant and intensive agriculture were based on mixed farming. Different staples were grown in different ecological zones: millet in Northern China, rice in Southern China and India; barley in Mesopotamia; emmer in Egypt, durum wheat in the Mediterranean, and bread wheat in the Black Sea region. They were combined with secondary cereals, oil and fodder crops, legumes, dates, vines, and indeed any other cultivated plant that the area had to offer. Animal husbandry supplemented agriculture for milk products and, to a lesser extent, meat, while manure was essential for fertilizing.^[33] Mixed cultivation not only served a mixed diet and a sustainable agricultural base, but was also an economic strategy of risk aversion. Cereal crops need an absolute minimum of 250 to 300 mm of annual precipitation and no frost during the growing season; conditions that are impaired at regular intervals, though often just locally, in many of the climatic regions where cereal agriculture was practiced. Equally adverse were insufficient inundation or flooding in river zones, which in more centralized regimes like China, Babylonia, and Egypt could lead to catastrophic consequences for local agriculture, and political instability. Monoculture was no option any­where in the ancient world. This does not mean that market-oriented production did not lead to specialization in certain cash crops. But none of even the most commercially minded agrarian manuals of the Roman and Chinese imperial periods recommends putting everything on one card.

Agriculture was organized within three broad categories of property relationship. The most widespread one was tenancy and share-cropping. In such labor relationships cultivators work, either individually or collectively, land held by agrarian aristocracies or institutions (temples, kings, and high royal officials). Tenancy is usually the term for contractual relationships where fixed rental periods and obligations are specified; whereas share­cropping refers to dependent labor relationships where landlord and cultiva­tor share the harvest in (unequal) parts, and the cultivator's freedom is encumbered to a greater or lesser extent.¹¹ These types of semi-free relationships, where rents are more oppressing than taxes, are typical of periods of weak central power systems through which many African, Asian, and European empires went between 1200 bce and 900 c e. However, they must be regarded as a wide spectrum of dependent or semi-dependent agrarian labor relationships, rather than a timeless institution.

The second category was peasant agriculture where landowners cultivate their property together with their nuclear families and possibly one or two slaves. This type of land holding is most typically found in the core regions of the Greco-Roman Mediterranean. Another type of this category developed in empires with predominantly institutional landownership. Here, too, peasant landholding developed, as smaller and greater landholders - de iure tenants of institutional land - gained broader property rights as a result of hereditary bequest, gift, or purchase.^{[34] [35] [36]} In this type of free-holding, rents formally paid to institutional landlords were gradually transformed into taxes. Such kinds of transformation processes can be observed in different ways in some regions of China, Babylonia, and Egypt at different times between 600 bce and the first century CE.1³

The third mode of production, equally diverse in its social manifestation over time and space, was slave labor, which is attested in all societies considered here. Affluent to average peasant households in Northern China and India, Egypt, North Africa, and Europe held one or two slaves to help with agrarian labor and/or household tasks. Large numbers of slaves were also employed in high-risk occupations such as quarrying, mining, and building work. They frequently worked side by side with corvee laborers and prisoners, while household slaves rubbed shoulders with seasonal employees, and could be hired out for a wage as well. Slavery was built into the socio-economic system of ancient agrarian states. But only under the Roman Empire did slave employment turn into a strategy of market-oriented agrarian enterprise. Roman villa estates were typically both run by a qualified slave manager (vilicus) and cultivated by large numbers of chattel slaves.¹⁴

Agrarian development

Stable empires created favorable conditions for the development of agricul­ture, despite the agricultural and demographic destruction they caused locally through military invasion, raiding, and mass enslavement. Some development was the result of direct interference into social and geographic landscapes, such as settlement politics, development of agricultural and hydrological infrastructure, and the promotion of technological knowledge. Others were more indirect: peace and protection, transformation of exchange networks, or investment opportunities through imperial conquest and exploitation. Conquest, moreover, provided new settlement space, gave opportunity for tax reforms, and mobilized local knowledge. In the limited space of this chapter, I confine myself to two of these aspects.

Settlement politics

Sadao identifies two crucial economic processes in the making of imperial China: the breaking up of clan-based agriculture in Northern China under the Warring States and their replacement by family farms organized in small hierarchical communities (li) supervised by powerful patriarchs (the prede­cessors of Han bureaucratic administrators); and the investment by these

internationalen Symposiums in Tubingen 18-20. Juni 1990 (Tubingen: Selbstverlag, 1994), pp. 107-33; Johannes M. Renger, Institutional, Communal and Individual Ownership or Possession of Arable Land in Ancient Mesopotamia from the End of the Fourth to the End of the First Millennium BC,” Chicago-Kent Law Review 71 (1995): 269-319; van der Spek, “The Hellenistic Near East,” pp. 409-34.

14 Walter Scheidel, “Slavery,” in Scheidel (ed.), Cambridge Companion to the Roman Economy, pp. 89-113, for recent discussion of the stability of the Roman slave system. local patriarchs into new techniques of water control and thus the develop­ment of new agrarian space. The interrelated process of opening up new land and formation of new communities continued under Qin. One example is the Zhengdu basin, carried out by Li Peng, governor of Shu. Another is the Cheng Guo Canal, promoted by the king of Qin and named after his engineer, Cheng Guo of the state of Han. This canal irrigated the plain north of the Wei River in Shensi and opened up some 40,000 ching or 1821 km². Han continued to promote flood control and irrigation works in many other regions, some projects extending again to as much as 10,000 ching (c. 457 km²). By financing flood control and irrigation, and maintaining the bureaucracy to implement the projects, the dynasty benefited through taxation and power, but it also fostered agrarian development and social prosperity. Agrarian development continued throughout Early Han and greatly increased under Later Han.^{[37] [38]}

Similar projects of water control and resettlement are attested in other imperial contexts. Jursa describes the period of intensive canal building attested in northern Babylonia around Sippar in the early sixth century bce. This gave rise to the rapid transformation of the agrarian base of northern Babylonia under Chaldean rule during which rural properties underwent fundamental change, leading to an increase in productivity, economic growth, and the development of a more thoroughly monetized economy in Babylonia. Of perhaps lesser impact, but noteworthy, too, was the develop­ment of the Fayyum oasis southeast of Memphis under the Ptolemies during the early third century bce. By lowering the water level of Lake Moeris, they trebled the cultivable area from 450 to around 1200 km².1⁶ The development of the Fayyum served to settle Greek military and civil immigrants, was a project of prestige and cultural competition, and simultaneously created a fertile hinterland for the new capital of Alexandria.

Ofbroader economic consequence was the policy of the Roman government to settle veterans and found colonies on newly conquered Roman territory. Uncultivated land was marked out in squares and rectangles by means of boundaries or drainage ditches (a process called centuriation). During the early period of Roman conquest, it transformed the face of Roman Italy, Gaul, North Africa, and Spain where traces are still visible today. The state's organization and mobilization of the collective labor force of the rural popula­tion for these projects were immense. Drainage was particularly important in low-lying clay soils, or in rich river valleys, such as the Pomptine marshes in central Italy or the Po Valley, the latter transforming into Italy's richest agricultural region, in large parts through the land reclamation initiative of a single Roman senator.^[39] It might not be accidental that the same senator was also responsible for the grain supply of the city of Rome in 109 bce.

Land and investment

The Han and Roman empires represent very different agro-political systems, the one centered on some form of institutional ownership of land, a strong state, and bureaucracy, the other on more extensive private property rights over land, relatively weak central government, and decentralized forms of administration.^[40] But in both cases the narrative of land concentration and agrarian production for markets at the height of economic power converge.

Land concentration was probably well under way in pre-imperial China but took off under Han in connection with a series of floods and droughts combined with a fierce taxation regime.^[41] Poorer peasants were forced to sell their land, houses, and even children as a consequence of poverty and debt. So- called drifting peasants were employed as landless tenants in share-cropping arrangements. Despite repeated attempts by the state to forestall land concen­tration, large networks of landholding became accepted as a matter of course. T oward the end of the reign of Wudi (140-87 bce), a new and improved system of cultivation greatly increased agricultural productivity.^[42] It can best be under­stood as a form of integrated fallow: straight furrows were sown with seeds alternating with ridges that lay fallow on the same field and were reversed the next year. The accompanying invention of an improved plow with two shares and drawn by a pair of oxen led to more efficient sowing and could lead to double yields in cases of good management. The system was introduced on state-owned land and soon adopted on large private estates; but it met with problems among poorer peasants as it required more elaborate equipment, more animals, and above all more intensive care that could not be performed on family farms. Wealthy farmers also profited from improved irrigation through brick-lined wells, which could be dug more deeply. Irrigation in the North China Plain relied on water from such wells, so better wells compensated for insufficient rainfall, and thus were conducive to increased productivity.

By the time of Later Han, we hear of great families who combined social power with landowning and trade. The network of holdings these families dominated was vast. Fan Chung (c. 20 bce - 20 ce) held 300 ching (c. 1375 ha); Yin Shih in the beginning of the first century ce owned 700 ching (c. 3237 ha) and was able to mobilize a thousand men to fight in the civil war. Average individual holdings may have had the size of 2.8 to 3.2 ha, and someone who owned ten times the average could be regarded as affluent. It is important to note, however, that the reason for land concentration was influenced by an ideology of patronage, social control, and local power, rather than economic intensification.^[43]

Key to Roman land concentration was imperial conquest, the boom in demand for agrarian produce to supply the long-serving armies, the availability of slave labor, and the spread of wine consumption in the Roman Empire. The conquest and administration of provinces, above all Sicily, Spain, and the economically developed regions of the Eastern Mediterranean, created unpre­cedented monetary revenue for the Roman senatorial elite and familiarized them with the sophisticated monetary economy of the Eastern Mediterranean Hellenistic world. In addition, they came into contact with Hellenistic agricul­tural knowledge laid down in an extensive agronomic literature traveling to Rome via Athens, Alexandria, Cyrene, and Carthage. Land concentration of agrarian property in Italy is attested both archaeologically and in Late Republican political discourses when the call for land-distribution schemes due to the impoverishment of the peasantry played an important role in the debates of the declining state. Archaeologically, the well-organized agrarian villa system seems to have begun to transform the Italian landscape from the second century bce onwards. Settefenestre near Cosa is the best-known example, but there were many others, concentrating mostly in Campania in southwestern Italy, and the Po Valley. Roman senators expanded their hold­ings in Italy but also acquired land in the provinces. By the end of the Republic, the senator Marcus Licinius Crassus was said to have 200 million sesterces in land, which may be calculated into the value of roughly 500 km² of arable land.^[44] Villae of 25 to 75 ha seem to have been medium sized, while the average peasant farmstead measured just one tenth of that. So-called latifundia developed in Italy and Sicily in the course of the first century c e and were an amalgamation of such mid-sized estates. These could grow to a size of 1000-2000 ha, comparable to royal or temple holdings in Egypt and the Near East.

But management principles mattered much more than individual size in determining the nature of the villa system. Typical were a large proportion of unfree labor in the productive force, intensive, year-round cultivation, tech­nological and agricultural experimentation, including fertilization and irriga­tion, and the systematic production of cash crops, above all oil and wine, for local and interregional markets. The agronomist Columella (first century ce) offered expert advice on the running of such estates and provides an idea of the sophistication of agricultural practice. The villa system spread to Africa, Gaul, and Germany where large estates with much equipment for oil and wine production sufficient to supply interregional markets are attested.^[45] Also the proprietors of estates gradually became a more diverse social group. By the late first century bce, a Roman freedman C. Caecilius Isodorus owned a fortune that could easily rival those of more long-standing social background (though his case may be exceptional).^[46] We are unable to quantify the output of these large estates, but they provide the backdrop for the scale of com­modity circulation in the Roman Empire.

Monetization

The use of limited-purpose money in some spheres of exchange preceded all monetary systems of the Afro-Eurasian world of the mid-first millennium and helps to explain monetization as a path-dependent process. Cowries domi­nated the Far Eastern aristocratic exchange network between China, the Southeastern Pacific, and India; precious metal bullion was a typical means of payment and exchange in Western Eurasia and Egypt. Local currencies with which rents were paid, tribute collected, diplomacy conducted, and sacred obligations fulfilled included grain, silk, and other textiles, jade discs, bronze bars, precious metal objects and base metal utensils, pearls, and glass ware.^[47] An important step in the history of monetization is the exchange of objects according to fixed units, which requires a degree of central authority over exchange. The first systems in which such centralized control over monetary units is attested are Mesopotamia and Egypt in the third millennium bce.^[48] From the second quarter of the first millennium, however, we find many more such cases increasing in tandem with growing political organization in Asia, Egypt, and the city-states of Greece and Italy. While state formation was a vital precondition for monetary exchange, imperial expansion was not. Imperial governments and the administrations did not, or could not, enforce their currency across political boundaries, though monetary systems conso­lidated under imperial conditions due to tribute payments, paid military service, and the symbolic benefits which accrue from using a powerful currency. Precious metal proved the most accepted monetary medium in the long term, because of its durability, portability, divisibility, and relatively stable value within and across political boundaries.

Cash and coinage

We have to distinguish between two cash traditions. The one developed coinage and very rapidly replaced other monetary media by it. This is repre­sented, at least in the case of bronze coinage, by China, as well as by India and the Greek world, which also had a strong impact on later Greco-Bactrian, Kushan, and Parthian coin use. Within the other cash tradition, the use of uncoined precious metal had a long tradition, and was maintained longer after contacts with coinage. This was the case in the Near Eastern empires and Egypt. But also within the coin tradition, bullion remained part of the mone­tary economy after the introduction of coinage. In China gold was very rarely minted into coins despite forming part of a bimetallic monetary system. In the Greco-Roman world, unsurprisingly, gold and silver bullion continued to be used as a store of value, and for the transfer of large sums.^[49] The trend toward greater monetization and greater financial sophistication - including financial intermediation and credit finance - can be observed in both cash traditions, and there is no intrinsic economic advantage in either of them.

Coinage developed in imperial China in the fourth century bce and came to be used in all Chinese states according to local weight standards, except the southern state of Chou where cowry shells and inscribed gold plates formed an isolated monetary development. Characteristic of the Chinese coin tradi­tion is the use of base metal, a punch-whole in the centre of the coin, and frequently an inscription of value or issuing authority. Gold remained uncoined but became part of a bimetallic monetary system. A further important idiosyncrasy of Chinese coinage was the lack, or incapacity, of state control over private coining.^[50]

The beginnings of coinage in the Indian subcontinent lie much in the dark, but the assumption that it developed in contact with Alexander the Great rests on no more than cultural prejudice. The first Indian coins originate in the Indo-Gangetic plain during the sixth century bce, long before Indian contacts with Greeks. They were minted, punch-marked silver pieces cut to weight, which coincides neither with Chinese nor Greek technology. Punch- marked coins are found throughout India, but most types were more or less restricted geographically. It has been argued that they were a means of exchange among tribal states that had formed in the Indian subcontinent in the fifth and fourth centuries bce. Other issues were distributed more widely, which may either represent the new coinage of the Nanda and Maurya dynasties, which united most of India in the late fourth and early third centuries bce, or represent local issues that circulated across political borders from that time onwards.^[51]

The Greek coin tradition is the oldest and best documented of the three. It was preceded for at least one century by silver bullion used according to fixed units of weight. The first coins were minted in Greco-Lydian cities on the coast of Asia Minor during the late seventh century bce. They were struck in a local alloy of gold and silver, called electron, which occurs naturally on Mount Tmolos and the River Paktolos in Lydia. The idea to coin precious metal spread into major cities of the Aegean, such as Aegina, Corinth, Athens, and some Ionian and Cycladic communities. Greek coins outside Lydia were struck in silver according to local weight systems and bearing local emblems of civic identity. Very rapidly coinage was adopted by many cities in the Black Sea region, Cyrene, Sicily, Spain, southern France, and Italy where Greeks had settled and maintained intense ties with mainland Greece. Bronze and gold coins do not appear before the fourth century bce.^[52]

The coinage of the city of Athens became dominant in the fifth century bce due to the Athenian Empire and the financial demands of the federal fleet. It spread far beyond the boundaries of the Greek-speaking world in the late fifth and fourth centuries bce as a result of being the most accepted currency by mercenaries and traders everywhere. Imitations of Athenian coins are found in Egypt, Syria, and Arabia where the local use of “Athenian” coinage filled different purposes. On the Arabian Peninsula, for example, Greek coins spurred local monetization from the fourth century bce onwards, particularly in the corridor running from Gaza to the South Arabian kingdoms.^[53] Coinages of other Greek cities were adopted outside their boundaries, too.^[54] Carthage in northern Africa adopted coinage via Sicily in the fourth century bce; Rome via Neapolis in southern Italy during the third; the Celts were introduced to coinage via Macedonia and the Greek towns on the Franco-Iberian coast in the late fourth century bce. Coin use was stimulated by the expansion of Greek culture under Alexander the Great and the ensuing Greek administration of the formerly Persian Empire. Full monetary consolidation, that is, a single imperial currency, supplemented by subsidiary local issues, developed in the Mediterranean under the Roman Empire from the second century bce onwards.^[55]

The use of metal money was dependent on local metal resources. Many monetary societies, however, had to rely on conquest or exchange. Highly monetized empires, most notably Babylonia, did not have access to local mines, but their monetary economies flourished as long as silver or coin supply was guaranteed by sufficient accumulation. The enormous silver wealth of Babylonia in and after the Achaemenid period is supposed to have been made possible first through gifts, tribute, and predation, but increasingly through commercial trade.^[56] Economies with a high agrarian resource endow­ment potentially could benefit from a positive balance of trade, especially when local agricultural productivity was increased by efficient agrarian man­agement. But, arguably, the ideological emphasis on agriculture as the only source of real wealth, and the symbolic benefits attributed to spending, rather than receiving, money, prohibited ancient societies from developing export to its full mercantile potential. Complaints about the drainage of money surfaced only when it was linked to expenditure on luxuries, as Roman literature throughout the imperial period makes abundantly clear. But a more serious challenge to imperial stability was the loss of money through military over­spending. This raises the question of the role of states and imperial govern­ance in ancient economies.

Taxation, trade, and urban development

Taxation was one of the most important means of asserting and maintaining empire both financially and symbolically. City-states, even if they were bound into larger imperial structures, refrained from taxing their citizens but asserted their sovereignty by taxing foreigners, merchants, and imports instead. Kingdoms and empires taxed their subjects, but tended to exempt privileged communities and classes of subjects. Most typical of ancient taxation was a combination of capitation, land or harvest taxes, property taxes, and a large number of indirect imposts on shipping, manufacturing, marketing, land sales, animal husbandry, fishing, use of public services, and so on. It was normally the sum of small amounts rather than the volume of an individual tax that made up the balance of a tax district. Taxes were used for local purposes (infrastructure and military installments) as much as they were sent to the centers of power and frontier zones. It is uncontroversial that they were the most important means of maintaining the costs of campaigns and armies.^[57] Any other costs were secondary to this expenditure in the imperial budget.

It should be noted, moreover, that the income generated was only one of the functions of imperial taxation; another was exercise of social control. For the assessment of poll and land taxes, tax subjects, land, or yields had to be registered; age groups, gender, ethnic origin, citizen status and faith were demarcated by differential assessment. Privileged groups and communities could be favored by reduced taxes, and unwanted professions, such as merchants under Han, imposed a double rate. Tax incentives could be created for special purposes, such as the introduction of a new crop, or the increase of children. There was also a close connection between taxation and the physical control of people. Both in China and in Egypt there was an extensive system of forced labor to which, in principle, everyone was liable. Yet corvee could be avoided against payment of tax, showing the convert­ibility of the state's control over surplus and bodies.^[58] Given such additional functions of taxation, it is doubtful that tax levies were calculated strictly on budgetary needs.

Fiscal politics, however, had the most profound impact on ancient econo­mies. Given the agrarian base of most tax subjects, rents and land taxes were most naturally levied in kind. The Roman emperors since the time of Augustus used that fact to supply no fewer than 200,000 citizens in the city of Rome regularly with free grain from North Africa and Egypt, to support markets in other parts of the empire, and to provide its huge armies with leather and clothing. A large variety of goods were collected as tax in kind, such as wood for shipbuilding, ox hides for shoes, hemp for oil, and silk for fine clothing. Under the Ptolemies, Egyptian taxes and rents in kind were used for state marketing as well as for luring merchants into the country in order to make a profit on their currency exchange. Yet cash was in many ways a preferred medium of taxation for its flexible use, cheap transport, and symbolic imperial meaning. The question, however, of what proportion of the aggregate value of imperial tax incomes was collected in cash is contested, and if cash incomes were larger at any particular moment, this must be regarded as an exceptional rather than predictable development. Cash taxa­tion requires a great amount of enforcement costs.

Already under Persian administration, parts of Asia were taxed in cash.^[59] But rather than responding to commercial development, it forced tax subjects into commercial transactions. It mobilized cash resources insofar as they had been treasured and hoarded so far. For satraps, temples, and other institutional landholders, rather than the peasants on the fields, were made responsible for the conversion of agrarian surplus into cash. This surfaces when we look at subsequent periods. The Hellenistic kings took over from the Persians a mixed system of taxation in cash and kind, for the collection of which local administrations and temples seem to have been fully liable at first.^[60] Taxation in kind continued to operate within the traditional institutions of collection and storage, but for cash taxes they gradually introduced tax­farmers who came to be responsible for tax collection from the population itself. Tax-farmers played an important role in mediating between the economy in cash and in kind. But peasants also were introduced to cash by being paid small wages for labor service and employment in the indus­tries owned by the king. In China, comparable structures emerge. Cash taxes were boosted from the time of the Warring States by a gradual reduction of land taxation in kind and by increasing capitation and property taxes, levied in cash. Number and volume of cash taxation was greatly increased during the early years of Han. There is no direct evidence of how peasants got hold of cash to pay their taxes, but scholars assume it was through a combination of marketing, wage labor, and intermediation by landlords and merchants. Both peasant marketing and intermediation must have mobilized large quantities of commodities and cash.^{[61] [62]}

Urban markets played an increasingly crucial role in mobilizing agrarian surplus and converting it into cash, either because of the tax-farming system or because of large landowners who collected both rents and taxes from their tenants in kind and sold them in urban markets as part of their large- scale economies. By the first century ce, many cities had become nodal points of larger systems of exploitation and transfers, converting local taxes and rents into exportable items of trade and cash. Without the extraction of resources that was caused and facilitated by imperial taxation, elongated lines of trade and the resultant network of interregional exchange that was ultimately centered on a few large capitals would not have emerged in the

40

same ways.

Interregional trade and global exchange

Extensive networks of exchange predicated on taxation, elite consumption, and military expansion predate our period and generated technology and structures for interregional exchange to develop further in the first millen­nium. Most advanced had been the networks centered in Mesopotamia, reaching across the Persian Gulf into the Arabian Peninsula in the south, and Persia in the north.^[63] Another such network had spanned between Egypt via Cyprus and the Levant to Anatolia, and between Egypt, Nubia, and the African Red Sea kingdoms further south.^[64] The northeastern region of China up to the age of the Zhou Dynasty, by contrast, was as yet a rather isolated region, stretching no further into the East China Sea than modern Taiwan.

In the early first millennium, after a period of political fragmentation, the highly competitive city-states of the Phoenician coast, most notably Tyre, developed new commercial directions which in the west reached, via Cyprus, North Africa, and Sicily, to the Spanish coast. Towards the east, and possibly in cooperation with the new kingdom of Israel, Phoenicians secured access to the Euphrates region, Mesopotamia and northern Arabia, while their navigational skills led them into the gold-producing countries along the Red Sea coast, possibly as far as the Indian Ocean.^[65] Typically, the Phoenician trade network seems to have worked through trading settlements abroad (emporia), and private enterprise was limited. Though the evidence is inconclusive, some scholars argue that Phoenician trade was organized by the aristocracies of the city­states rather than by independent professional merchants.^[66] This raises the important issue about the extent to which long-distance exchange in the early first millennium can be regarded as trade.

Most Bronze Age exchange networks have been identified only by shared metallurgical practices and an exchange of material culture visible in elite burial. Thus, we find an early interregional exchange network in Southeast Asia from the beginning of Eastern Zhou (seventh century bce).^[67] Exchange and common metallurgical practice are also found in the northern Chinese zone from the Late Western Zhou and Early Spring and Autumn period (ninth to seventh century bce).^[68] At the other end of the world, the semi- sedentary continental European populations developed gradually a common material culture through migration and exchange.^[69] In the second quarter of the first millennium, two developments took place that in the long term profoundly affected the nature of exchange in the Afro-Eurasian region: the conquest of large parts of Asia by the Persians, and the expansion of Greek exchange in the Mediterranean.

The Persians are famous for having created a network of roads throughout their imperial territory, which laid the foundations for the movement of goods through formerly inaccessible territory. The Persian king Darius was also remembered for having built canals and emporia on the Egyptian Red Sea coast linking the Nile with the Arabian Peninsula. We have extremely little evidence for trade along these roads and routes under Persian domination. Nevertheless, there is still much to suggest that the larger part of goods that were moved along Persian roads down to the middle of the millennium were forms of tribute rather than items of commercial trade.^[70]

The second development was the growth of Greek power in the Mediterranean. During the first half of the first millennium, the Greeks had not been aggressive conquerors, nor did they develop into serious competi­tors of the Carthaginian-Phoenician trade network in the Western Mediterranean. They had established Phoenician-type emporia at the Levant and on the western Italian coast as early as the eighth century bce. They had also been granted a trading post in Egypt during the late seventh century bce. However, rather than competing for trade, they established an intercon­nected urban culture based on collective political participation, exchange, and consumption.^[71] Their cities differed both from the emporia that had been established for trading purposes in harbors and frontier zones, and from the capitals that were dominated by palaces and courts in the various African and Asian empires, including China. Wider social groups participated in the exchange system of their cities and gained access to urban markets as consumers through an ideology of political participation and equality. Greek aristocrats and civic governments within this exchange system aimed at opening markets by interfering with trade and prices of staples.^[72]

Democracy was not long-lasting, but with the Macedonian conquest of the Persian Empire, including Egypt, at the end of the fourth century bce, Greek urban culture, centered on civic interaction spread toward Central Asia and Egypt.^[73] And while large parts of that empire were soon lost to local king­doms and stronger imperial networks in central Asia, Greek urban culture, in many intercultural varieties, remained strong. When, in the first century C e, the Chinese expanded into the Tarim Basin (present-day Xinjiang province) that bordered on the emerging Kushan Empire, hybrid coins were adopted with Greco-Indian motifs on one side and Chinese symbols or weight marks on the other.^[74] The Greek language remained one of the dominant means of communication in Egyptian, Western and Central Asian trading commu­nities down to the Muslim conquest and beyond.^[75]

On the Indian subcontinent greater degrees of cultural cohesion emerged in the fifth century bce. Buddhism, a new religion building on older Brahman traditions, was one of the articulating elements in this new cultural cohesion. The Mauryan dynasty, reaching its height of power under the king Ashoka in the third century bce, unified most of the South Asian world and created a broad, if short-lived, victory of Buddhism. More importantly, it created a political framework for a shared culture of consumption that began to be recognizably Indian despite regional variation. The Qin and Han dynasties united China for the first time and fostered economic development in the ways described in previous sections. They helped to integrate and synthesize local cultures to much greater degrees even than the Mauryans and Hellenistic Greeks had achieved further west.

The East-West trade along the Silk Roads and the Indian Ocean from the third century bce onwards is treated in much detail in Chapter 18 of this volume. It is worth noting, however, that the importance of what in global perspective may be called regional networks of exchange continued to exceed the role of intercontinental trade along those routes. It is almost certain, although it cannot be proved, that the aggregate value of the goods that went on the long journey from Eastern and Central Asia to the Mediterranean and on to Rome was only a fraction of the aggregate value of the same range of goods that continued to circulate in much smaller geographical confines.^[76] The most significant fact of intercontinental trade was that the value of individual journeys was huge, and that it was dependent on the consumptive capacities of rather narrow social elites.

By the beginning of the Common Era, both the East African coastline and Arabia and India were settled with harbor towns connected inland by river and caravan roads.^[77] Some show archaeological traces of permanent foreign trading communities, which confirms that the intercontinental trade to the east and the west was regular and in the hands of professional traders. According to the Roman geographer Strabo, up to 120 ships per year set sail from Myos Hormos on the Red Sea to India (Strab. 2.5.12). A business letter accounting for a maritime loan related to a trade journey from Egypt to Muziris on the West Indian coast gives us an idea of the importance of India and Egypt for the movement of goods between Asia and the Mediterranean in the first century ce. On the single journey attested in that papyrus, c. 135 tons of tusks, pearls, and spices were shipped with a total value of almost 7 million Egyptian drachmas after the subtraction of 25 percent worth of tolls. This was equal to the price of roughly 1,765 ha of moderately productive arable land in Italy.^[78]

The East-West connection from China to the Mediterranean went via India and the South Arabian coast. But the Arabian kingdom and Ethiopian destinations, then under Arabian control, were by no means negligible. The Periplus Maris Erythraei, a first-century ce treatise on trading opportunities in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, suggests much internal trade between Arabian and Indian cities, which not only native traders but also Egyptian merchants seem to have shipped during their long-term journeys. Goods, moreover, came either from local places, or from farther away. China supplied silks to the cities on the East Indian coast, while Italian and Phrygian wine, as well as olive oil, coins, tin, saffron, or coral from other parts of the Roman Empire, passed through Egypt into the Indian Ocean. To judge from the Periplous, trade could mean quite a number of things: some goods were freely exchanged in markets according to supply and demand; others were labeled as destined directly for some Indian court: statues, expensive copper, gold and silver ware, horses, mules, and slaves. This suggests that free trade was not separated in practice from politically directed trade to particular destina­tions. Similarly, we find both monetized trade and barter along the Indian coast.^[79]

There was thus no clear distinction between “engines” and “passageways” of trade, so convincingly identified by Smith for the economy from 1000 ce onwards.^[80] Regions with a precarious agrarian base grew wealthy through their geo-economic location, such as the city-states of Sogdiana along the central Asian route from China, Adulis in the Axumite kingdom in East Africa, Petra in the Nabatean kingdom of the northern Arabian Peninsula and above all Palmyra which, during the third century ce, dominated large parts of central Asia with its powerful military.^[81] But once we focus more narrowly on the local histories of cities of the Silk Roads, we find that they were more than posts on passageways. They thrived on the money from passing trade, but their aristocracies also profited from the access to estab­lished symbols of social distinction. Some of these aristocracies rose to political and military power, and became vital for the spread of faiths in Asia after 400 ce. It was not just traders spreading faiths, but local social hierarchies catching the opportunity to engage successfully with the symbolic system of other peers.

Neither does the trade of late antique Mecca provide an explanation for the rise of Islamic power, as is claimed in Islam religious historiography and in numerous popular accounts. The city did not lie on one of the major cross­roads of South and East Arabian trade which rather favored the sea routes. Meccan trade, as Patricia Crone has shown, was purely local and dominated by ordinary local products, rather than luxuries.^[82] The Arabian Peninsula remained socially and tribally fragmented, as it had always been in the last centuries. Mecca was not a center of pilgrimage and market exchange, and the alleged mercantile economy did not disrupt a united social order that had existed before. Arguably, the great attraction of Muhammad's teaching resided in its combination of monotheism built on ancestral religious tradi­tion, and a new form of tribal harmony that had never existed before. Behind the meteoric rise of Muslim power toward a world empire may be discovered the well-known connection between state-formation and military expansion, now spurred by a religious mission.

Religion became an important factor for consumption, conquest, and trade from the fifth century ce onwards. In Chapter 17 of this volume, Xinru Liu shows how silk decorations in the royal representation of the Byzantine emperors in Constantinople had an important impact on silk consumption from the time of Justinian I (r. 527-565 ce) onwards. In China silk came to be used by the court to endow Buddhist monasteries in the hope of being reborn into a better life. After the increasing disintegration of the Roman Empire in the Mediterranean, and of China in eastern Asia, the geo-economic space of Europe, North Africa, and western to eastern Asia was gradually reordered.^[83] China did not reunite before the Sui and Tang, while in Western Europe the centers of political and economic power shifted from the Mediterranean to the inner continent and the Baltic from the sixth century onwards. During the prosperous early period of the Byzantine Empire, the wine trade between Constantinople, Gaza, and the Negev flourished and most likely expanded, with a concomitant stimulus to ceramics production in harbor towns and production centers. But alongside growing prosperity in the Byzantine Empire, there was also structural change. Both texts and archaeological remains of sunken ships point to merchants' efforts to move away from highly taxed markets in the cities to more informal market places in smaller settlements and waterside landings.^[84] With the Muslim conquest of Syria in the early seventh century, followed by Egypt, North Africa, Morocco, Spain as well as Sassanid Persia, the Arabs dominated the southern part of the Mediterranean and Asia as far as the Caucasus in the north and the Indus toward the east. This separated a Mediterranean unity which had been char­acteristic of Afro-Eurasian history since the Phoenician and Greek colonization period, and created a new economic space centered on the Islamic heartland, while India and China reemerged as its most important competitors.^[85]

Further Reading

Bedford, P. R., “The Persian Near East,” in Walter Scheidel, Ian Morris, and Richard P. Saller (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World, Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 302-33.

Broodbank, Cyprian The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World, Oxford University Press, 2013.

Chase-Dunn, Christopher, and Thomas D. Hall, Rise and Demise: Comparing World Systems, Bolder, co: Westview, 1997.

Crone, Patricia, Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987.

Curtin, Philip D., Cross-Cultural Tradein World History, Cambridge University Press, 1984. Di Cosmo, Nicola, Ancient China and Its Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power in East Asian History, Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Ebrey, Patricia, “The Economic and Social History of Later Han,” in Michael Loewe and Denis Twitchett (eds.), The Cambridge History of China, Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 608-48.

Fitzpatrick, Matthew P., “Provincializing Rome: The Indian Ocean Trade Network and Roman Imperialism,” Journal of World History 22 (2011): 27-54.

Geraghty, R. M., “The Impact of Globalization in the Roman Empire, 200 bc-ad 100,” Journal of Economic History 67 (2007): 1036-61.

Harris, William V., “The Late Republic,” in Walter Scheidel, Ian Morris, and Richard P. Saller (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World, Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 511-42.

Hodges, Richard, Dark Age Economics: A New Audit, Bristol Classical Press, 2012.

Horden, Peregrine, and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History, Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.

Jursa, Michael, Aspects of the Economic History of Babylonia in the First Millennium: Economic Geography, Economic Mentalities, Agriculture, the Use of Money and the Problem of Economic Growth, Munster: Ugarit Verlag, 2010.

Kehoe, Dennis P., “The Early Roman Empire: Production,” in Walter Scheidel, Ian Morris, and Richard P. Saller (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco- Roman World, Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 543-69.

SITTA VON RBDBN

KroU_jJohn H., “The Monetary Use of Weighed Bullion in Archaic Greece,” in WiUiam V. Harris (ed.), The Monetary System of the Greeks and Romans, Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 12-37.

Laiou, Angeliki E., and Cecile Morrison, The Byzantine Economy, Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Lewis, Mark Edward, The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han, Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Liu, Xinru, Ancient India and Ancient China: Trade and Religious Exchanges ad 1-600, New Dehli: Vicas, 1988.

McCormick, Michael, Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce ad 300-900, Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Morley, Neville, Trade in Classical Antiquity, Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Sadao, Nishijime, “The Economic and Social History of Former Han,” in Denis Twitchett and Michael Loewe (eds.), The Cambridge History of China, Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 545-607.

Sarris, Peter, Economy and Society in the Age of Justinian, Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Scarre, Christopher (ed.), Past Worlds: The Times Atlas of Archaeology, London: Times Books, 1988.

Schaps, David M., “The Invention of Coinage in Lydia, in India and in China,” Bulletin du Cercle d’Etudes Numismatiques 44 (2007): 281-322.

Scheidel, Walter, “The Divergent Evolution of Coinage in Eastern and Western Eurasia,” in William V. Harris (ed.), The Monetary Systems of the Greeks and Romans, Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 267-86.

Scheidel, Walter, “From the Great Convergence to the Great Divergence: Roman and Qin-Han State Formation and Its Aftermath,” in Scheidel (ed.), Rome and China: Comparative Perspectives on Ancient World Empires, Oxford Studies in Early Empires, Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 11-23.

Scheidel, Walter, Ian Morris, and Richard P. Saller (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World, Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Sidebotham, Steven E., Berenike and the Ancient Mediterranean Spice Route, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.

van der Spek, R. J., “The Hellenistic Near East,” in Walter Scheidel, Ian Morris, and Richard P. Saller (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World, Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 409-34.

von Reden, Sitta, Money in Classical Antiquity, Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Wickham, Christopher, “Rethinking the Structure of the Early Medieval Economy,” in Jennifer R. Davis and Michael McCormick (eds.), The Long Morning of Medieval Europe, Aldershot: Scholars Press, 2008, pp. 19-31.

Williams, Jonathan (ed.), Money: A History, London: The British Museum Press, 1997.

Woolf, Greg, “World Systems Analysis and the Roman Empire,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 3 (1990): 44-58.

Young, Gary K., Rome’s Eastern Trade: International Commerce and Imperial Policy, 31 bc - ad 305, London: Routledge, 2001.