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Whether it be the Latium-threatening Parthians that he leads in deserved triumph, or whether it be conquered Chinese and Indians from eastern shores, he'll 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
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 Finley's 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...