The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [81]
From Ganges to Tiber
Asoka was a contemporary of Hannibal and Scipio, which brings me to Rome. Rome’s particular speciality, from its very first days until the end of its empire, was simply to plunder its provinces to pay for bribes, luxuries, triumphs and soldiers’ pensions nearer to home. There were four respectable ways for a prominent Roman to gain wealth: land-owning, booty from war, money lending and bribery. Cicero pocketed over two million sesterces (three times the sum he had previously quoted to illustrate ‘luxury’) from his governorship of Cilicia in 51 and 50 BC – and he had a reputation as an especially honest governor.
Yet there is no doubt that Rome’s hegemony was built on trade. Rome was the final unification of Greece’s and Carthage’s trade zones, with a smattering of belligerent Etruscans and Latins in charge. ‘The history of antiquity resounds with the sanguinary achievements of Aryan warrior elites,’ wrote Thomas Carney, ‘but it was the despised Levantines, Arameans, Syrians and Greeklings who constituted the economic heroes of antiquity.’ The populous and prosperous cities of southern Italy, Sicily and points east that were the core of Rome’s world were Greek-speaking; they did the hard work of keeping people rich while legionaries and consuls strutted their triumphs. The fact that standard histories of Rome barely mention the markets, merchants, ships and family firms that sustained the empire, preferring instead to bang on about battles, does not mean they did not exist. Ostia was a trading city as surely as Hong Kong is today, with ‘a vast piazza housing the head offices of some five dozen companies’. Much of the Campanian countryside was devoted to slave-manned plantations growing wine and oil for export.
Moreover, Rome’s continuing prosperity once the republic became an empire may be down at least partly to the ‘discovery’ of India. Following Augustus’s absorption of Egypt, the Romans inherited the Egyptians’ trade with the East, and soon the Red Sea was alive with massive Roman cargo ships carrying tin, lead, silver, glass and wine – the latter soon becoming an exciting novelty in India. Thanks to the discovery of the monsoon, which reliably blew ships eastward in summer and back westward in winter, the journey across the Arabian Sea was cut from years to months. At last Rome’s ships made direct contact with the world’s economic superpower. In the first century, the anonymous author of The Periplus of the Erythrean Sea described the navigation and trade of the Indian Ocean; Strabo wrote that ‘now great fleets are sent as far as India’; and the emperor Tiberius complained of Indian luxuries draining the empire of its wealth. Peacocks from India became a favourite possession of Roman plutocrats. Indian ports like Barigaza (modern Bharuch in Gujarat) seem to have blossomed through exporting cotton cloth and other manufactures to the West. Soon, even within India, there were enclaves of Roman traders, whose hoards of amphorae and coins still sometimes come to light. Arikamedu, for example, on the east coast near modern Pondicherry, was exporting to China glass imported from Roman Syria (glass blowing was a new Roman invention and glass was suddenly much better and cheaper throughout the empire).
Think about this from the consumer’s point of view. Nobody in China can blow glass; nobody in Europe can reel silk. Thanks to a middleman in India, however, the European can wear silk and the Chinese can use glass. The European may scoff at the ridiculous legend that this lovely cloth is made from the cocoons of caterpillars; and the Chinese may guffaw at the laughable fable that this transparent ceramic