Roman Overland Trade and Maritime Trade
Laurent Zhang
The Roman world was shaped extensively by both overland trade around the
Mediterranean and maritime trade from the east—India and China. Both the overland
and maritime trade helped unite the Roman world by incorporating all sorts of people
and goods together. However, Roman overland trade differs from its maritime trade in
several ways.
When the Roman Republic evolved into the Roman Empire during the first century B.C.,
life in Rome and other major cities began to change significantly. The Roman Empire
expanded its influences around the Mediterranean which was later called “Mare
Nostrum” literally “our sea” in English. The Roman Empire incorporated all sorts of
people and goods from the Mediterranean coasts and further east into Rome, the
cosmopolitan capital city of the empire.(Xinru Liu, p20) A united empire ensured the
safety of merchants and security of trade inside the Mediterranean and gave a huge boost
in trading practices especially in the period of Pax Romania.
Trading practices was further facilitated by the long-time stable political situation inside
the Roman Empire. From the first century B.C. to the second century A.D, the Roman
world was under Pax Romana, a relatively peaceful political period. Contemporarily
mediterranean trade was heavily collaborative, highly systematised, extensively
networked, document based, contractual activity, with clearly stipulated rates of rent,
interest, price and profit accounted in terms of money and with precise sense of weights
and measures. (Gurukkal, p201) Constant stability and prosperity in the Roman Empire
also enabled the Roman emperors, nobilities and wealthy citizens to take further interests
in eastern products which they valued as entertainment purpose and providing high-
social status. Most of the eastern trade goods were brought from caravan cities on the
edges of the Syrian and Jordanian deserts by overland routes from the east. Compared to
the eastern commodities, the Mediterranean goods were practical and daily products—
pigs from Scilly, grapes from Italy and wheats from North Africa. The eastern luxuries-
goods was mainly for entrainment purposes— spices, raw silk, painted hangings, fine
linen fabrics, Indian eunuchs, lions and lionesses, leopards…(Galli, p8)
The Roman Empire proved itself as the world’s largest market, with thousands of wealth
