Premodern Trade in World History - Richard L. Smith

Pliny seems to agree and notes that the monsoon wind was henceforth named after Hippalos, and the geographer Claudius Ptolemy na ...

the Red Sea, and Roman troops guarded and maintained the desert roads between the Nile and Red Sea. This did not come free: toll ...

“In earlier times not so many as twenty vessels would dare to traverse the [Red Sea] far enough to get a peep outside the strait ...

related trees native to different parts of southern Arabia and northern Somalia. The Arabs who controlled their cultivation and ...

kinds of pepper: long pepper produced from the fruit of a shrub found in northern India; black pepper from the berries of a clim ...

cinnamon is collected in that part of Arabia, and from there it is sent all over the world.” Giant greedy birds aside, there is ...

of problems from restoring male sexual potency to serving as an antitoxin for snake bites. Other wild animal products included t ...

allies against Central Asian nomads. So long as the Chinese and Kushan empires remained strong, tons of silk wouldflow through I ...

Indian ports, passing on the same docks Indian cotton goods going in the opposite direction. Even stranger was storax, an aromat ...

and by the time the Romans were in direct contact with India, theflow was in one direction only. Centuries earlier Herodotus had ...

hundred times its prime cost”(a sestertius was the principal bronze coin of the Roman Empire valued at a quarter-denarius; the a ...

Chapter 9 Following the Periplus Roman maritime trade with the Indian Ocean began at Alexandria, which served as the Mediterrane ...

profitable trade. Eventually they opened an overland road to the Nile Valley connecting to Egypt after defeating a number of peo ...

known by their most conspicuous product–a caravan track that ran north paralleling the Red Sea. Such a road was made possible by ...

essentially mandated by law since they“are so much inclined to acquire possessions that they publiclyfine anyone who has diminis ...

Barbaria.” Here were a string of ports where no central government had control. Apparently it was the only area in the western a ...

If East African trade was limited in potential, it also presented naviga- tional problems for the type of square-rigged ship tha ...

According to Nearchus, Alexander’s admiral who commanded an expedition from the mouth of the Indus to the Persian Gulf, these se ...

Barygaza was especially treacherous: in one place shoals and eddies reached beyond the sight of land; in another, rough seas wit ...

could get a shipful of goods at one or both of these ports without further effort or risk, and south of Barygaza pirates were of ...