Slaves were available and cheap in Gaul because of the ongoing state-
building and social-stratification processes. Roman merchants earned fortunes
by encouraging warrior communities to expand at the expense of their less
organized or militarized neighbors. When the Romans themselves decided to
conquer Gaul, slave dealers followed in their wake, depopulating large
swaths of the country. As the Gaulish thirst for wine appeared insatiable, so
was the Roman need for latifundia slaves. However, slaves had to come from
war or from outside the empire. Thus the Roman conquest signaled the
beginning of the end of the Gallic slave trade since independent tribes were
no longer free to raid and capture each other’s people, and rulers were not
allowed to enslave their own people once under Roman law.
Gaul’s importance in long-distance trade did not fade with the decline of
the slave trade. No single product could impact on much larger economic
forces at work, which during the Imperial period would see a shift away from
Italy to the more peripheral areas of the Aegean–Black Sea frontier in the
east and the Gaul–Spain–Britain axis in the west. In Gaul, Roman mer-
chants moved in to elbow aside the chiefly class that had hitherto controlled
long-distance exchange. Roman-turned-Gallic merchants assumed the mid-
dleman position in trade systems extending to Britain, Germany, and
beyond. Cities developed around Roman forts, generating more trade while
Roman currency commercialized the Gallic economy down to the village
level. Roman products poured into Britain, which would soon join Gaul as
part of the empire as did limited sections of Germany.
Not all Roman trade with Germany went through Gaul; some came
directly over the Alps or through the Danubian provinces. In border zones a
limited market economy developed often using Roman money. Some Roman
merchants penetrated into unoccupied Germany to do business at established
marketplaces or meet native counterparts bringing goods from farther afield.
In this way Roman merchants plugged into the network of commercial
contacts that ran through the Germanic world. Some Roman traders were
not averse to doing business with groups considered to be unfriendly to the
empire although this could be risky since such transactions were not guar-
anteed by treaties or agreements. At times Roman authorities, including
Caesar, used the problems that arose from such dealings as justifications for
war. Some German tribes who opposed the Romans refused to trade for
Roman goods in the quite perceptive view that a desire for such goods
opened the door to Roman economic and cultural influence, which too often
led to Roman political domination.
In the border zones, Roman trade goods featured articles for everyday
consumption. More luxurious products, includingfinely made bronze and
silver items, jewelry, glass, and gold and silver coins, tended to penetrate
much farther into the German hinterland. Somewhere along the line they
sometimes ceased being commodities bought and sold through the market
economy and entered the older system of elite gift exchange driven by social
Shifting cores and peripheries in the Imperial West 81