Abstract
For centuries, there has been a steady and profitable commerce between the Roman Empire and India. One of the most striking evidence of such trade are the Roman coins found in India over the last two centuries. This body of evidence has always used to try to guess the scale and the fluctuations of the Roman exports to the East. Nevertheless, such attempts have been so far fruitless, because they mostly failed to understand the real nature of this sort of evidence. This paper aims to revise the available evidence to demonstrate, firstly, that the phenomenon of the Roman coins in India cannot be properly understood without a proper theoretical economic framework to interpret it. From this point of view, the analytical tools of both New Institutional Economics (NIE) and asymmetric information theory are essential. Secondly, this paper argues that Roman coins were only exported to India when this was profitable. The reason that drove Roman merchants to trade Roman currency in India was the different ratio between silver and gold in the two regions of the Ancient World. Because of this difference, there were moments in which trading coins was more profitable than it would have been inside the Empire. This would represent a case for arbitrage. A combination of the evidence of the Periplus Maris Erythreai and of some Indian inscriptions allow us to shed light on a sophisticated financial process that was part of the international business between the Roman Empire and India, and, in more general terms, on the features of the Roman economic system.
This research was carried out in the framework of the STAR programme, funded by UniNa and Compagnia San Paolo. I would like to express my gratitude here to Prof William V. Harris and Prof Domenico Fausto for their willingness to read an earlier version of this work and give me their extensive feedbacks.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
See the classic Hicks 1969: 1–8 for an economist’s purview on the matter.
- 4.
- 5.
For an interesting treating of the issues related to the application of economic theories and models on the ancient economy, see recently for example Verboven 2015a and Erdkamp 2015; see also the very recent and extremely compelling collective book edited by Hollander, Blanton IV and Fitzgerald 2019, which is full of stimulating new insights aimed at breaking the limits of a ‘market-oriented’ scholarship on the ancient economy.
- 6.
The problem of describing non-modern economic activities in modern terms is already fully discussed by Karl Marx in his Grundrisse: Marx 1973: 105–106; see also Marx 2002. See recently Boer and Petterson 2017: xi–xxi for an engaging discussion on the usefulness of applying modern approaches to the study of Antiquity.
- 7.
Morris 1994.
- 8.
- 9.
See for instance Frederiksen 1975: 10: “the old debate between primitivists and modernists (is) a small and rather unimportant duel (…) Neither thesis (is) really acceptable without a good deal of emendation”. The attempts to shift the debate intensified since the ‘90s of the last century: see Harris 1993. An interesting overall rethinking of the economy of Antiquity is in Andreau and Maucourant 1999; Bresson 2000. In the new millennium, see the monumental Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World (Scheidel et al. 2007), followed by a considerable step forward thanks to the works of for example Erdkamp and Verboven 2015; Kehoe et al. 2015; Boer and Petterson 2017; Manning 2018; Hollander et al. 2019.
- 10.
Among the most interesting cases of comparative history of the last few years, Scheidel’s and Bang’s works are definitely noteworthy. See Scheidel 2009 and 2015 for a contrast between the Roman Empire and ancient China. See also Morris and Scheidel 2009 for a wider range of comparisons among pre-industrial societies. See instead Bang 2008 for a comparison between the Roman Empire and the Moghul Empire. See also Bang and Kołodziejczyk 2012 for a comparison between Eurasian empires.
- 11.
- 12.
Harris 2011: 156.
- 13.
It should be noted incidentally that even the importance of trade as a proxy to understand the structures of the ancient economy is a concept that has always been taken for granted. See now on this subject Hollander et al. 2019.
- 14.
For a survey of the different points of view and interpretations on the subject, see for example the chapter “A Forum on Trade” in Scheidel 2012a: 287–317. The idea that eastern merchandise were only luxury items dates back as far as Gibbon (1776), and, despite being proved wrong by many scholars (see e.g. Sidebotham 1986; Morley 2007, 573–574) still has some supporters among modern scholars: see for example McLaughlin 2010.
- 15.
- 16.
- 17.
- 18.
- 19.
- 20.
Nappo 2018.
- 21.
A very short synthesis of the most important works of the three Nobel laureates can be found in Löfgren et al. 2002.
- 22.
Eatwell et al. 2000: 133–135.
- 23.
- 24.
Stiglitz 1989.
- 25.
Akerlof 1970.
- 26.
Jones 2014: 236.
- 27.
Ael. Arist. Oration 6.12–13.
- 28.
Aug. Res Gest. 31: Ad me ex India regum legationes saepe missae sunt non visae ante id tempus apud quemquam Romanorum ducem.
- 29.
The first to deal with the subject was Gibbon, in his The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1789); see also Warmington (1928, revised edition 1974). But the turning point for such studies was the excavations made by Wheeler at Arikamedu, in India, that for the first time provided some actual archaeological evidence of the trade between the two areas of the world (Wheeler 1976). Since then, the number of papers and works published on the topic has constantly increased.
- 30.
See Young 2001 for a full discussion.
- 31.
Sidebotham 1986: 20–21. Most of the following scholarship has now accepted this important point. See for example Ball 2000: 130; Young 2001: 14–17. Yet the old approach to the Indian trade as merely a trade in luxury items is still present in some recent works unwilling to engage with the progress of modern scholarship (e.g. McLaughlin 2010: 7–10; and again 2016: 1).
- 32.
Every attempt to list all the relevant monographs appeared after Sidebotham’s first book is doomed to be incomplete. Among the most relevant studies on the subject, it is certainly necessary to mark out the works of De Romanis 2006, 1998, 2020; Young 2001; Sidebotham 2011; Power 2012; Seland 2008, 2010, 2014; Gurukkal 2016; Boussac et al. 2016; Mathew 2016; Manzo et al. 2018; Cobb 2015a, 2018a, c.
- 33.
- 34.
See for example the works of McLaughlin 2010 and 2016; Manzo et al. 2018, which all in their titles rather ambitiously refer to the concepts of World Economy and Globalisation, while not specifically addressing such sensible topics. More interesting is the purview of Seland (2008, 2010: 18–20; 2014: 386–387), who prefers to speak of ‘oikoumenisation’. See also Cobb 2018b: 5–7.
- 35.
Plin. NH 6.101.
- 36.
Plin. NH 12.84 (trans. Bostock and Riley (1855)).
- 37.
See Tac., Ann., 3.53 (reporting Tiberius’ words): Promiscas viris et feminis vestis atque illa feminarum propria, quis lapidum causa pecuniae nostrae ad externas aut hostilis gentis transferuntur. (‘The apparel worn indiscriminately by both sexes, or that peculiar luxury of women which, for the sake of jewels, diverts our wealth to strange or hostile nations’). As pointed out by Tchernia (2016: 239), the words of Pliny and Tiberius are very similar, suggesting that “either Pliny was directly influenced by an idea actually expressed in Tiberius’ discourse, or it was a topos widely used in the middle decades of the first century, or more precisely, an adaptation of an old topos on luxury and autarky to a particular set of circumstances.”
- 38.
More examples of such a point of view are to be found in the ancient literary sources, such as Dio Chrysostom, Orations 79.5–6: Ἆρα ἐνθυμεῖσθε ὅτι πάντες οὗτοι, λέγω δὲ τοὺς Κελτοὺς καὶ Ἰνδοὺς καὶ Ἴβηρας καὶ Ἄραβας καὶ Βαβυλωνίους, φόρους παρ᾽ ἡμῶν λαμβάνουσιν, οὐ τῆς χώρας οὐδὲ τῶν βοσκημάτων, ἀλλὰ τῆς ἀνοίας τῆς ἡμετέρας; […] πλὴν ὅτι λίθους μικροὺς καὶ ἀσθενεῖς καί, νὴ Δία, θηρίων ὀστᾶ διδόντες λαμβάνουσιν ἀργύριον καὶ χρυσίον, ἀντὶ χρηστῶν ἄχρηστα ἀντικαταλλαττόμενοι. (‘Are you aware that all these peoples—the Celts, Indians, Iberians, Arabs, and Babylonians—exact tribute from us, not from our land or from our flocks and herds, but from our own folly? […] They do offer tiny, fragile pebbles and, forsooth, bones of wild beasts when they take our silver and gold, exchanging useless things for useful’).
- 39.
- 40.
- 41.
Note the different opinion expressed by Harris (2011: 227) who argues that payments could also be done in bullion.
- 42.
Yet, our sources make reference also to the possibility of trading with Indians through the means of barter. See for instance Pausanias, Descriptio Graeciae, 3.12, 3–4: Λακεδαιμονίοις δὲ κατὰ τὴν ὁδὸν ταύτην ἐστίν, ὡς ἤδη λέλεκταί μοι, τὰ ὀνομαζόμενα Βοώνητα, Πολυδώρου ποτὲ οἰκία τοῦ βασιλέως: ἀποθανόντος δὲ παρὰ τοῦ Πολυδώρου τῆς γυναικὸς ἐπρίαντο ἀντιδόντες βοῦς. ἀργύρου γὰρ οὐκ ἦν πω τότε οὐδὲ χρυσοῦ νόμισμα, κατὰ τρόπον δὲ ἔτι τὸν ἀρχαῖον ἀντεδίδοσαν βοῦς καὶ ἀνδράποδα καὶ ἀργὸν τὸν ἄργυρον καὶ χρυσόν: οἱ δὲ ἐς τὴν Ἰνδικὴν ἐσπλέοντες φορτίων φασὶν Ἑλληνικῶν τοὺς Ἰνδοὺς ἀγώγιμα ἄλλα ἀνταλλάσσεσθαι, νόμισμα δὲ οὐκ ἐπίστασθαι, καὶ ταῦτα χρυσοῦ τε ἀφθόνου καὶ χαλκοῦ παρόντος σφίσι.
‘On this road the Lacedaemonians have, as I have already said, what is called the Booneta, which once was the house of their king Polydorus. When he died, they bought it from his widow, paying the price in oxen. For at that time there was as yet neither silver nor gold coinage, but they still bartered in the old way with oxen, slaves, and uncoined silver and gold. Those who sail to India say that the natives give other merchandise in exchange for Greek cargoes, knowing nothing about coinage, and that though they have plenty of gold and of bronze.’
- 43.
- 44.
PME 39.
- 45.
Casson 1989: 75.
- 46.
PME 49.
- 47.
PME 56.
- 48.
- 49.
Nappo 2018 for the full description of the case study.
- 50.
PME, 49. Transl. Casson (1989: 81). Note that the Greek text has the word ‘denarion’ which Casson (with reason) takes as meaning generally ‘Roman coin.’
- 51.
- 52.
- 53.
Butcher and Ponting 2015: 451.
- 54.
It is indeed true, as pointed out by De Romanis (2020: 328) that the Periplus explicitly talks of gold and silver coins to be traded in Barygaza, but the corpus of Roman coins found in India, so far, does not endorse such claim. For the inaccuracies of the Periplus, see Arnaud 2012, more precisely page 40 for the problems with the area of Barygaza.
- 55.
That is how I interpret the words ἐπικέρδειάν τινα used by the Periplus.
- 56.
Eatwell et al. 2000: 100.
- 57.
See De Romanis (2020: 59–80) for a detailed description of the timing of the Indian commercial enterprises.
- 58.
- 59.
Bang 2008: 4–5.
- 60.
Pace De Romanis 2020: 332.
- 61.
Bresson 2015: 382–384 reports a case for arbitrage happening between the city of Athens and grain traders, in the second half of the fourth century BC.
- 62.
RIC 2.207.
- 63.
RIC 2.25.
- 64.
Sutherland and Carson 1984: 97.
- 65.
Turner 1989: 21.
- 66.
- 67.
- 68.
Cobb 2018c: 259.
- 69.
- 70.
- 71.
Suresh 2003: 29. See also the discussion in Lo Cascio (1980: 445–470) on the effects of Gresham’s Law after Nero’s devaluation of the denarius. Lo Cascio points out that denarii from Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, and Claudius are rare in the hoards during the Flavian era: according to him, the best coins must have either been melted down or sent abroad for trade.
- 72.
Tac., Ann., 3.53; Pliny, NH, 6.85.
- 73.
Duncan-Jones 1994: 121.
- 74.
Strab. 17.1.7.
- 75.
De Romanis 2020: 127–132.
- 76.
For the text, see above, n. 38.
- 77.
Strab. 17.1.7: ταύτῃ δὲ καὶ τὰ ἐκκομιζόμενα ἐξ Ἀλεξανδρείας πλείω τῶν εἰσκομιζομένων ἐστί: γνοίη δ᾽ ἄν τις ἔν τε τῇ Ἀλεξανδρείᾳ καὶ τῇ Δικαιαρχείᾳ γενόμενος, ὁρῶν τὰς ὁλκάδας ἔν τε τῷ κατάπλῳ καὶ ἐν ταῖς ἀναγωγαῖς ὅσον βαρύτεραί τε καὶ κουφότεραι δεῦρο κἀκεῖσε πλέοιεν.
- 78.
Duncan-Jones 1994: 118–123.
- 79.
- 80.
- 81.
Coase 1937: 390.
- 82.
- 83.
Coase 1992: 716.
- 84.
North 1990: 27.
- 85.
- 86.
- 87.
The topic of the natural inclination of men to trade, as well as the possibility of using the concept of ‘market economy’ to usefully describe any economic system are very sensitive ones. There is a rich and very heated debate going on these subjects. See for instance Temin 2013, who advocates for the presence of a strong integrated market economy in the Roman World; Bang 2008 for a completely opposite view on the topic.
- 88.
A classic exposition of how the burden of transaction costs would have weighted pre-modern economies is in North and Thomas 1973.
- 89.
- 90.
- 91.
- 92.
It should be noted as well that the definition of institution went through evolution and revision in the thinking of D. North. On the subject, see Wallis 2014.
- 93.
- 94.
See Hollander 2015 (especially pages 148–155) for an overview of the main private institutions devised to overcome transaction costs by Roman traders.
- 95.
- 96.
- 97.
The papyrus was bought in 1980 for the Austrian National Library, but its provenance is unfortunately unknown. See Rathbone 2000: 39.
- 98.
- 99.
- 100.
- 101.
Bang 2008: 140.
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Nappo, D. (2021). A Case of Arbitrage in a Worldwide Trade: Roman Coins in India. In: Rosillo-López, C., García Morcillo, M. (eds) Managing Information in the Roman Economy. Palgrave Studies in Ancient Economies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54100-2_12
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