Trade, Commerce, Power, and Control
Trade and commerce are not always given due consideration in discussion of the traditional land empires, but they have been central to analysis of the oceanic colonial imperial systems, since it is evident that they were in many cases the original stimulus for exploration and conquest.
To a degree, trade and commerce and the wealth deriving therefrom are less a resource than a relationship. On the other hand, commerce and trade can be regulated, limited, promoted, or disrupted; attitudes toward them can impact on social praxis and thus on the potential to exploit them as sources of revenue or investment. Where empires or those who are involved in such activities derive wealth from them, either through personal investment or via taxation, for example, they surely count as a resource to be exploited, not only in terms of the wealth or profits to be made, but also politically—trade, or the absence of trade, can be used to put pressure on a neighbor or an enemy, to force concessions both economic and political, and so forth. The protection offered to international commerce by the Mongols in the thirteenth century and the legacy of that protectorate, as reflected in the policies of the various successor khanates on the steppe as well as in China and Iran, offer a clear example of the ways in which empire has both served to promote international exchange and commerce and enriched the imperial elites under whose patronage it was permitted to flourish.By the same token, where trade and commerce were more than a purely private affair, they have had dramatic consequences for the power relations within a state or across an empire, and can impact in important ways on the configuration of social and political relations within a society. In this context we need only think of the ways in which the Italian commercial empires grew from the eleventh and especially the twelfth centuries ce, in contrast to the role played by commerce in the perspective of the Byzantine Empire to the east.
In Venice, Genoa, and Pisa the cities were dominated by businessmen whose wealth and political power was generally dependent as much, if not more so, on commerce than on rents. The elites of these cities evolved a vested interest in the maintenance and promotion of as lucrative and advantageous a commerce as possible, so that the economic and political interests of the leading and middling elements were identical with the interests of the city as state, its political identity, and its independence of outside interference. The Byzantine government tried constantly to minimize the concessions it had to grant the Venetians (and later the Genoese and Pisans) in return for political (primarily naval) support, but it played no role in promoting indigenous enterprise, either for political or economic reasons, and viewed commerce as simply another (minor) source of state income. The subsequent political, economic, and military challenge from Venice and Genoa was grounded in a commercial and maritime activity, carrying trade and control of shipping, all rooted in a completely different and quite alien understanding of the value of commercial enterprise from that of Byzantium. The latter had no means with which to respond, and by the time it had learned from the experience, in the later thirteenth century, the political as well as the commercial situation had changed so dramatically that it was too late.But commercial activity can have a range of impacts on empires and their workings. In the Indian subcontinent, and long before the medieval period, the demands of local and supra-local elites for luxuries, for the maintenance of retinues and armies, for buildings and other construction work, had been an important stimulus to trade and commerce. Coastal regions had attracted foreign traders and merchants from the earliest times, and had acted as channels for the export of a wide range of products, both in bulk terms and in respect of luxury goods. While the center of gravity may have moved over time from region to region, the subcontinent tended on the whole to absorb surplus wealth from outside, producing goods such as cotton and silk, dyes, spices, narcotics, timber ivory, pitch, and a number of other products, and importing relatively little—certain ores, slaves, horses.
This trade, through numerous localized merchant elites, was an integral, if also parasitic element of the relationship between urban and rural production. Merchant groups themselves, whether indigenous or foreign, acted as a mediating force between rulers and more distant centers of urban as well as rural production. In addition, the demands of local and intra-regional commerce promoted the relatively high degree of monetization of Indian exchange relationships, although the form of the exchange medium varied enormously across time and from region to region, as well as according to the level at which transactions were conducted. In respect of the ways in which dominant elites and rulers were able to exploit resources and influence the ways in which wealth was distributed, as well as in respect of the degree of independence from local entrenched socioeconomic subsystems which the rulers of larger political formations were or were not able to achieve—in short, in respect of the contouring of patterns of power—merchant groups and the existence of well-established trade routes and markets represented an important constitutive element. In some areas, external markets created demands sufficient to promote the development of flourishing long-term cash-crop economies, especially in respect of cotton and other textiles, or rice, for example, and later in respect of tea. Such factors could play an important role in respect of the formation, consolidation, and fragmentation of larger and smaller political systems. In the Mughal period, they functioned as both alternative and complementary sources of wealth and power to those which were founded solely on the appropriation of agrarian surpluses, and further intensified the highly regionalized nature of Indian economic structures. Not only merchant groups were involved. Wealthy mansabdars (provincial revenueassignment holders) and members of royal households invested in trade for profit, some in shipping, others were involved in maritime trade on a considerable scale. It remains unclear as to what percentage of state income might derive, under different imperial regimes, from duties on trade; but private profit-taking certainly contributed to the wealth at the disposal of those who invested in commerce of one sort or another. In addition, the redistribution of surplus wealth appropriated as tax by the Mughal state often followed preexisting commercial networks and was actually facilitated thereby; thus creating a degree of interdependence of the one upon the other such that, just as in the later Roman period, some trade may well also have been facilitated by the state's own fiscal network and transportation system. Mughal authorities certainly showed an interest in the well-being of traders and those involved in commerce, and in at least one official document encouraged its officials not to neglect their interests. From the fifteenth century there occurred an expansion of international commerce which played an important role in the ways in which the Mughal administration was able to conduct its fiscal affairs, and the ways in which other political centers could acquire wealth and either resist Mughal power or evolve structures not bound in to the Mughal system of surplus appropriation. Again, commerce played an important role both in the expansion of Mughal fiscal liquidity, as well as in the weakening of central control over local elites who could derive considerable independent wealth from it.The existence of an extended interregional commerce can also directly impact on fiscal arrangements and vice versa. This is nicely illustrated in the case of both the Mughal Empire and the later Roman Empire, the highly monetized economies of which reflected a number of key factors. In the Mughal case the vast imperial bureaucracy, the attendant services it demanded or stimulated, and the high level of demand for a wide range of luxury goods and services to maintain the ostentatious consumption and display of the ruling elite promoted the establishment and maintenance of reasonably stable precious-metal as well as low-denomination coinages.
This was built upon a long-standing tradition of monetized exchange and particularly by the considerable demand stimulated by increased contacts with European markets as a result of first Portuguese (and later Dutch, French, and English) merchant enterprise. As the world market for textiles, silks, spices, and other products expanded, so the import of both copper (which formed the basis of the coinages of much of North India until the introduction of the Mughal silver) as well as silver and gold increased.[404] But long before direct European involvement, a widespread and very flourishing network of trading contacts existed across South Asia, linking Chinese, Japanese, Philippine, and Indian ports and centers of agricultural and industrial production with the Iranian, Arab, and East African regions.[405] The extraction of surplus at all levels had been well-integrated into a monetized system of exchange, using a wide variety of currency media—copper, gold, cowries and a range of other token currencies, entailing sets of overlapping pools of money-use extending from the level of state activity via large-scale commercial exchange and tax-farming, right down to village economies.[406] The existence of a well-established silver currency worked to the advantage of local and long-distance commerce and of Mughal fiscal management; fluctuations in the supply of silver had a direct effect upon both. And the central importance of a highly monetized economic life meant additionally that tax-farming, the development of a market in the rights to agricultural produce and ultimately in land itself (by the early eighteenth century), as well as the development of fairly sophisticated structures for credit and loans, went hand in hand. It also meant that the relationship between the resource-extracting class of local and regional notables in the empire and the commercial and urban markets, upon which the former depended for both luxury goods and services, diluted the political and fiscal link between the center and its resource base.[407]In the case of the later Roman Empire, the fiscal structures of the state served both to promote and to set limits to commerce.
Following the so-called crisis of the third century, and from the early fourth century ce, a greatly reformed and more effective, centralized fiscal apparatus evolved, entailing in the medium term the closer tying-in of regional elites to the imperial system at all levels. The stability that followed these changes, in the context of state demands to provision the armies of the empire, led to a flourishing trans-Mediterranean commerce, with the result that the state and its fiscal apparatus began to act as never before as a key element in facilitating the economic recovery that archaeological and written evidence documents. It was not the state alone that generated the vast and highly commercialized market system of late Antiquity, but it certainly acted as the key stabilizing agent that facilitated commerce and production for a large, empire-wide market of consumers at all social levels. Late imperial taxation was managed and extracted at the local and the regional level, but in many cases then redistributed over considerable distances to support Rome and Constantinople, or to support the military. Taxation supported and bolstered the strong central authority of the late Roman state, assisted through the annona—the extraction of resources in kind (although sometimes commuted into cash) and their delivery to the army—as well as other fiscal mechanisms in bringing together widely dispersed markets and production centers. The vast geographical extent of this system enabled the elites of the empire both at the center and in the provinces to deepen their economic and political reach within, and to extend it well beyond, their own province. The wealthier and more effective elites were at extracting resources, the greater the potential for long-distance bulk commerce, and the greater the potential for the less wealthy to benefit from this fact. But when taxation was weakened and when integrative fiscal mechanisms broke down or were suborned by local elites, fragmentation of both the empire-wide economy and its elite was a necessary result. In the Roman west in the course of the fifth century, taxation systems became localized, before often breaking down completely to be supplemented by, or completely replaced by, new forms of surplus extraction and redistribution, modes that reflected changed power relationships between political centers and elites or aristocracies. This impacted directly on patterns of exchange, since it was on the back of fiscal structures that a good proportion of the international and interregional exchange networks had been able to flourish. Thereafter and in many areas it was residual—albeit substantial—aristocratic demand which provided henceforth the main motor of longer-distance commerce and exchange. While fragmentation of the empire-wide economy was one outcome of these changes, the survival of strong elites, local and regionalized exchange, and the use of money on a grand scale remained the norm in many regions. Where elites lost their ability to extract resources on the scale that had been possible under the late Roman fiscal regime, so peasantries appear to have benefited, improving their position, and one result of this was that the elites of those areas with wealthier or more autonomous peasantries came to rely less on a more internationalized luxury commerce and more on humbler domestic or local production, just as their peasantries did—with further consequences for the wider international pattern of exchange. Whether or not empires try to manage, tax, or control commerce, by its very nature it impacts directly on the ways in which an imperial system manages its fiscal affairs.[408]Leaving to one side the varied possibilities for states of different political forms to intervene in order to exploit such commerce (customs, taxes, etc.),[409] an important difference lies in the structural potential of such commerce. For traditional societies, while vast profits for individual merchants or joint contractors could be made, such wealth was generally recycled through forms of conspicuous consumption or invested in small- or medium-scale production, the wealth generated by which was generally consumed again without being further invested into the process of wealth production. The simple amassing of commercial capital, however spectacular some merchant fortunes may have been in either Rome or medieval European societies, and its investment in either conspicuous consumption, in finance (loans to governments at high rates of interest, for example), or in shipping, remained always within the sphere of circulation of wealth, rather than being employed in a way which would transform production processes either in rural agricultural or in urban manufacturing contexts. Of course, the investment of a slave's labor power in producing goods for the market that are of greater value than the combined values of the capital invested in the slaves and in the materials on which they are set to work comes close to this; it nevertheless remains clearly distinct, only one element in a broader system of non-capitalist production relations.
Production for sale in a market context with the aim of maximizing profits (of which one can find many examples in the Roman world, to name but one instance), but in the context of an economy dominated by tributary relations, is not capitalism. A concentration of money, or wealth in other forms (such as credit instruments, for example), in the hands of merchants, together with petty commodity production in both villages and towns, and long-distance trade, does not by itself lead to capitalist relations or indeed the breakup of feudal relations of production. This is apparent when we consider the situation in western Europe until the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when it was only with the discovery of the New World and the opening up of the African and South Asian littorals and their hinterlands to European merchant activity, combined with qualitative and quantitative changes in agricultural productivity and technology, that a major discrepancy between the wealth generated by feudal production relations, and that produced by long-distance mercantile exchange, developed. Even then, it is important to note that, up to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (and later in many areas) long-distance trade was itself of a highly traditional type, bringing into contact social formations that were mutually ignorant of one another, exchanging products the costs of production of which were not known in the society to which they were delivered.[410] As noted earlier, where those social labor costs were unequal, one society was in effect benefiting from the transfer to it of surplus produced in the other. This asymmetrical relationship characterizes European trade with Asia and Africa in the later medieval and early modern periods.