"A trickle" is compatible with the sources I've read. Actual merchants were not exactly crowding the Silk Road. We have tax records from Turfan from 600 BCE that records one group of merchants per week. The Chinese government sent silk west in huge quantities as gifts to minor kings, dwarfing what the traders moved around. Also, at least one source says that the Romans got their silk from India, not China.Moose-tache wrote: ↑Mon Jun 13, 2022 9:08 pm I understand that coins printed with "Dear future numisthmatists: this is from the Roman Republic" found under Chinese temples aren't terribly common. But the Chinese sent silk west and got silver in return, which they melted down to make their own coinage (and yes, there were several steps between Rome and China, so it's not always clear it was Roman silver). This trade picked up speed over time, and it was probably only "a trickle" as Thorley put it during the Republic. But the west-to-east flow of silver did happen.
If I'm following, you're saying that Renaissance traders were more capitalist than Romans and therefore mercantilism had ceased to make sense. That's pretty similar to what I said about the Romans: not really a trading nation. But so far as I know the Greeks, Arabs, and Middle Easterners were still good at it.In any case, the original question was mercantilism as it pertained to Rome, and the question of trade as a zero-sum game. I think it's fair to say that Mercantilism became increasingly stupid over time, and during the Roman empire it was at its least stupid (say, hovering around 40-60% stupid). Ideas like "Make sure your Carpathian micro-state has its own separate nutmeg colony so you don't have to buy nutmeg at market rates" that were assinine in the 18th century would have made more sense in the first half of the first millennium (if they had nutmeg, that is).
This is partly because greater international integration means that vertical integration is less essential and doesn't provide the same supply chain security that it used to. But also, it's because of (proto-)Capitalism. The money that the Duchy of Vladiblork spends on a nutmeg colony could instead be reinvested in heavy industry. If they can make their money grow faster, they can have all the nutmeg they want through dependency economics. An Aegean city-state that's been producing nothing but wheat and squid for a thousand years and has no nacient Capitalist class doesn't have any way to make their money grow faster than the nutmeg island.
If you're a premodern ruler and you have a chance to seize some source of wealth, you probably do. This wasn't a Roman invention, but it's probably what they were best at. That was Spain's modus operandi too, but they had the misfortune to be competing with actual trading nations.
Anyway, my main point is that Pliny should be taken with a huge helping of salt. In economic terms, the grain the Romans stole from Egypt was far more important than the spices, textiles, ivory etc. that they got from India. (And Romans did bring stuff east, especially pottery and glassware.) Furriner-bashing has a long long history.
