Classical Indo-Roman Trade: A Historiographical Reconsideration

It is an attempt to reconsider in the light of the extant sources including the latest archaeological findings in India, Red Sea coast and Egypt, some of the long sustained assumptions about the Indian role in the classical eastern Mediterranean transmarine commerce. Perusing the political economy of the early Mediterranean exchange relations with the southern West Coast, the paper seeks to argue that the expression, ‘Indo-Roman trade’ popularized by Indian historiography is a misnomer, for what had happened was literally Roman trade with the East having India little or no role in it. Some Tamils might have accompanied the traders in the Arab or Mediterranean ships, probably as merchant middlemen, suppliers of trade goods and providers of other services on board. Even if we assume that Tamil chiefs had some role in shipping merchandises at least up to the Red Sea coast, the question of various capability pre-requisites for arranging agents, managers, and intermediaries for the rest of jobs including stay till the next Monsoon Wind, would remain, because such capabilities were unlikely in a chiefdom level polity. Further, the classical Mediterranean trade by nature was too systematized, extensively networked, document based, and monetized to have been compatible to contemporary Tamil chiefdoms of redistributive economy, reciprocity and politics of plunder.