Introduction: Ancient Economies and Global Connections

The purpose of this three-volume handbook is twofold. First, it aims to provide a tool for interdisciplinary research on ancient economies during the imperial period of the third century  to the third century . Second, it aims to suggest ways of approaching the connectivity of the Afro-Eurasian region from a new economic perspective. It is widely acknowledged that the expansion of relationships between the Afro-Eurasian empires in antiquity was accompanied by the movement of large amounts of goods: fine textiles, leather items, pearls, ivory, dies, spices, drugs, unguents, animals, and much more. The visibility of such items in places far away from their origin leaves no doubt. Yet the mechanisms by which these goods were mobilized in their areas of production or extraction, and the exchange systems through which they spread into distant locations, are far less certain. We argue that the notion of Silk Road trade based on nineteenth-century perceptions of caravan trade, national economies, and markets is ill-suited to analyzing the nature and dynamics of the connectivity of ancient empires.1 The chapters of this handbook aim to globalize ancient history without presuming a context that make ancient inter-imperial economic connections a precursor of modern globalization.2 Over the last 15 years, scholarship has seen a proliferation of comparative research on ancient empires.3 The question of connections across Eurasia, in contrast, has suffered relative neglect or has been locked within the flawed notion of the Silk Road. This handbook attempts to shift the problem of connections into a framework that has been developed in world history and world systems theory. It starts from the uncontroversial fact that while ancient imperial courts and historiographers invented empires as ‘one’ and universal, they were neither culturally homogenous nor fully self-sufficient.4 The complicated levels of interdependence of imperial and local economies, as well as the diversity of social and ecological landscapes within which exchanges took place, make it hard to approach empires as socio-political ‘containers’ engaging with other such containers via international trade. The concept of inter-imperiality, in contrast, brings into focus local economic and ecological heterogeneity, peripheries, as well as imperial coevolution and global (inter)depen