Wait wait wait

Wait wait wait

Who the fuck did they trade with if they owned the entire Mediterranean?

Who the fuck did they trade with if they owned the entire Australia?

Themselves
Best part is they get all the tax money too

China, Indonesia, India.

Who the fuck did they trade with if they didn't have warp drives?

Was it true that the Romans invented fish sauce?

Australia isn't real, it's just a jewish meme.

>this thread

They didn't. Trade gradually declined under the empire, which was mostly focused on distributing grain, taxes, and army supplies between regions. Commercial trade mostly just piggy-backed off of that.

Just so you know my OP question was 100% serious, one of the main advantages of the med is for trading and if they controlled the whole thing there's no way to really use it (right?)

>this is your brain on mercantilism

>Trade gradually declined under the empire
can I get a source on this, I've heard that trade boomed during the pax romana

it only stagnated because of the crisis of the third century, and never recovered to its earlier levels because so many self sufficient manors had developed as a response to the crisis that economic specialization was no longer as important.

kek

the romans had enormous factories that pumped out millions of household items like oil lamps that were then shipped out across the empire

>one of the main advantages of the med is for trading
Shipping, of which trade is just one example.

Trade was booming leading up to Pax Romana, and declined seriously once it got going.

I think the dates of the decline correspond more accurately with the beginning of the roman dictatorship.

And thus with Pax Romana.

>trade can't be internal

china mainly
Indus valley too
and tribals along the way

Internal trade and the chinks

Garum

Maybe they got better at building ships? Or at sailing them?

There was inter-provincial trade and they still traded with other nations and tribes outside of their empire. It's not really that hard to comprehend. You also need to consider how diverse the empire was. You might have grain going from Italy all the way to Egypt and cotton from Egypt going to Britain and etc.

Forgot pic

China and India via the silk road

>Italy giving Egypt grain
kek. The reason the Western Empire fell was because all the grain came from Egypt.

Isn't the whole idea of mercantilism what the Romans accomplished though? Purely internal trade so that there was no wealth outflow?

That's simple: they traded with the locals and the other Romans.
Even if you "own" a land, its resources still have to be extracted. Extracting resources requires work. You pay for that work by trading.
Was your question really about basic economics ?

Are you fucking retarded?

They traded a shit ton with China from a distance for silk.

Yes. They covered absolutely everything with it and it impossible to overstate their love for it. It created on an industrial scale in places like Portugal in massive factory style drums. It was their equivalent to table suit.

Persia, Parthia, India, China, Nubia, Arabia, Second Finnish Empire.

That decline in sea trade occurs after the Antonine pandemic. Dead everyone = reduced gold and silver mining, a smaller army, and less recruits to rebuild the army. Less money and soldiers = Germans are scarier (they weren't significantly affected by the plague). They lost control of Dacia and its mines during this time. Unsurprisingly, this weakened governing apparatus incentivized civil wars. If Roman trade was based even partly on gold and silver instead of mostly then the trade deficit would have eventually eroded their ability to maintain their empire under ideal circumstances. The Antonine plague seems to have been the beginning of a vicious cycle that was later fueled by inefficiencies caused by imperial attempts to fix their income loss, civil wars, and the growing technological sophistication and population of Germanic tribes.

Raoul McLaughlin claims that the economies of the first and second century empires of Eurasia were so intertwined that when one collapsed they all followed. It took a long time for conditions to allow trade to grow again.

They traded internally. Like you said they owned the Med which is great for water based trade.

>they

Thank you based user. Quality post.