Panel 5.2 – Tolls and ancient economies


Organiser/Chair:

  • Gabriele Cifani (University of Rome, Tor Vergata)
  • Julien Zurbach (ENS, Paris)

External Discussant:

  • Andrew Monson (NYU)

Panel abstract

Tolls and customs duties imposed on road-users and goods played a crucial role in pre-modern economies, but in ancient economic history they have been considered mainly as part of the main income of the state and not often in terms of their direct or side-effects on mobility and exchange The importance of tolls, however, has never been fully evaluated or debated in recent reconstructions of Early Iron Age and Archaic Mediterranean economies, which have focused mainly on trade circuits and activities of production without giving due consideration to the systems which controlled the distribution of goods and the mobility of people. In archaeological literature, the Archaic Mediterranean is often considered to be a kind of open ground as far as cultural encounters are concerned. We would like to draw on recent work (notably Moreno Garcia, ed., Dynamics of Production in the Ancient Near East 1300-500, 2015, and recent books by the two presenters of this proposal), and to reconsider the true economic factors linked to interconnections and the development of early states in the Mediterranean between the Late Bronze Age and the Archaic Period. The objective of this panel is to offer fresh perspectives by comparing diverse categories of sources concerning the role of tolls and customs in ancient Mediterranean economies. Literary sources in all languages, the evidence of day-to-day practice in Egypt and the Levant, and the archaeological evidence of routes and territorial control for the purposes of imposing taxes will be discussed, as well as ethnographic data. In particular, the panel will consider the evidence from Egypt, the Near East, Archaic Greece and Italy.

 

Paper abstracts

1. Gabriele Cifani (University of Rome, Tor Vergata) / Julien Zurbach (Ecole normale supérieure, Paris)

An introduction to Tolls and the Economic history of the archaic Mediterranean societies
Tolls and customs duties imposed on road-users and goods played a crucial role in pre-modern economies, but in ancient economic history they have been considered mainly as part of the main income of the state and not often in terms of their direct or side-effects on mobility and exchange (but see Peter Bang, The Roman Bazaar). It is no surprise, then, that recent evolutions in fiscal history also consider them from this perspective.
It is also striking that a reference in this sphere (A. Monson, W.Scheidel ed., Fiscal regimes and the political economy of Premodern States,2015) refers to tolls as fiscal instruments and economic factors in the
Near East, the Hellenistic states and the Roman Empire.
Furthermore, the importance of tolls, however, has never been fully evaluated or debated in recent reconstructions of Early Iron Age and Archaic Mediterranean economies, which have focused mainly on trade circuits and activities of production without giving due consideration to the systems which controlled the distribution of goods and the mobility of people.
In archaeological literature, the Archaic Mediterranean is often considered to be a kind of open ground as far as cultural encounters are concerned. We would like to draw on recent work (notably Moreno Garcia, ed., Dynamics of Production in the Ancient Near East 1300-500, 2015, and to reconsider the true economic factors linked to interconnections and the development of early states in the Mediterranean between the Late Bronze Age and the Archaic Period.
The aim of this introduction paper is to focus on the economic relevance of tolls, above all in the first half of the first millennium BC, and their role in laying the financial basis of the archaic states.

 

2. Julien Zurbach (Ecole normale supérieure, Paris)

Indirect taxes in the Formative period of City-States
It is well-known that indirect taxes were the essential fiscal resource of Ancient Greek city-states: this old idea has recently been demonstrated by Migeotte. I will concentrate on Archaic Greek city-states. Taking into account texts and inscriptions from ca 750 down to 450 BC, it is possible to discuss the origins of the levies on moving goods in the context of institutionalization of the city-states, the relations of this system to earlier (Mycenaean, Homeric) systems of levies on traveling people or exchange places, and to examine the factors by which this became so important to the Greek poleis. The first set of questions would lead to a history of indirect taxation, from probably informal levies where force would play a role to formal systems defined by law or international agreement. The second set of question invites to place the development of indirect taxation in the general evolution of taxation. Here the question is the relationship to the explosion of financial needs caused by the maritime revolution of the late 6th cent. and to the probable reduction of direct income from land taxes (on the first point van Wees 2013 is decisive). The question then is: which factors do lie behind the apparent crucial importance of indirect taxes to Greek city-states?

 

3. Damien Agut (CNRS)

The Egyptian Custom on the Mediterranean Sea during the Persian Period (5th and 4th centuries BCE)
The Egyptian documentation dated to the Persian period (5th and 4th centuries BCE) contains many precise indications concerning the functioning of the custom of the Mediterranean Sea. In extracting and confronting the relevant documents, this paper aims to propose an analysis of the nature of the levies on imports (1) as well as the way in which customs revenues were also used to fuel local institutions, mainly local temples (2). In conclusion, we will examine the manner in which construction lumber for the ships, one of the most commonly imported goods collected by the custom, was employed by the royal administration (3).

 

4. Laetitia Graslin

The economic policy of neo-assyrian and neo-babylonian kings regarding long distance trade
In Mesopotamia, the first millennium is a time of construction of big empires. In an enlarged geographical space, the issue of control of trading paths and goods gets even more relevant as before. Different kinds of geographical areas are concerned: the mountain frontier with Iran, the maritime coast on the Mediterranean, the desert-fringes or the disputed frontier between Assyria and Babylonia. The appearance of new trading patterns requires to find new solutions, for example to collect tolls on difficult-to-control Arabian tribes. To the historian eyes Mesopotamian kings have often been denied any economic awareness and their fiscal policy reduced to a predatory economy. However, both textual and archaeological evidence shows that the empires took a large variety of measures, of fiscal, legal or military nature. They tried to take profit of the resources of long distance trade, even in its emerging forms. They also encouraged importation of useful commodities in Mesopotamia, while diverting the traffic of strategical goods from hostile neighbors. This paper provides an overview of the fiscal or legal measures taken by mesopotamian kings to take profit of long distance trade. We will try to understand the nature of the royal policies: were they mere accumulations of one-off measures or did they reflect a good understanding of the new economic background ? What were the economical and geographical consequences of the mesopotamian fiscal policy related to long distance trade?

 

5. Gabriele Cifani (Università degli studi di Roma "Tor Vergata")

Tolls in the early roman economy
Early Rome was a frontier city lying between the Latins, Etruscans and Sabinians; her rapid urban growth can be explained by the equally rapid evolution of a Late Iron Age economy based on regional and long-distance trade. Apart from agriculture, pastoralism and the salt trade, the bulk of the Roman economy in this phase and later can be accounted for by tolls on goods in transit through the Lower Tiber Valley, between Etruria and Campania, along the coast and from the coast to inland areas and vice versa.
Tolls should be imagined as belonging to the economy of the public sphere, because only city authorities could have collected tolls for transit within the city. However, in the secondary centres of the Roman community (such as Crustumerium, Decima and Laurentina), tolls would have been collected and retained by local aristocracies, the wealth of whom was exhibited in their luxurious burials.
In the 6th-5th century BC the reorganisation of the fluvial and maritime ports by means of public sanctuaries and market places (emporia) shows the decisive role played by the central authorities in reorganising the places where trade took place and consequentially the growing interest of the state in the economy, which may have involved the institution of specific taxes in the form of customs tariffs or duties on port services.

 

6. Juan Carlos Moreno García (CNRS)

Tolls at Heracleopolis Magna: monitoring trade at the borders of the Nile Delta
Heracleopolis Magna, in the Fayum area, played a crucial political and economic role in the late 3rd and early 1st millennium BC. The reasons underlying such a prominent position still remain obscure, but some epigraphic evidence suggests that Heracleopolis exerted some control over foreign trade in both cases. This could explain why Heracleopolis was closely linked, in the late 3rd millennium BC, with trade routes that arrived into the Fayum across the Western Delta. Conflicts over the control of Heracleopolis also erupted during the early 1st millennium BC, when Nubian rulers tried to control Middle and Lower Egypt as a first step to extend their domination over the area of Gaza and the Southern Levant, in opposition both to local rulers and Assyrian kings. The ultimate goal seems to dominate the trade routes that connected northeastern Africa and Southern Arabia to the Mediterranean, when customs and tolls were a source of considerable income for the polities in Southern Levant and, possibly, also in Lower Egypt. In both periods, it is interesting to observe that the rise of Heracleopolis to a prominent position was connected in some way with the prosperity of trading activities across the Western Delta and the consolidation of political powers in this area (Kom el-Hisn, Sais), a trend that crystallized with the foundation of Alexandria.

 

7. Mario Lombardo and Flavia Frisone (University of Salento)

The hidden resources of “empires”. Tolls, economy and political systems in Archaic Southern Italy and Sicily
The creation of extended political and territorial systems is a relevant phenomenon in Magna Graecia and in Sicily during the archaic period. The most renown and significant cases, as well as the best documented ones in literary sources and material evidence, are those of Sybaris, Kroton and Syracuse. In addition to the enhancement of their power, those enlarged states show a clear interest in strategies for controlling settlements, human mobility and production which included tolls, customs duties and other forms fiscal measures. Usually the economic aspects of these systems have been marginally considered or studied with reference to only some types of evidence (e.g. coinage). The paper aims at focusing the role of economic factors in the development of these regional powers and of their territorial networks, with a special attention to the systems by which they controlled goods production and distribution as well as people’s mobility. A thorough examination of the evidence (literary sources, coins, inscriptions, but also archaeological documents) relating to forms of indirect control or exploitation, through taxes and tolls, of the productive activities, as well as of routes and territorial resources, will be presented, with the aim of showing that it was an inherent aspect of those complex systems as, to use the Greek term, “archai”.

 

8. Sven Günther (Institute for the History of Ancient Civilizations)

Indirect Taxes, Tolls, Dues and the Formation of Political Economies in Archaic Greece
Archaic Greece did not only see the emergence of poleis and their “state” institutions but also, and parallel, the formation of political economies as an important and integral part of these new “city-states”. Though driving factors like ship-building for military and trading purposes, coin-money, taxes and tributes as well as politico-social representation have already been examined in respect of state-formation, mainly for Athens (see van Wees 2013; further literature and discussion in von Reeden 2015, 130), the appearance of political economies, exceeding the typical household economy, has mainly been researched with a focus on geo-economic, political and social factors as well as within frameworks of price-setting, business-strategies and money-control / -circulation (cf. Eich 2006).
The paper adds the perspective of indirect taxes, tolls and dues to this still incomplete mosaic. I shall show the deep interdependencies between the rise of state institutions and administration of finance, the extraction of indirect levies and the development of political economies. Particularly, the “framing”-effects of such levies in times of Archaic tyrannies and power struggles among the elite will be analyzed, a first step to control, use and exploit business activities for the establishment and stabilisation of frequently challenged rules.

 

9. Peter Kritzinger (Universität Jena)

Überlegungen zur Praxis der Zollerhebung in der römischen Antike
Obwohl das römische Zollwesen in jüngerer Zeit erneut in den Fokus der Altertumswissenschaften geraten ist, wurde bisher kaum in systematischer Weise untersucht, wie der Verzollungsvorgang in der Praxis abgelaufen sein könnte.
Diesem Aspekt gebührt vor allem deshalb mehr Aufmerksamkeit, da das römische Zollsystem nicht nach einem theoretischen Konzept entworfen, sondern vielmehr aufgrund jahrzehnte- und jahrhundertelanger praktischer Erfahrungen ausgeformt und laufend weiterentwickelt wurde. Das bedeutet, dass den praktischen Überlegungen bei der Entwicklung theoretischer Modelle vom römischen Zollsystem (bspw. S. de Laet, Portorium, Brügge 1949 oder J. France, Quadragesima Galliarum, Rom 2001) ein Vetorecht zukommt.
Vor diesem Hintergrund setzen sich meine Ausführungen zum Ziel, diverse Bereiche der in der Forschung vorherrschenden Modelle vom römischen Zollsystem hinsichtlich ihrer Praktikabilität zu überprüfen und gegebenenfalls zu modifizieren.
Hierzu wird es nötig sein, den Verzollungsprozess aus der Perspektive der Bürger, der Zöllner und der staatlichen Administration zu betrachten, da alle Parteien recht unterschiedliche praktische Ansprüche an den Vorgang stellten. Aufgrund der dürftigen Quellenlage ist es nötig, alle Quellengattungen gleichermaßen zu berücksichtigen.

"Handelsprotektionismus im römischen Kaiserreich?" (Fulltext)