Amber Route and Roman Empire

by jake7264

If I'm not mistaken the price of amber around the year zero was very close to price of gold (if not greater). The main deposits of amber - from eastern coast of Poland to Finland. This location was very well known since Egiptian times. Why oh why Romans didn't do any solid efort to conquer this particular part of Europe? Surely taking over Britain (an island!) was not less challanging. Why the only World Power at the time didn't try to control the richest deposits of most expensive commodity???

Tiako

Well, there was quite a bit or territory between the Roman frontier and Poland, but more importantly, the idea of conquering an are "for its resources" isn't really something that happened, or at least not until fairly recently. As a general rule, the cost of invasion and administration will more than outweigh the benefits of extraction, and more to the point, the state was not generally directly involved in extraction, so the prime beneficiaries would not be the state, but those elite who were positioned to capitalize on it. These elite were heavily tied to and related to the workings of the state, but they were not entirely congruent.

Or to put it differently, by and large it is easier to just trade for the material. There is really only one example of a Roman military action that is generally accepted to have possibly been for the hopes of controlling resource production, and that was expedition of Aelius Gellius in 25 BCE to Arabia Felix. The expedition was a failure and would not be repeated, a rather significant fact.