1000–300 BCE: (Commerce as the Engine of Empire — The Beginning of the Age of Empires Coinciding with the Growing Complexity of Products and the Widening Geo…

1000–300 BCE: (Commerce as the Engine of Empire — The Beginning of the Age of Empires Coinciding with the Growing Complexity of Products and the Widening Geographical Reach of Trading Links During the First Millennium BCE, the Various Empires Tending Often to Expand Across Areas with Already Complex Networks of Trade Relations in Place — as Exemplified by the Neo-Assyrian Conquests in the Levant and the Roman Conquest of the Mediterranean Shores — or into the Major Producing Areas of Key Trade Products as in the Case of Aksum): The beginning of this age of empires coincides in timing with the growing complexity, as the first millennium BCE wore on, in the variety of products and the widening geographical reach of trading links. The various empires tended often to expand across areas with already complex networks of trade relations in place — as notably exemplified by the Neo-Assyrian conquests in the Levant and by the Roman conquest of the lands all around the shores of the commercially central Mediterranean Sea — or into the major producing areas of key products of the trade, as one sees in the case of Aksum. The correlation between commerce and empire is not coincidental. Empires did not create trade networks from nothing. They seized them. The Neo-Assyrians conquered the Levant because the Levant was already the crossroads of ancient commerce. Rome conquered the Mediterranean littoral because the Mediterranean was already the commercial highway of the ancient world. And Aksum expanded because it controlled the production zones of frankincense, myrrh, gold, and ivory — commodities for which demand was already global. Empire, in this reading, is the political expression of commercial ambition. The military apparatus of the state is deployed to capture the revenues of existing trade, to control the choke points through which commerce flows, to monopolize the production of high-value goods. Africa was not peripheral to this dynamic. Africa was essential to it — as the source of the gold, ivory, frankincense, and myrrh that the entire ancient world craved, and as the home of empires that understood, as clearly as Rome or Assyria, that control of commerce was the foundation of power.