Other historians reject those motives, as the supposed Parthian "control" over the maritime Far Eastern trade route was at best conjectural and based on a selective reading of Chinese sources: trade by land through Parthia seems to have been unhampered by Parthian authorities and left solely to the devices of private enterprise. Commercial activity in second century Mesopotamia seems to have been a general phenomenon, shared by many peoples within and without the Roman Empire, with no sign of a concerted imperial policy towards it. As in the case of the alimenta, scholars like Moses Finley and Paul Veyne have considered the whole idea of a foreign trade "policy" behind Trajan's war anachronistic. According to them, the sole Roman concern with the Far Eastern luxuries trade, besides collecting toll taxes and customs,Paul Erdkamp, The Grain Market in the Roman Empire: A Social, Political and Economic Study. Cambridge University Press, 2005, , page 5 was moral and involved frowning upon the "softness" of luxuries but no economic policy. In the absence of conclusive evidence, trade between Rome and India might have been far more balanced in terms of quantities of precious metals exchanged. One source for the notion of the Roman gold drain, Pliny the Younger's uncle Pliny the Elder, had earlier described the Gangetic Plains as one of the gold sources for the Roman Empire. In his controversial book on the ancient economy, Finley considers Trajan's "badly miscalculated and expensive assault on Parthia" to be an example of the many Roman "commercial wars" that existed only in the books of modern historians.
