FORUM The Early Modern “Silk-Road”. The Role of European, Chinese, and Russian Trade Reassessed 1 Salvatore Ciriacono ABSTRACT ##### The Traditional Silk Road and the Maritime. Products and International Competition Tis article aims to examine trade along the famous Silk Road between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Te term ‘Silk Road’ itself is said to have been coined by the nine- teenth-century German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen in discussing centuries of trade along the harsh desert routes of Central Asia that linked such places as Samarkand, fabled cities that were also great centres of manufacture. In such commerce, silk clearly epitomized the important luxury goods imported into Europe from Asia. However, that was not the only product carried from China to the West: porcelain, tea and, earlier still, paper and gunpowder (basically a large part of the era’s technological know-how) played a no less essential role in East-West trade. And nowadays, after centuries of western dominion which meant that the predominant fow of trade was West-East, we are once 1 I would like to thank Professor Peter Burschel, director of the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel (Ger- many), for allowing me to draw widely on the material housed in that library, without which I could not have completed this paper. Comparativ | Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung 29 (2019) Heft 3, S. 122–137.