In the middle of the 6th century, the Byzantine emperor Justinian undertook one of the largest legal codification projects in history. His efforts distilled the entire millennium of Roman legislation into four tomes, addressing in theory the whole scope of Roman law. An important, although understudied, element of Justinianic legislation is its treatment of economic and, more precisely, mercantile policy. Previous scholarship on trade in the Justinianic period has fallen into two broad camps: legal scholars from the early and middle of the 20th century imagined a total state-driven economy, with the state being the primary driver of long-distance exchange and with the emperor exercising a quasi-monopoly on matters like production, transportation, and pricing of goods; more recently, historians have become more pessimistic of the role of the Late Roman state in the economy, particularly after comparison with economic papyri from Egypt, and have seen legislation as more of a propaganda exercise than a real indicator of economic phenomena. In a paper I prepared during my MPhil study at the University of Oxford, I investigated the trade-related legislation of the emperor Justinian and argued that the level of legislation and consequently state intervention in trade depended primarily on the interest of the state in individual goods. On the one hand, the level of legislation and state involvement in the economy was heavily proscriptive with regards to goods like purple silk, bread, and slaves, which were considered of exceeding importance for the interest of the state and/or its ruling class. On the other hand, commodities like ivory and non-elite products (e.g. non-purple silks, cloths, cotton, etc.) were only liable to import taxes, but beyond that their trade operated according to relatively free market principles. Thus, the Byzantine economy of the era of Justinian was a curious mix of state-driven economic processes, such as the annona system or public bread shipments, involving a select number of goods and of free-market exchange for the majority of goods and merchants. This discovery is important in explaining the continuity of low-level cabotage trade in subsequent centuries despite the collapse of the majority of state-driven exchange networks. If you would like to read this paper in full, discuss it, or use it in your own scholarly work, please feel free to reach out to me.