I doubt that the goal had anything to do with making the empire wealthier. In the real world, many of these kinds of decisions came about because the crown swapped a monopoly of some sort for financial assistance, and the monopolists then dragged the crown into a conflict, initially through privately raised forces. Those would be the aristocrats you mention. It also feeds nicely into the existing stories about how the leadership of the conquest changed over time.
In terms of what gets traded, the problem is that there is little riverine transport available to get things uphill to Dragon Pass. I suspect that the Lunars didn't really understand that at first. They probably looked at map and saw a big Creek-Stream River system that they could use. There would be local problems to overcome. The most familiar to them woud have been Snakepipe Hollow; if there's anyone that could manage a trading route through there, it would be the Lunars. So then they came up with a list of all th wonderful things that could be imported by barge up the Creek-Stream River portaged either across Dragon Pass or through Snakepipe Hollow to the headwaters of the Pelorian river basin. Pickled fish, beers, sugar, spices, western iron, tropical hardwoods, linen and cotton cloth, parchment, tobacco, and so on. The conspirators probably divided out the monopolies.
Then, it turned out that riverine transport was really problematic. The chaos in Snakepipe Hollow wasn't so tame. Dredging a canal through Delecti's swamp isn't quite so easy as in the marshes in Peloria. Getting passage through the underground rivers of the Plateau of Glass is pretty rough, too. Plus the entities in the Creek-Stream River aren't as friendly as those in the Pelorian rivers. And then there are the natives. So, the uphill transport from the sea only makes sense for products that have a high value to volume and weight. Parchment, spices, and sugar probably make it. Cloth, tobacco, and iron are risky, Pickled fish, beer, and hardwoods don't make it. Certainly grain, yarn, and raw cotton are out of the question.
That would create divisions among the monopolists. Some would position to re-allocate the monopolies. Others would lobby the crown to fix the transport problems, presumably through taxes on the successful monopolists. (Maybe someone should look into these magical draconic roads that the locals talk about!) And the monopolists with the valuable monopolies would resist these changes. Each side looks for allies. (PC's enter stage right.)
To get the flavor of all this, I recommend volume 1 of Murray Rothbard's "Conceived in Libery," which is available for free online at http://mises.org/books/conceived1.pdf. He' a libertarian economist and philosopher, but his descriptions of how the American colonies were generally organized by scheming political monopolists is highly amusing, regardless of your politics. He conveys a great sense of the conflicts between different monopolists and between the monopolists and the settlers they tried to rule and between the monopolists and the crown.
Chris Lemens
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