6 ms·
The End of the Past
- adrianratnapala 10y agoA good article with an opaque headline that gives no clue that it compares the ancient Roman economy to the early modern one. I agree slavery was very important but, early modern Europe had slavery too. It begs the question to just say slavery was less important to the modern economy: why was that? One difference is that early modern Europe, for all its wars, had no dominant apex predator like the Roman Republic. True, the Republic fostered advanced trade -- it was wise enough not to destroy provincial economies. But aristocrats still lived off the taxes and bribes payed in conquered lands. This meant that if you had some wealth, the best investment for it was to bribe your way to a government post. This general pattern lead to the empire, and to its corruption. It also explains the rentier culture that the article describes.
- PeterisP 10y agoYes, it's important to read such claims exactly and literally - as the OP states, "Roman Italy had comparable per capita income to the Dutch Republic in 1600". Assuming that this is true, it is still clear that Roman Empire and even more so Roman Egypt did not have a comparable income. Roman Italy was fed and clothed by products of non-Italian economies; It's easy to get a multiplier of your GDP if you have landowners that "farm" overseas land with overseas slave labor that isn't part of your economy consumption.
- abecedarius 10y agoThere's a recent book by Ober, _The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece_, pointing out that the pre-Roman Greek world had per-capita income that high. I think a better question is why did that culture not keep advancing, and maybe the biggest part of the answer is that they got conquered by Rome.
- adrianratnapala 10y agoBut first they were conquered by Macedonia -- was Greek in many ways, but it did not have the political culture that Ober says distinguished the Poleis.
- abecedarius 10y agoI'm including the Hellenistic era. It continued to grow economically at well above normal preindustrial rates (according to Ober), if not quite as high as in the classical period. Technological progress might've been even faster then -- it was the time of Archimedes and the Antikythera device, and much else. (Russo, The Forgotten Revolution.) Ober concluded with a post-Alexander chapter: the Hellenistic cities were not completely at the mercy of empire-building despots because a walled city at the time was very hard to conquer (instead of starving out) leaving a Nash equilibrium where cities paid substantial taxes but weren't messed with too much in their internal politics, so that much of that culture survived for quite some time. (From my memory of a book I read a year ago.) I'd guess that even without Rome, military technology & organization would've made cities increasingly vulnerable, and it'd have been a race between increasing despotism from such developments and the fact that freer more dynamic societies also have a kind of military advantage (see Archimedes again at Syracuse). But of course I'm indulging in total speculation.
- flukus 10y agoI assume that's not counting the slaves? My understanding is that the greeks had some of the highest percentages of slaves to citizens in history.
- abecedarius 10y agoThe slavery makes me very uncomfortable in wondering about this, yes. It varied a lot between the poleis, like Sparta vs. Athens, and I don't think the Rome of the original post was an improvement.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- maldusiecle 10y agoThe author links to pseudoerasmus's blog post about Empire of Cotton as if it were a refutation of Empire of Cotton's thesis. But that blog post is a summary, not a critique--the author says this explicitly in its comments. The closest the author comes to a critique is an aside in this post: https://pseudoerasmus.com/2015/04/26/mccloskey-cotton-ir/ https://pseudoerasmus.com/2015/04/26/mccloskey-cotton-ir/ with similar points made earlier in: https://pseudoerasmus.com/2014/11/10/slavery_and_industrialism/ https://pseudoerasmus.com/2014/11/10/slavery_and_industriali... ...which is far from open-shut, in my reading of it. It's a tangential point, I guess, but worth considering in evaluating the plausibility of the whole argument.
- adrianratnapala 10y agoJust in case anyone is wondering, the linked pseudoerasmus post is: https://pseudoerasmus.com/2016/06/16/eoc/ https://pseudoerasmus.com/2016/06/16/eoc/
- b_emery 10y agoMakes me wonder: Would the slavery-based economy of Roman times represent a model for what will be the robot-based economy of the future?
- bdrool 10y agoThat was my first thought as well. Another thing that came to mind is that way manual work / craftsmanship was looked down upon has its parallels in the present day, particularly in the US. It's often said that other parts of the world see engineering in particular as a prestigious line of work, but the same cannot be said for the US. It's strange how the US lauds only the extremes: either very blue-collar manual laborers, or very white-collar 0.001%-ers (very often rent-seekers who don't actually add much value to society). People who actually engineer things and drive innovation are not looked up to.
- maxxxxx 10y agoBlue collar workers (or soldiers) are looked up to only as a romantic ideal but they got no benefit from that. It's not like they make a lot of money or are sought after in the dating market.
- true_religion 10y agoBeing a solider is fairly profitable so long as you are an officer, and on a steady promotion trajectory.
- ci5er 10y ago> People who actually engineer things and drive innovation are not looked up to. In the US? Compared to whom? Doctors? Bankers? Lawyers? Politicians? Who do you think that you are better than?
- bigger_cheese 10y agoI don't know about the US but here is Australia Engineers are consistently rated as one of the most ethical and trusted professions eg. http://thenewdaily.com.au/money/work/2016/05/14/most-trusted-professions/ http://thenewdaily.com.au/money/work/2016/05/14/most-trusted... Most of my ethics course from university focused on US based case studies (Tacoma Bridge, Kansas City walkway collapse, Space Shuttle etc.) So it could be possible Engineers in US have a worse reputation.
- zeteo 10y ago> Was the Roman economy only as developed as that of Europe circa 1300 or was it as advanced as that of western Europe on the eve of the Industrial Revolution in say 1700. The question is ill posed. It assumes that economies move on a linear scale - with definite positive and negative directions. Was the economy of the Soviet Union in the 1930s more advanced than that of the Dutch Republic in the 1600s? Well, the USSR could produce tractors and icebreakers. But the Dutch had a stock market and a really good internal transportation network.
- Animats 10y ago(Title is poorly chosen.) I've asked this question before - why didn't the Roman Empire progress to an industrial revolution? The Roman Empire never developed the concept of the corporation. They never got beyond the "one rich guy" or "rich family" stage of business organization. They never had much in the way of inter-city businesses. They didn't have common carriers for shipments. They had the roads and the legal system to make that work, but somehow never developed something like Wells Fargo, the stagecoach line. They lacked the organizational tools to scale a business. The Roman Empire had figured out how to scale government, training provincial executives in Rome and sending them out to govern. The Empire had a sizable grain and oil shipping operation, but this seems to have been done as a Government contracting operation, not as a private business. Another argument is that the industrial revolution needed coal, iron, and water power in reasonably close proximity. Italy doesn't have much of that that. England and France do. So do parts of the US. Once you've got railroads, the proximity doesn't matter as much, but until then, it's hard to get started. The political importance of land ownership may have been an obstacle, but England had a landed gentry all through the Industrial Revolution. The landowners couldn't stop progress, although some of them opposed it. They couldn't even stop railroads; Parliament could and did approve "compulsory purchase" of the right of way. It's a good question. For a thousand years, the Roman Empire couldn't solve this basic economic problem. What are we missing about our own society?
- boznz 10y agoRemember an old Dr Who episode where the roman empire never collapsed and they landed on the moon in 500AD or something like that. great story for a young kid like me but shit acting and cheap special effects made it totally forgettable.
- vondur 10y agoI've been listening to a podcast called the Fall Of Rome by Patrick Wyman who goes into detail about the economy of the later Roman Empire. He details some of the logistic systems the Romans had to bring food and other staples to the main cities of the Empire, which was subsidized by the Roman government. This allowed for shippers to then spend the rest of their shipping time on moving goods for profit. The merchant shipping basically broke even moving the goods for the government, after that any other jobs they could take were basically profit. This allowed for the shipping of items all over the Empire for very low prices. For example, common pottery that was made in large quantities in North Africa were shipped to Britain and even hundreds of miles inland into France. This would seem to indicate that it was cheaper to ship items from hundreds or thousands of km's away then they could be produced locally for a profit.
- thisrod 10y agoThere is potentially a really simple answer to the question, "What happened in England in the 17th Century and changed everything?" Isaac Newton. I'm surprised that historians don't consider that possibility, at least to the extent required to exclude it.
- GlennS 10y agoIt's an interesting proposition. There is certainly a history of scientific paradigm shifts, although I don't think it's very popular among historians. Consider also the printing press. Invented much earlier, but something which built up momentum as it was improved and paper was made cheaper. Perhaps the improved ability to disseminate information made the industrial revolution inevitable?
- Maken 10y agoNewton was not an isolated occurrence
- lolive 10y agoHoly cow, dudes!!! There is a massive cultural overload in all these comments! Are you really the same guys who code websites all day/night long?