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The Roman empire was based on slavery and had to die so that humanity could progress. Slave labor is vastly less efficient than having serfs that can keep (part

The Roman empire was based on slavery and had to die so that humanity could progress. Slave labor is vastly less efficient than having serfs that can keep (part of) what they produce and have incentives to +-work harder. That allowed producing more food with less workforce so many people were free to do other things and bigger cities could develop which in turn would set the foundation for making the industrial revolution possible. Everything else is just some weird romanticism of the antique when in reality many things got better in the medieval period. There wasn't a sudden fall of the Roman Empire. It was a gradual process and the structures coming after it saw themselves not as a replacement but as a continuation of Roman traditions. Edit: As people misunderstand. The important difference between serfdom and slavery is not freedom. The important part is incentives to work harder. Slaves only have the incentives to avoid the whip. They do not own what they produce. They need to be closely supervised and micromanaged. In contrast many forms of serfdom allowed to the serfs to keep some of the stuff they produced so they had incentives to work more efficiently.

SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
I'm not sure why you're focusing on that one aspect when there so many others for the Roman decline. And it's not like slavery disappeared with the Roman empire.
- cardanome 2y ago
  Because economics are the deciding factor. It is what enables sustaining a higher population, investing in technological progress and of course military might. The form of society that is more efficient will always win out in the end. Same as companies that can produce goods more efficiently under free market capitalism will always dominate.
  - SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
    You're making a lot of unsupported claims about free market capitalism which really isn't a factor when we're discussing 2000 year old empires. I don't think you can make the argument that the dark ages ushered in a free market, so I don't know how you're connecting these things. It's a strange take that hyper-focuses on slavery and the economy when slavery was being used by western nations well into the 1800s.
    - cardanome 2y ago
      I am not saying there was any free market capitalism in feudalism. I am trying to explain to you the basic economic principle that those that can produce something more efficiently will tend to dominate. I used the example of corporations under capitalism as an example that I hope you would be more familiar with. If I need to use 90% of my population just to produce enough food to sustain them, I can only use 10% for other things. The society that only needs 50% of the workforce to be in agriculture can easily entertain for example a vastly bigger military even with the same population. Economics is what wins war. Economics is what allows technological progress. Yes, slavery existed but the question is what the dominant form of ding agriculture.
      - SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
        I don't understand what time periods you're comparing here. Your explanations don't follow with any sort of historical precedent. You're making assumptions that there were such a thing as a standing army during the middle ages - ironically enough it was Rome with its slaves that had one of those - and that somehow there were less serfs than slaves. The majority of people in Medieval Europe were still peasant farmers. I feel like you're talking about economic abstractions without understanding the actual historical context.
        cardanome 2y ago
        I am not making any assumption about there being big standing armies. I am just trying to explain to you the basic principle that the economy is the deciding factor that governs everything else. I really just try to explain basic economic stuff. History doesn't go perfectly linearly. There is always exceptions for every rule. You need to understand the broad stroke and main driving forces before going into the small. The bigger picture is: Slave holding society -> feudalism -> capitalism Not everywhere in the world and sometimes steps get skipped but that is the general tendency observed. Edit: Removed a unnecessary sentence that was not very polite. Sorry about that.
        2y ago
  - inquirerGeneral 2y ago
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  - schmidt_fifty 2y ago
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Astraco 2y ago
Everybody knows slavery ended with the Roman Empire.
- cardanome 2y ago
  It ended slavery as the dominant form of doing agriculture.
  - Astraco 2y ago
    Then the end of slavery in the Empire and and the start of serfdom, more efficient than slavery, after de Diocletian reforms killed the Empire. That's contradictory. And slavery was still a thing after those reforms, as other comments say. Diocletian reforms, the corruption, civil wars and the inability of defend itself eroded and destroyed all the structures that made the Republic great all those are the reasons that made the Empire fall.
    - tsimionescu 2y ago
      The Republic was gone for a few hundred years before the Empire fell in Western Europe (and the Eastern part of the Roman Empire continued for a thousand years more).
      - Astraco 2y ago
        I'm talking about the political, economical and social structures, not the Republic.
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    In Southern Europe, if you consider serfs different from slaves (they were, but only to a small extent). Slavery is extremely economically efficient in reality, especially if you have the power to force the slaves into utter servitude, like they did in the US South. The south, and the USA as a whole, would never have been as rich if they didn't have slavery at the right time. It was important enough that h he confederacy was willing to fight a war over it: they knew, and they were proven right, that losing slavery would plunge them into poverty, as it did. Of course, this is not a defense of slavery: in all its forms, it is a disgusting, disturbing, inhuman institution that must always be fought against and dismantled. But this can only ever be done by the will of the people, against the economic interests of the slave masters. An unregulated free market will always seek to reintroduce slavery (just like it will converge to monopolies or at least oligopolies and many other undesirable traits).
throwup238 2y ago
Serfs were by and large slaves. The only major difference was that they were tied to a specific piece of land and couldn’t be sold off separately. Other than that, feudal lords could do with them as they wished. Besides slavery was practiced in Europe for long after Rome, especially by the Vikings who would raid the serfs and take them as slaves. The Byzantine empire that survived the fall of Rome practiced slavery until its fall a thousand years later so your thesis doesn’t make much sense.
- cardanome 2y ago
  There is a huge difference between serfs and slaves. Both are unfree by modern standards but that doesn't mean one wasn't a big progress over the other. As I said the big difference is that serfs could also keep part of what they produce. They have incentives to work harder while slaves do not have any. Feudal lords couldn't just do with them as they wanted. Yes, they were tied to specific piece of land but in return also got the protection of the lord in times of war. Slavery was replaced as the dominant form for doing agriculture. Slavery still exists to this day but I don't see how this is relevant. We are talking broad stroke tendencies over a very long, long time. The more efficient forms of productions will always win out in the end. It shouldn't really be controversial that slave labor is not very efficient.
  - hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
    > There is a huge difference between serfs and slaves. Bullshit. Also, when you say "Yes, they were tied to specific piece of land but in return also got the protection of the lord in times of war", that was generally true of chattel slaves as well - owners like to protect what they see as their property, after all. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom_in_Russia#Slaves_and_serfs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom_in_Russia#Slaves_and_s... (and there are other linked sources on that page if you want to follow up): > Formal conversion to serf status and the later ban on the sale of serfs without land did not stop the trade in household slaves; this trade merely changed its name. The private owners of the serfs regarded the law as a mere formality. Instead of "sale of a peasant" the papers would advertise "servant for hire" or similar. > By the eighteenth century, the practice of selling serfs without land had become commonplace. Owners had absolute control over their serfs' lives, and could buy, sell and trade them at will, giving them as much power over serfs as Americans had over chattel slaves, though owners did not always choose to exercise their powers over serfs to the fullest extent.
ceuk 2y ago
Can you expand on the idea that slave labour is "vastly less efficient"? Is it just a motivation thing? And is there any good evidence/sources for this? Surely both groups generally performed pretty extreme levels of backbreaking labour. I can't exactly imagine a slave slacking off while literally being whipped. Also, even if feudalism made us more efficient at food production as you say* - did it not also make societies less effective at producing great works of infrastructure (roads being a good example) than imperial Rome? One just needs to compare the dark ages/low middle ages to the Roman era to see the stark contrast. Isn't the entire narrative basically: Roman prosperity -> bad times -> rediscovery of classic values (renaissance) -> parity with the Romans 1000 years later? Genuine questions, not trying to be combative. My history just might not be very good * Also I'd be interested to find out if there were more famines during pax romana or in the period after the fall of the western empire..
- bryanlarsen 2y ago
  Roads are a poor example. Goods and people travelled far more efficiently by water, roads were primarily for military use. Historians today don't use the term "dark ages" because in reality they weren't that dark.
  - Qwertious 2y ago
    The term "dark ages" was used to refer to how we (i.e. people in the present/historians) didn't have a lot of info about that period. As in, something dark is something you can't see into very well. The ages indeed weren't dark themselves though, that's a misunderstanding of the term and that misconception is exactly why historians try to avoid the term nowadays. Roads were primarily built for military use, but once they were built anyone travelling on foot would benefit from them, which meant had real economic impacts. That said, boats can carry far more goods than pack mules far faster, and don't eat a ton of fodder every day. There's a reason all the big old cities are on rivers. It's also why the Roman empire was primarily on the Mediterranean. If anyone wants to read pages and pages of info about classical-era and roman roads, I recommend https://acoup.blog/2023/06/02/collections-roman-roads/ https://acoup.blog/2023/06/02/collections-roman-roads/
- 2y ago
mjhay 2y ago
There were vastly more slaves in the late Republic and early Empire than the mid or late empire, due to conquest. Slaves undercutting free workers was a factor in the fall of the Republic, but it had little to do with the fall of the Empire. Proto-serfdom had already begun by the Empire's fall, so by your argument it should have gotten stronger, not weaker.
- orwin 2y ago
  I would argue that the fall of the republic was the first nail in the coffin, and like you said, was caused by slave concentration in few patrician's hands (according to the Gracci brothers at least). The slave concentration around rome, and the slave owner concentration at the end didn't help the empire either. And please don't draw parallels, you shouldn't, the society now is very different. [edit] for clarification, the last sentence is a general 'you', I'm not talking about my parent who made an overall good point.
inquirerGeneral 2y ago
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black_13 2y ago
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schmidt_fifty 2y ago
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AlbertCory 2y ago
A silly comment. Slavery persisted well into early modern times. Spanish colonies in the New World depended on it. It persists still in some parts of the world. > The Roman empire was based on slavery Something only a recent college grad who's ignorant of history would ever say.
Calavar 2y ago
1. I don't think it's accurate to call Rome a slave based economy. Most people in Rome were freemen. Slaves served certain functions that would have been hard to replace with freemen, but I wouldn't say that makes Rome a slave based economy. For example, migrant laborers can't be easily replaced in the modern US economy, but I wouldn't say that the US economy based on migrant labor. 2. Relating incentives to productivity is an anachronistic grafting of industrial and post-industrial economic thought onto a subsistence farming economy where it doesn't apply. If a serf works harder and produces more crop, what are they going to do with it? Sell it to their neighbor, who is also a farmer and grows all the same things? To the best of my knowledge, there was not a significant cash crop economy in medieval Europe. 3. As others have pointed out, slavery continued long after the Roman Empire. It was much more prevalent in the encomienda system and the antebellum South than it ever was in Rome. The proportion of enslaved people in mid 1700s South Carolina about 3 to 5x that of ancient Rome. And even that's nothing compared to the Caribbean.
- cardanome 2y ago
  1. Rome is commonly characterized as a slave holding society. I think it is fair to say that it was based on slavery as getting new slaves was a big enough concern that it was willing to wage wars over it. It is hard to get estimates but something like 15% percent might have been slaves which is pretty huge. Of course saying it was only based on slavery would be too far. 2. Cities can not sustain themselves but need the existence of villages that would sell them the food. In the late medieval period farmers absolute would sell the surplus for money on the market. We also see also traveling merchants that would go from village to village to offer wares. > Sell it to their neighbor, who is also a farmer and grows all the same things? Some people in a village did not have land but were craftsmen like the iconic blacksmith. An yes it was a development and early medieval period ages the serf was probably just happy to have slightly more to eat. It didn't all happen over night. Villages started very self-sufficient. Basically producing everything they needed themselves while we see much more diversification of labor later on. 3. I made a comment about the US South as well. An yes, history is not linear. There are just general tendencies.
  - 2y ago
felipellrocha 2y ago
This is a huge mischaracterization. Most people in the roman empire were free. Yes, they had slaves, but their economy was not based in slavery. In fact, part of the reforms of Diocletian was to transform everyone into serfs, aka, proto-Feudalism. They walked backwards, not forward.
anyonecancode 2y ago
Regarding how many people in the Roman Empire were slaves, and what percentage of the population that was, this passage[1] from the oft-hn-referenced acoup.blog on the demographics of the ancient world is relevant: ``` Once again in Roman Italy our situation is perhaps a touch better, although not particularly good. Because we have better demographic data for the rest of the free population and a better grasp on the mechanics of Roman agriculture, we can do something a bit better than blind guessing here (though blind guessing there has been in abundance), but not much better. Walter Scheidel walked through much of this math, guesstimating the urban enslaved population under Augustus (r. 31BC-14AD) at around 600,000 (based on an estimated breakdown of Roman social classes and estimates of how many enslaved persons each elite household might have) and another c. 600,000 in the countryside (based on rather more confident agricultural modeling showing the figure can’t be much higher than this without pushing out all of the small farmers and tenants we know from our sources there were) for a total of 1.2m probably representing the height of the enslaved population in Italy, coming as it does at the explosive conclusion of Rome’s long streak of rapid expansion in warfare.12 For an Italy under August between perhaps 5.7m and 7.0m that would imply an enslaved population of very roughly 15-20%, with a bit of wiggle room on both sides.13 This, we can be quite sure, is a significant increase from the earlier period so the figure for 225 BC and the Middle Republic must be lower, perhaps very roughly around 10%. Again, those figures are very rough, but I think Scheidel14 does a good job showing that something much higher, say, 30+% simply doesn’t make much sense given our evidence. That actually is a useful conclusion, by the by, the full import of which I think has not been fully observed: while Rome has a reputation as the slaveholding society – and it certainly was a slaveholding society, make no mistake – those rates are probably rather lower than what we see in Greece, suggestive of an Italy countryside in particular that had more freeholding citizen small farmers than a comparable Greek polis. ``` [1]https://acoup.blog/2023/12/22/collections-how-many-people-ancient-demography/ https://acoup.blog/2023/12/22/collections-how-many-people-an...
csomar 2y ago
> The Roman empire was based on slavery and had to die so that humanity could progress. Making a statement with confidence doesn’t make it true. You might want to provide substance for this statement as the rest of your comment is based on it.
fngjdflmdflg 2y ago
The Romans managed to accomplish very little in 1,000 years considering the extent of their empire. The Greeks contributed much more than the Romans in a shorter time frame and with much less land, power etc. The reason Romans are romanticized is they are the ones who brought civilization to Norther Europe. (more or less. Or, at least, these is what Europeans themselves thought.). These Europeans then created the scientific and industrial revolutions (almost 1,000 years after the fall of Rome, I should note.) Rome also spread Christianity to Europe and maintained control over the Christian religion in Europe via the Pope. So it makes sense that people romanticize Rome because they see it as the predecessor of Europe. Even though Rome itslef is actually not that great, even if we accept that it spread civilization to Europe.
- mr_toad 2y ago
  > The Romans managed to accomplish very little in 1,000 years considering the extent of their empire. Yes, apart from the aqueducts, the sanitation, the roads, the wine, public health, public baths, public order, cheese, medication, law, education and entertainment the Romans accomplished very little.
  - gattilorenz 2y ago
    What about bringing peace?
    - BehindBlueEyes 2y ago
      Oh, peace? SHUT UP! ;)
  - fngjdflmdflg 2y ago
    You are saying that sarcastically but that actually is very little. Compare the advancements from the 1,000 year prior, even just by the Greeks in Mathematics (Pythagoras, Euclid, Diophantus etc.) science (Aristotle), philosophy (Plato, many others) technology (Archimedes, killed by a Roman soldier) and astronomy. None of the things you mention are really hard problems. The fact is that the Romans were anti-intellectual and only cared about building which is not that hard. Also the Romans did not invent cheese or wine. Compare also with the Babylonians. Compare also the advancements made from 1200 in Europe.
wwtrv 2y ago
> slavery and had to die so that humanity could progress. Slave labor is vastly less efficient than having serfs that can keep And the Roman empire had in large part shifted to serfdom in its later periods as the supply of cheap slaved dried up. > That allowed producing more food with less workforce Also the population collapsing resulted in significant increase in per capita productivity (more land per person)

SketchySeaBeast 2y ago

I'm not sure why you're focusing on that one aspect when there so many others for the Roman decline. And it's not like slavery disappeared with the Roman empire.

cardanome 2y ago
Because economics are the deciding factor. It is what enables sustaining a higher population, investing in technological progress and of course military might. The form of society that is more efficient will always win out in the end. Same as companies that can produce goods more efficiently under free market capitalism will always dominate.
- SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
  You're making a lot of unsupported claims about free market capitalism which really isn't a factor when we're discussing 2000 year old empires. I don't think you can make the argument that the dark ages ushered in a free market, so I don't know how you're connecting these things. It's a strange take that hyper-focuses on slavery and the economy when slavery was being used by western nations well into the 1800s.
  - cardanome 2y ago
    I am not saying there was any free market capitalism in feudalism. I am trying to explain to you the basic economic principle that those that can produce something more efficiently will tend to dominate. I used the example of corporations under capitalism as an example that I hope you would be more familiar with. If I need to use 90% of my population just to produce enough food to sustain them, I can only use 10% for other things. The society that only needs 50% of the workforce to be in agriculture can easily entertain for example a vastly bigger military even with the same population. Economics is what wins war. Economics is what allows technological progress. Yes, slavery existed but the question is what the dominant form of ding agriculture.
    - SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
      I don't understand what time periods you're comparing here. Your explanations don't follow with any sort of historical precedent. You're making assumptions that there were such a thing as a standing army during the middle ages - ironically enough it was Rome with its slaves that had one of those - and that somehow there were less serfs than slaves. The majority of people in Medieval Europe were still peasant farmers. I feel like you're talking about economic abstractions without understanding the actual historical context.
      - cardanome 2y ago
        I am not making any assumption about there being big standing armies. I am just trying to explain to you the basic principle that the economy is the deciding factor that governs everything else. I really just try to explain basic economic stuff. History doesn't go perfectly linearly. There is always exceptions for every rule. You need to understand the broad stroke and main driving forces before going into the small. The bigger picture is: Slave holding society -> feudalism -> capitalism Not everywhere in the world and sometimes steps get skipped but that is the general tendency observed. Edit: Removed a unnecessary sentence that was not very polite. Sorry about that.
        2y ago
- inquirerGeneral 2y ago
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- schmidt_fifty 2y ago
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Astraco 2y ago

Everybody knows slavery ended with the Roman Empire.

cardanome 2y ago
It ended slavery as the dominant form of doing agriculture.
- Astraco 2y ago
  Then the end of slavery in the Empire and and the start of serfdom, more efficient than slavery, after de Diocletian reforms killed the Empire. That's contradictory. And slavery was still a thing after those reforms, as other comments say. Diocletian reforms, the corruption, civil wars and the inability of defend itself eroded and destroyed all the structures that made the Republic great all those are the reasons that made the Empire fall.
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    The Republic was gone for a few hundred years before the Empire fell in Western Europe (and the Eastern part of the Roman Empire continued for a thousand years more).
    - Astraco 2y ago
      I'm talking about the political, economical and social structures, not the Republic.
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  In Southern Europe, if you consider serfs different from slaves (they were, but only to a small extent). Slavery is extremely economically efficient in reality, especially if you have the power to force the slaves into utter servitude, like they did in the US South. The south, and the USA as a whole, would never have been as rich if they didn't have slavery at the right time. It was important enough that h he confederacy was willing to fight a war over it: they knew, and they were proven right, that losing slavery would plunge them into poverty, as it did. Of course, this is not a defense of slavery: in all its forms, it is a disgusting, disturbing, inhuman institution that must always be fought against and dismantled. But this can only ever be done by the will of the people, against the economic interests of the slave masters. An unregulated free market will always seek to reintroduce slavery (just like it will converge to monopolies or at least oligopolies and many other undesirable traits).

throwup238 2y ago

Serfs were by and large slaves. The only major difference was that they were tied to a specific piece of land and couldn’t be sold off separately. Other than that, feudal lords could do with them as they wished. Besides slavery was practiced in Europe for long after Rome, especially by the Vikings who would raid the serfs and take them as slaves. The Byzantine empire that survived the fall of Rome practiced slavery until its fall a thousand years later so your thesis doesn’t make much sense.

cardanome 2y ago
There is a huge difference between serfs and slaves. Both are unfree by modern standards but that doesn't mean one wasn't a big progress over the other. As I said the big difference is that serfs could also keep part of what they produce. They have incentives to work harder while slaves do not have any. Feudal lords couldn't just do with them as they wanted. Yes, they were tied to specific piece of land but in return also got the protection of the lord in times of war. Slavery was replaced as the dominant form for doing agriculture. Slavery still exists to this day but I don't see how this is relevant. We are talking broad stroke tendencies over a very long, long time. The more efficient forms of productions will always win out in the end. It shouldn't really be controversial that slave labor is not very efficient.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  > There is a huge difference between serfs and slaves. Bullshit. Also, when you say "Yes, they were tied to specific piece of land but in return also got the protection of the lord in times of war", that was generally true of chattel slaves as well - owners like to protect what they see as their property, after all. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom_in_Russia#Slaves_and_serfs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom_in_Russia#Slaves_and_s... (and there are other linked sources on that page if you want to follow up): > Formal conversion to serf status and the later ban on the sale of serfs without land did not stop the trade in household slaves; this trade merely changed its name. The private owners of the serfs regarded the law as a mere formality. Instead of "sale of a peasant" the papers would advertise "servant for hire" or similar. > By the eighteenth century, the practice of selling serfs without land had become commonplace. Owners had absolute control over their serfs' lives, and could buy, sell and trade them at will, giving them as much power over serfs as Americans had over chattel slaves, though owners did not always choose to exercise their powers over serfs to the fullest extent.

ceuk 2y ago

Can you expand on the idea that slave labour is "vastly less efficient"? Is it just a motivation thing? And is there any good evidence/sources for this? Surely both groups generally performed pretty extreme levels of backbreaking labour. I can't exactly imagine a slave slacking off while literally being whipped. Also, even if feudalism made us more efficient at food production as you say* - did it not also make societies less effective at producing great works of infrastructure (roads being a good example) than imperial Rome? One just needs to compare the dark ages/low middle ages to the Roman era to see the stark contrast. Isn't the entire narrative basically: Roman prosperity -> bad times -> rediscovery of classic values (renaissance) -> parity with the Romans 1000 years later? Genuine questions, not trying to be combative. My history just might not be very good * Also I'd be interested to find out if there were more famines during pax romana or in the period after the fall of the western empire..

bryanlarsen 2y ago
Roads are a poor example. Goods and people travelled far more efficiently by water, roads were primarily for military use. Historians today don't use the term "dark ages" because in reality they weren't that dark.
- Qwertious 2y ago
  The term "dark ages" was used to refer to how we (i.e. people in the present/historians) didn't have a lot of info about that period. As in, something dark is something you can't see into very well. The ages indeed weren't dark themselves though, that's a misunderstanding of the term and that misconception is exactly why historians try to avoid the term nowadays. Roads were primarily built for military use, but once they were built anyone travelling on foot would benefit from them, which meant had real economic impacts. That said, boats can carry far more goods than pack mules far faster, and don't eat a ton of fodder every day. There's a reason all the big old cities are on rivers. It's also why the Roman empire was primarily on the Mediterranean. If anyone wants to read pages and pages of info about classical-era and roman roads, I recommend https://acoup.blog/2023/06/02/collections-roman-roads/ https://acoup.blog/2023/06/02/collections-roman-roads/
2y ago

mjhay 2y ago

There were vastly more slaves in the late Republic and early Empire than the mid or late empire, due to conquest. Slaves undercutting free workers was a factor in the fall of the Republic, but it had little to do with the fall of the Empire. Proto-serfdom had already begun by the Empire's fall, so by your argument it should have gotten stronger, not weaker.

orwin 2y ago
I would argue that the fall of the republic was the first nail in the coffin, and like you said, was caused by slave concentration in few patrician's hands (according to the Gracci brothers at least). The slave concentration around rome, and the slave owner concentration at the end didn't help the empire either. And please don't draw parallels, you shouldn't, the society now is very different. [edit] for clarification, the last sentence is a general 'you', I'm not talking about my parent who made an overall good point.

inquirerGeneral 2y ago

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black_13 2y ago

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schmidt_fifty 2y ago

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AlbertCory 2y ago

A silly comment. Slavery persisted well into early modern times. Spanish colonies in the New World depended on it. It persists still in some parts of the world. > The Roman empire was based on slavery Something only a recent college grad who's ignorant of history would ever say.

Calavar 2y ago

1. I don't think it's accurate to call Rome a slave based economy. Most people in Rome were freemen. Slaves served certain functions that would have been hard to replace with freemen, but I wouldn't say that makes Rome a slave based economy. For example, migrant laborers can't be easily replaced in the modern US economy, but I wouldn't say that the US economy based on migrant labor. 2. Relating incentives to productivity is an anachronistic grafting of industrial and post-industrial economic thought onto a subsistence farming economy where it doesn't apply. If a serf works harder and produces more crop, what are they going to do with it? Sell it to their neighbor, who is also a farmer and grows all the same things? To the best of my knowledge, there was not a significant cash crop economy in medieval Europe. 3. As others have pointed out, slavery continued long after the Roman Empire. It was much more prevalent in the encomienda system and the antebellum South than it ever was in Rome. The proportion of enslaved people in mid 1700s South Carolina about 3 to 5x that of ancient Rome. And even that's nothing compared to the Caribbean.

cardanome 2y ago
1. Rome is commonly characterized as a slave holding society. I think it is fair to say that it was based on slavery as getting new slaves was a big enough concern that it was willing to wage wars over it. It is hard to get estimates but something like 15% percent might have been slaves which is pretty huge. Of course saying it was only based on slavery would be too far. 2. Cities can not sustain themselves but need the existence of villages that would sell them the food. In the late medieval period farmers absolute would sell the surplus for money on the market. We also see also traveling merchants that would go from village to village to offer wares. > Sell it to their neighbor, who is also a farmer and grows all the same things? Some people in a village did not have land but were craftsmen like the iconic blacksmith. An yes it was a development and early medieval period ages the serf was probably just happy to have slightly more to eat. It didn't all happen over night. Villages started very self-sufficient. Basically producing everything they needed themselves while we see much more diversification of labor later on. 3. I made a comment about the US South as well. An yes, history is not linear. There are just general tendencies.
- 2y ago

felipellrocha 2y ago

This is a huge mischaracterization. Most people in the roman empire were free. Yes, they had slaves, but their economy was not based in slavery. In fact, part of the reforms of Diocletian was to transform everyone into serfs, aka, proto-Feudalism. They walked backwards, not forward.

anyonecancode 2y ago

Regarding how many people in the Roman Empire were slaves, and what percentage of the population that was, this passage[1] from the oft-hn-referenced acoup.blog on the demographics of the ancient world is relevant: ``` Once again in Roman Italy our situation is perhaps a touch better, although not particularly good. Because we have better demographic data for the rest of the free population and a better grasp on the mechanics of Roman agriculture, we can do something a bit better than blind guessing here (though blind guessing there has been in abundance), but not much better. Walter Scheidel walked through much of this math, guesstimating the urban enslaved population under Augustus (r. 31BC-14AD) at around 600,000 (based on an estimated breakdown of Roman social classes and estimates of how many enslaved persons each elite household might have) and another c. 600,000 in the countryside (based on rather more confident agricultural modeling showing the figure can’t be much higher than this without pushing out all of the small farmers and tenants we know from our sources there were) for a total of 1.2m probably representing the height of the enslaved population in Italy, coming as it does at the explosive conclusion of Rome’s long streak of rapid expansion in warfare.12 For an Italy under August between perhaps 5.7m and 7.0m that would imply an enslaved population of very roughly 15-20%, with a bit of wiggle room on both sides.13 This, we can be quite sure, is a significant increase from the earlier period so the figure for 225 BC and the Middle Republic must be lower, perhaps very roughly around 10%. Again, those figures are very rough, but I think Scheidel14 does a good job showing that something much higher, say, 30+% simply doesn’t make much sense given our evidence. That actually is a useful conclusion, by the by, the full import of which I think has not been fully observed: while Rome has a reputation as the slaveholding society – and it certainly was a slaveholding society, make no mistake – those rates are probably rather lower than what we see in Greece, suggestive of an Italy countryside in particular that had more freeholding citizen small farmers than a comparable Greek polis. ``` [1]https://acoup.blog/2023/12/22/collections-how-many-people-ancient-demography/ https://acoup.blog/2023/12/22/collections-how-many-people-an...

csomar 2y ago

> The Roman empire was based on slavery and had to die so that humanity could progress. Making a statement with confidence doesn’t make it true. You might want to provide substance for this statement as the rest of your comment is based on it.

fngjdflmdflg 2y ago

The Romans managed to accomplish very little in 1,000 years considering the extent of their empire. The Greeks contributed much more than the Romans in a shorter time frame and with much less land, power etc. The reason Romans are romanticized is they are the ones who brought civilization to Norther Europe. (more or less. Or, at least, these is what Europeans themselves thought.). These Europeans then created the scientific and industrial revolutions (almost 1,000 years after the fall of Rome, I should note.) Rome also spread Christianity to Europe and maintained control over the Christian religion in Europe via the Pope. So it makes sense that people romanticize Rome because they see it as the predecessor of Europe. Even though Rome itslef is actually not that great, even if we accept that it spread civilization to Europe.

mr_toad 2y ago
> The Romans managed to accomplish very little in 1,000 years considering the extent of their empire. Yes, apart from the aqueducts, the sanitation, the roads, the wine, public health, public baths, public order, cheese, medication, law, education and entertainment the Romans accomplished very little.
- gattilorenz 2y ago
  What about bringing peace?
  - BehindBlueEyes 2y ago
    Oh, peace? SHUT UP! ;)
- fngjdflmdflg 2y ago
  You are saying that sarcastically but that actually is very little. Compare the advancements from the 1,000 year prior, even just by the Greeks in Mathematics (Pythagoras, Euclid, Diophantus etc.) science (Aristotle), philosophy (Plato, many others) technology (Archimedes, killed by a Roman soldier) and astronomy. None of the things you mention are really hard problems. The fact is that the Romans were anti-intellectual and only cared about building which is not that hard. Also the Romans did not invent cheese or wine. Compare also with the Babylonians. Compare also the advancements made from 1200 in Europe.

wwtrv 2y ago

> slavery and had to die so that humanity could progress. Slave labor is vastly less efficient than having serfs that can keep And the Roman empire had in large part shifted to serfdom in its later periods as the supply of cheap slaved dried up. > That allowed producing more food with less workforce Also the population collapsing resulted in significant increase in per capita productivity (more land per person)