AH challenge: Stoicism managed to bring the downfall of slavery in rome
- Thread starter ray243
- Start date
Slave societies exist as long as those who benefit from slavery hold significant political power. Slave societies are far worse in creating overall wealth than free societies.
For a slave society to remain, you need;
A. Powerful patricians with influence, large tracts of land or mines, industry etc.
B. The lack of a large self-owning class of peasants.
C. The lack of a large class of proletarians.
D. Victorious wars to create a steady influx of slaves.
Now, it is not entirely impossible that this system could be broken.
An Emperor, faced with a patrician revolt, siezes patrician land and distributes it among the army, creating a class of self-owning peasants.
Add a law the eldest son inherits everything, and you get a good class of free men that look for work, a countryside proletariat to work at wineries, in industries, mines etc.
Add a few slave rebellions, some Pax Romana (not bringing in new slaves), perhaps some of the well-educated Greek slaves writing plays and books of slavery and the misery of it and the class of self-owning peasants becoming a political factor (they could demand the end of slavery, as it would be of no beneift to them, and absolutely of no benefit to their proletariat second and third sons) and an Imperial Decree banning slavery could very well happen.
It will take time, but it is not impossible and will not need ASB technology introduction.
For a slave society to remain, you need;
A. Powerful patricians with influence, large tracts of land or mines, industry etc.
B. The lack of a large self-owning class of peasants.
C. The lack of a large class of proletarians.
D. Victorious wars to create a steady influx of slaves.
Now, it is not entirely impossible that this system could be broken.
An Emperor, faced with a patrician revolt, siezes patrician land and distributes it among the army, creating a class of self-owning peasants.
Add a law the eldest son inherits everything, and you get a good class of free men that look for work, a countryside proletariat to work at wineries, in industries, mines etc.
Add a few slave rebellions, some Pax Romana (not bringing in new slaves), perhaps some of the well-educated Greek slaves writing plays and books of slavery and the misery of it and the class of self-owning peasants becoming a political factor (they could demand the end of slavery, as it would be of no beneift to them, and absolutely of no benefit to their proletariat second and third sons) and an Imperial Decree banning slavery could very well happen.
It will take time, but it is not impossible and will not need ASB technology introduction.
THe Romans are probabnly the worst candidates for this kind of thing because Roman law was designed to be conservative. You could have a development in Rome that leads to the de-facto end of slavery - graduial extension of legal protections, economic change and the rise of an ideology of equality - but if Roman law stays at all Roman, there will still be slaves a thousand years after, simply because the law says there are. Roman law kept up the distinction between patrician and plebeian for many centuries after all of the patrician families had died out.
It seems to me that the elimination of slavery requires a basic change that gives an advantage to the small 'free farmer' and free citizen, such as the early discovery / invention of the horse collar. If the small farmer to put more land under cultivation without having to rely on slaves, he will be viable in the growing empire.
If you could combine this with slightly improved metalurgy, you might get simple mechanical devices, such as harvesters. Again improving the productive capacity of the individual.
If you could combine this with slightly improved metalurgy, you might get simple mechanical devices, such as harvesters. Again improving the productive capacity of the individual.
That's likely to backfire. You're upping productivity tied to serious capital costs. That means that the wealthy will be able to cultivate even more land with even less labour.
If you want to destroy rural chattel slavery, you're better off raising the purchase price of slaves to the point that they're significantly less profitable than free tenants. If you increase productivity, you're making slavery more viable, not less (especially under the Roman system where slaves were frequently the more highly qualified and more trusted labour force).
Rome had that previous to the Second Punic War, and still had a slave-owning society. Heck if we're talking generally about slave-society then the American South had a rather large number of self-owning peasants.
Egyptian grain shipments were feeding someone in Rome . . . .
Once you've created a slave-based economy the wars don't matter anymore, the demand exists and will be met. Look at the recruitment of slave-soldiers (mamluks), they were bought in Crimea and shipped south. The purchasers may have been driving the slave-raiding, but they were not directly engaged in the fighting of wars for the purpose of enslaving populations. The same goes for the American slave markets, which created a demand that was filled by commercial slave-raiding in Africa.
I would put forward the idea that the key to getting rid of slavery in Rome would be the "Commercial Revolution" timeline that got tossed around a few years ago. IIRC it was based on the POD of the Middle Ages legal innovations that facilitated the commerce driven Age of Discovery being innovated during the Late Republic (or sometime thereabouts). The legal innovations lead to technological innovations (bigger technology exchange with the East?), agricultural work becomes less labor intensive, driving urbanization, which creates large cheap labor pools with which to industrialize (and colonize) with. The need for populations to work in the ever-growing industrial sector ends up drawing in the tribes that OTL were slavers and en-slaved directly into the Republic, which is bigger because the increased appetite for resources (plus better technology to exploit said resources) has driven the Republic to further expansion.