Did Slavery hold Technology Back?

The wheeled plough needs
- pretty advanced ironworking
- weelwrighting
- teams of draught animals
and it needs it in the villages. If you are a subsistence farmer, the prospect of sinking so much capital into so fragile and inflexible an instrument is daunting, especially if you don't own enough land to gain the economies it provides. And that is before considering the problems you get for interfering with established agricultural patterns.

Also, I don't think Egypt or Mesopotamia are well suited to deep ploughing. In very dry climates, the result is often accelerated soil erosion.

I agree that every idea needs a consumer, so perhaps there was no real need for a printing press- allthough an administration with the size and the cost(!!) of the Empire, I really think that somebody should have... but I digress.

The heavy plough - you are standing in a field, breaking your back and a chariot passes by...all you have to do is add two and two together:D
But an invention has to make sense in the world it finishes in, not in the world it started.
 
I agree that every idea needs a consumer, so perhaps there was no real need for a printing press- allthough an administration with the size and the cost(!!) of the Empire, I really think that somebody should have... but I digress.

The heavy plough - you are standing in a field, breaking your back and a chariot passes by...all you have to do is add two and two together:D
But an invention has to make sense in the world it finishes in, not in the world it started.
There's also the fact that oxen do not have near the pulling power of horses, and horse drawn plows weren't of use in the med. soils which is why they started in northern France. At the rate oxen go (2 mph for plowing I want to say), it doesn't make things much easier to stick wheels on it.
 
The problem is we can only "prove" this by recourse to economic models. Historically, societies that had slavery have been more advanced than those without most of the time, but of course, slavery (that is, chattel slavery, not other forms of unfreedom) requires things like organised military force, a legal system, a market economy and the wealth surplus to sustain slaveowners and luxury slaves, so that's probably not surprising. Non-slave societies through much of history havve been those without the social infrastructure to sustain slavery.

Now, I know the argument about Greco-Roman slavery, but I don't buy it. Hellenistic and Roman times saw slavery expand from a mainly luxury aspect of the urban market to a mainstay of the economy, but also saw an explosion of technology. The eighth through eleventh centuries in Europe saw a rise in technology use that coincided with a huge growth industry - slaving. Renaissance Italy had slaves aplenty while contemporary Muscovy did not. Of course it's not that slavery drives technology, either. The number of slaves held in Europe after around 1200 seems to drop precipitously, but technology moves on.

I suspect there is a different thing at work here. Slavery is a very effective form of securing a supply of labour, but it has its limits. Once a society finds different ways of securing labour (be it through sustaining a population surplus, through legal bonds, social conditioning, a high degree of division of labour, or the promise of affluence), the comparative advantage of slavery drops. It stays attractive, but only in certain fields (you can still run some industries effectively on slave labour, as we see happening, and at the individual level, owning a slave beats the hell out of owning a Ferrari for ego gratification, apparently). In the Western world, slavery also became the foil against which tro define its predominant ideology of individual liberty, but I don't think that this is a necessary precondition for modernity. You could have highly complex, industrialised societies that practice slavery. in fact, we have those societies, they just don't admit to it for purely ideological reasons.

As to the Roman steam engine - that didn't exist. And the anecdote about Tiberius is exactly that, an anecdote, and one that does not mention slaves. What the Roman world severely lacked to progress technologically beyond its (pretty damned impressive) level was a concept of modern economics. That slavery can be integrated into one very efficiently is witnessed by Early Modern America.

Hrm. Very well put.
 
I don't think the evidence is overwhelming either for or against slavery inhibiting technological growth. However, it should be kept in mind that slaves were not a perfectly movable, almost capital asset until the age of discovery. Though slavery had existed since time immemorial, slaves were generally bound to a master or a household, not not very often bought and sold. This made slaves more like ill-paid servants or serfs than the slaves that were brought to the New World.

Once you have a society where slaves ARE treated as movable assets, like they were in the Antebellum American South, then I think there is an easy argument for slavery reducing technology: buying slaves competes with buying durable capital goods. A mechanical reaper looks like a much poorer investment when for the same some you can buy five human beings, and all their descendants.

Since technological progress (not invention) is highly dependent upon liquid capital available for investment, then I do think that slavery inhibited technological development in certain parts of the world. It does not really matter what kind of ideas are circulating around, or what kind of fascinating inventions are sitting around in alchemist's labs or Emperor's courts. Technology advances when it is in demand, and there is money to pay for it.

Slavery competes with technology by demanding the same capital, therefore it inhibits technological development.

That happens not to be the case. In practice slaves as a fluid asset were treated as sheer commodities, with short- and medium-term profit the main aim of their use. Virtually no one was making decisions based on their children owning more slaves - rather the economy of the south had an extreme capitalistic bent. As such, slaves were routinely sold to acquire any piece of technological equipment that would reliably produce more income than they would with their bare hands. This was a constant in the Deep South, only somewhat moderated in the more northerly slave states.

The result was a society extremely capable of adopting profitable technological innovation. Inventing that technology, on the other hand, is an entirely different matter.
 
As has already been mentioned, a large pool of cheap and available labor removes the immediate need for labor saving machines. It's not just slaves either; any place with millions of unskilled labors is not going to need great machines to do all that work. Plus, governments of such states are going to have to keep that large population employed, busy, and out of trouble, so it could create an artificial damper on technological advance.

Late premodern China is a good example of this. There was so much labor, so cheap, and so much focus on maintenance rather than growth, that progress in a wealth of areas was crippled.

However, if you have access to societies that are making great technological progress and modern capitalism as an economic base, the record is clear that progress can be rapid and extensive.
 
Aeolipile...not that big a deal

The First Steam Engine was created in Greece a long time before the Romans.

I wish people would quit referring to the aeolipile as a "steam engine." Look at it, it's a steam powered pinwheel that maybe, maybe, would give you about a thousandth of a horsepower...if you could find a way to do a power take-off of it that wouldn't keep it from working at all.

I can't see any reasonable technological path that leads from an aeolipile to an actual engine that does useful work (without requiring entire forests as a fuel supply).

It's less a prototype steam engine than a kid frying ants with a magnifying glass is a prototype solar-thermal electric plant...
 
Arguably yes, it did. Slavery was cheaper than turning to machines and was as essential to ancient times as electricity is to our own. A complicating factor is that Ancient China was the most technological society in the world for millennia, while Europe used to be the Muslim world's periphery. And Ancient China was not exactly a society filled with free labor in the industrial sense of the word....and as far as the USA, there's the certain problem that cotton-fueled slavery strongly spurred industrialization in the North and that as the Civil War showed the South *did* have as much Yankee ingenuity as the North. The reason that the Slave South was never as technological as the North and the Roman Empire at its largest less than China is more nuanced than slavery alone. The absence of education even among Southern whites due to slavery and the rigid, despotic social system that typifies all slave economies are what holds technology back more than anything else. And the USSR showed that slavery can spur a crude type of technological progress.
 
Late premodern China is a good example of this. There was so much labor, so cheap, and so much focus on maintenance rather than growth, that progress in a wealth of areas was crippled.

I remember reading something about the Peoples' Dynasty (as I like to call the modern rulers) were using some shovel-and-pick work when construction Three Gorges Dam. Don't know if it's true, but it would certainly be in the regime's best interest to keep the people working, and too busy to cause them any trouble.
 
The heavy plough - you are standing in a field, breaking your back and a chariot passes by...all you have to do is add two and two together:D
But an invention has to make sense in the world it finishes in, not in the world it started.

Actually it's a lot more complicated than that. You can harness a horse on a chariot in a way that would strangle a horse on a plow, because the chariot accelerates gradually and then maintains momentum, while a plow requires continuous force to be exerted.
 
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Arguably yes, it did. Slavery was cheaper than turning to machines and was as essential to ancient times as electricity is to our own. A complicating factor is that Ancient China was the most technological society in the world for millennia, while Europe used to be the Muslim world's periphery. And Ancient China was not exactly a society filled with free labor in the industrial sense of the word....and as far as the USA, there's the certain problem that cotton-fueled slavery strongly spurred industrialization in the North and that as the Civil War showed the South *did* have as much Yankee ingenuity as the North. The reason that the Slave South was never as technological as the North and the Roman Empire at its largest less than China is more nuanced than slavery alone. The absence of education even among Southern whites due to slavery and the rigid, despotic social system that typifies all slave economies are what holds technology back more than anything else. And the USSR showed that slavery can spur a crude type of technological progress.

Indeed history is replete with examples of legal slaves who had greater freedom, more privileges, and higher living standards than the teams of scientists who allowed the Russians to crush Barbarossa and take the early lead in the space race.
 
I don't think you can make a generalization all across human history as what a slave was and how they were treated varied radically. I do think slavery indirectly held back technological development in the antebellum American South.
 
Indeed history is replete with examples of legal slaves who had greater freedom, more privileges, and higher living standards than the teams of scientists who allowed the Russians to crush Barbarossa and take the early lead in the space race.

The Mamluks of Egypt and the Ottoman Janissaries being a couple of examples.
 
Historically, societies that had slavery have been more advanced than those without most of the time, but of course, slavery (that is, chattel slavery, not other forms of unfreedom) requires things like organised military force, a legal system, a market economy and the wealth surplus to sustain slaveowners and luxury slaves, so that's probably not surprising. Non-slave societies through much of history havve been those without the social infrastructure to sustain slavery.

I think that's overstating things. Through most of human history all societies save some hunter-gatherers practiced slavery. More technologically advanced cultures would acquire slaves by force or purchase from their less advanced neighbors, but those "barbarians" owned slaves as well. In the modern era, abolition started with the more technoligically advanced countries of the world.
 
It seems to me there are two important factors for technological advancement, labor shortage and capital surplus. When both conditions are met capital is invested into labor saving innovation in order to maximize profits.

The cause of labor shortage can be complex, and a slave economy is not immune to having this problem.
 
I think that's overstating things. Through most of human history all societies save some hunter-gatherers practiced slavery. More technologically advanced cultures would acquire slaves by force or purchase from their less advanced neighbors, but those "barbarians" owned slaves as well. In the modern era, abolition started with the more technoligically advanced countries of the world.

But for outright chattel slavery as a widespread social institution rather than a one-off much more organized societies were the rule. The "slaves" Europeans purchased in West Africa had a much better set of rights and privileges before crossing the Atlantic than they did after.
 
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