One of the factors given for why the Roman Empire stagnated technologically as well as in other ways was its over reliance on slaves. If slavery was done away with likely by the decree of one of the Emperors, could we have seen a Rome more linearly advance similar to our civilization over the last 500 years.
If Rome got rid of slavery would it have advanced more?
- Thread starter Malone
- Start date
Wasn't the percentage between 30% to 40%? Sorry if I am wrong here.
I think it was closer to 20%, and a big chunk of them were house slaves that lived a pretty similar experience to servants in a later age, being paid in room and board. The slavery that really holds you back is chattel slavery, and that only really existed for the state slaves that worked in the mines.
consdiering slaves were a reason why the roman steam engine remanined a toy i dont think its a great plus to get rid of them but serfs are almost the same also there is not the socio economical or political ones for an industrial revolution even if you get rid of slavery.
i think you might be confusing late roman and byzantine slavery with the early roman ones in the byzantine one it was mostly house holds in early roman one it was mostly mega plantations with thousands of slaves
its one of the reason among some why out of the 4 ways to better agricultural production rome implemented none
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IMO that doesn’t really follow. The steam engine wouldn’t be widely utilized for well over a thousand years after Rome fell, anywhere in the world. Regardless of any region’s reliance or lack thereof on slaves. It seems more likely that putting the steam engine to practical use just required circumstances that didn’t exist.
Slaves are the closest thing to automation and mechanization society gets until industrial revolution. Getting rid of them doesn’t solve anything, especially since Roman slavery separated slaves based on their ability. Greek teachers and polymaths rarely ended up tilling soil in latifundias. If anything without slavery Rome falls apart at the seems.
slavery was one of the reasons why the romans would not used it , as i mentioned there is socio economic and political reasons as to why even if you eradicate slavery would still would probably not have a roman industrial age how ever removing slavery is a benefit to that path and big one at that if its not replaced by serfdom , paying wages to men migth result in proto captalisim evolving earlier and thus making merchants not be seen as the bottom class and higher wages for workers makes machines like the steam engine a more valuable cost effective solution ( also no latifundias could and this is the most probable one is that the Romans discover earlier the ways to maximize agricultural production that were used in the middle ages )
but even then i still think it would take centuries to devolp like the otl and its not guaranteed
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Deleted member 116192
Wait weren't the huge latifundia run by slaves? And weren't they a huge part of roman agriculture?
A wealthy Roman might have owned a few hundred slaves. Certainly not thousands.
The slave population in the empire around the 2nd-3rd centuries AD is estimated at around 10-20% (around 5 million slaves). The 30-40% figure comes from their share of the population of Italy during the late republican era. Around half of these would be owned by the elite.
i meant in general with the thousands of planetions with the thousands of slaves as for the late as mentioned late roman slavery and especially byzantine slavery was different in the latter slaves working on fiels became very if not extremely rare compared to how common it was in the early empire, still iam quite suprised that slaves for fields were still a thing even after Diocletian basically implemented proto serfdom
I don't really think slavery has much to do with their technological stagnation. The Greek world also had its fair share of slaves, which did not stop scientific advancement.
The thing is... the Romans did advance quite a bit in engineering. They were good at solving practical and huge scale problems as their aqueducts, roads, amphitheatres, etc, manifest.
The thing the Romans didn't have was a scientific tradition. The Grecorroman world still saw the ancient Greek philosophers as the source of all knowledge, there was no need to investigate the physical world because after all, the old philosophers explained everything, and what was TRULY important was Philosophy on itself, and ethics, metaphysics... there just wasn't an idea of going on and doing experiments and observations as scientists did. And when Christianity came, the focus was shifted into theology, just look at the endless Christological debates, they sound confusing and even a bit ridiculous for us, but at the time, they were very important discussions about the Truth of things, and to set Christianity within a logical framework (inherited again from the Greek philosophers) something vitally important.
At the time, wise men (and a few women) weren't what we would call scientists or naturalists or engineers; they were philosophers and theologists. We know a lot about the philosophers and theologists of the time. We know little about who built the Roman Aqueducts, or the Antikythera mechanism. Evidently, they just weren't considered as important.
There were exceptions of course; the most famous one was Pliny the Elder who was perhaps the first naturalist and who made Naturalis Historia which was the go-to book for centuries with his word taken as fact (see a pattern here) and the Library of Alexandria was still active, if not at the heights of the Hellenistic period. But still, even with that, the Roman Empire lacked the scientific revolution that shaped the world from the Renaissance onwards.
Carl Sagan in Cosmos (the book) proposes that the advances of Greek proto-science were stopped because the Greek philosophers decided to concentrate in the metaphysical realm instead of doing experimentation and observation in reality which is vital to science, and he argues that this was the case because the overreliance of the Greeks on slaves made any kind of physical labor -and so experimentation- undesirable and even beneath the role of a philosopher, so eventually any possible scientific revolution was nipped in the bud and "wasted" in metaphysical, quasi-religious speculation.
I don't know how true this is, and certainly Carl Sagan was no historian, but I've seen the claim numerous times.
The thing the Romans didn't have was a scientific tradition. The Grecorroman world still saw the ancient Greek philosophers as the source of all knowledge, there was no need to investigate the physical world because after all, the old philosophers explained everything, and what was TRULY important was Philosophy on itself, and ethics, metaphysics... there just wasn't an idea of going on and doing experiments and observations as scientists did. And when Christianity came, the focus was shifted into theology, just look at the endless Christological debates, they sound confusing and even a bit ridiculous for us, but at the time, they were very important discussions about the Truth of things, and to set Christianity within a logical framework (inherited again from the Greek philosophers) something vitally important.
At the time, wise men (and a few women) weren't what we would call scientists or naturalists or engineers; they were philosophers and theologists. We know a lot about the philosophers and theologists of the time. We know little about who built the Roman Aqueducts, or the Antikythera mechanism. Evidently, they just weren't considered as important.
There were exceptions of course; the most famous one was Pliny the Elder who was perhaps the first naturalist and who made Naturalis Historia which was the go-to book for centuries with his word taken as fact (see a pattern here) and the Library of Alexandria was still active, if not at the heights of the Hellenistic period. But still, even with that, the Roman Empire lacked the scientific revolution that shaped the world from the Renaissance onwards.
Carl Sagan in Cosmos (the book) proposes that the advances of Greek proto-science were stopped because the Greek philosophers decided to concentrate in the metaphysical realm instead of doing experimentation and observation in reality which is vital to science, and he argues that this was the case because the overreliance of the Greeks on slaves made any kind of physical labor -and so experimentation- undesirable and even beneath the role of a philosopher, so eventually any possible scientific revolution was nipped in the bud and "wasted" in metaphysical, quasi-religious speculation.
I don't know how true this is, and certainly Carl Sagan was no historian, but I've seen the claim numerous times.
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So the claim that plato allegory of the cave ie why study the real world when the real world is just a copy of the meta physical world while popular and I partially agree on its effects i think it might be overestimating how much imapct it had and for how long .
I fear plato allegory is going to become the new dark ages myth that some how this alone regresed científic progress and that
Miguel Lanius
Banned
And have an economy based on what? Nothing?
Nah, slavery and serfdom was just how pre-industrial societies got shit done. Few things entice human society like work done for free, or close to free, or almost free.
Nah, slavery and serfdom was just how pre-industrial societies got shit done. Few things entice human society like work done for free, or close to free, or almost free.
Of course, any emperor producing such a decree would very quickly find himself with a few dozen knives sticking out of him. But aside from that, there is no way for the Romans to get fully functional steam engines. They just didn't have the metallurgy to produce actual practical ones. And metallurgy is something that grows and builds slowly over time, it's not something where they could easily make the massive leap that was required to even consider a proper steam engine.
Having an economy based on serfdom depending on how it goes would be a better thing than slavery
Steam engines remained toys long after even the Eastern Roman Empire stopped being a thing, never mind the Western half.
Medieval and Early Modern Europe were hardly slave-societies. Steam engines remained toys even after serfdom was largely* abolished in western Europe.
*Or entirely in the case of e.g. England.
Otto Kretschmer
Banned
You need the Milesians to be more successful if you want a scientific revolution to take place earlier. Make one of the leading figure in the Milesian school found his own school like Plato did with his Academy and Aristotle with the Lykeion and after 2-3 decades you gonna have Milesian thinkers in every major city in Greece.
Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were all conservative thinkers who did not believe in change in society. The Sophists were the ones who believed values are not immutable and can change with time. Without this kind of thinking one cannot abolish slavery.
Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were all conservative thinkers who did not believe in change in society. The Sophists were the ones who believed values are not immutable and can change with time. Without this kind of thinking one cannot abolish slavery.
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