Not Another Industrial Rome Thread

I was musing on something the other day, and, while I haven't fully fleshed out my ideas to my satisfaction, it keeps on sticking in the back of my mind, so here's a thread on a topic that won't die, no matter how many dead horses you beat it with - I may have messed that metaphor up.

Anyway, first off, lets define 'industrial' in a reasonable way. Obviously, coal-fired steam engines are not what we're talking about here. That said, the systematic parts of industrialization, such as the organization and specialization of labor, and the more fundamental technologies of industrialization, such as your basic labor-saving devices like, are within both the cultural and technical capabilities of the era.

The Romans did have what we would recognize as factories and there was regional specialization in various industries. They also had a relatively sizable and dispersed system of watermills that were used to a variety of purposes.

On the other hand, they also had, for much of their history, a glut of labor - particularly slave labor. I personally think that the argument that slavery is antithetical to industrialization is overhyped (industrialization was historically dominated by textiles, which were produced largely with slave labor until the ACW), but slave labor does have one key disadvantage to free labor: its inherently inefficient on a large scale. Simply put, free labor will end up where you need it, slave labor, by definition, won't (or, at least, will do so much more slowly). We also have to confront the relatively rudimentary financial system developed in Rome if we're looking for true industrialization (though now I want to start a thread on 'What if Rome had a central bank').

But lets narrow our focus on two possible changes, and ask which would be more helpful to help the Roman Empire at least semi-industrialize. Basically, which could better help get a greater economic output out of the Empire - and, in particular, but not exclusively, per capita.

Option 1: After the first major plague, the Antonine Plague, hits, a variety of labor-saving devices are developed and dispersed across the Empire. Nothing like a steam engine, like mentioned before, or even anything sophisticated enough to produce a textile mill like we would recognize was the leading edge of the Industrial Revolution. Simpler things, like spinning wheels, blast furnaces, windmills, etc. Basically, your grab bag of technical innovations that the Medieval Era had over the Romans.

Option 2: The Romans have a demographic boom. Perhaps some form of immunology is developed. Perhaps more advanced crop rotation is introduced. Or better agricultural technology, like heavier plows (a classic staple of Roman AH). Either way, the Empire is either able to support a higher population, or more resistant to disease, or both.

So, either we have more productive people, regardless of how they're organized, or more people. If you could bottle up the whole Empire in a lab (twice), which do you think would result in higher output and productivity?
 
Setting aside that Roman religion would probably preclude any form of scientific development of inoculation (since they were very superstitious and attributed these diseases to religious practices), I'll throw in my two cents, since Rome is so much fun to talk about. Also, I like your idea of a central bank, and imho that is more likely to develop as an institution in Rome than any sort of large scale industrialization (as Roman "economists" had a more-or-less basic understanding of ideas like scarcity, inflation, marginal utility of labor, and some other very basic and broad economic concepts). That's probably beyond the scope of my ongoing Roman TL, but I'd say it's an idea worth fleshing out. Maybe a WRE rump state in Italy and Illyria survives into the Medieval period and mirrors OTL's Italy in terms of pioneering banking institutions

Option 1: After the first major plague, the Antonine Plague, hits, a variety of labor-saving devices are developed and dispersed across the Empire. Nothing like a steam engine, like mentioned before, or even anything sophisticated enough to produce a textile mill like we would recognize was the leading edge of the Industrial Revolution. Simpler things, like spinning wheels, blast furnaces, windmills, etc. Basically, your grab bag of technical innovations that the Medieval Era had over the Romans.

Option 2: The Romans have a demographic boom. Perhaps some form of immunology is developed. Perhaps more advanced crop rotation is introduced. Or better agricultural technology, like heavier plows (a classic staple of Roman AH). Either way, the Empire is either able to support a higher population, or more resistant to disease, or both.

So, either we have more productive people, regardless of how they're organized, or more people. If you could bottle up the whole Empire in a lab (twice), which do you think would result in higher output and productivity?

I'd say the second scenario would be more likely to yield a more industrious Rome, and here's my reasoning. Even if these small technological innovations were introduced (spinning wheels, blast furnaces, etc) the simple fact that machines are easy to sabotage and dangerous to work (see: OTL luddite movement) would make it hard for using slave labor to produce significant output using these simps machines. Of course, you could specialize labor more directly and see an urban lower class fill the ranks of these technical jobs, like happened IOTL, but by the time in the empire's history that these technologies would have been introduced, the labor and hereditary reforms of Diocletian would likely be in place, which would stunt any ambitious young Romans' ability to move to cities and take these jobs, and the population of urban poor already in the cities would probably not be significant enough to fill these jobs on a scale large enough to produce meaningful results in a time frame shorter than 3-5 centuries.

Secondarily, a major problem that the later Roman Empire had to face was a shortage of workers in certain industries, which made it hard for the government to collect taxes (since after centuries of debasing their coins, the sesterces and dinarii had been inflated to the point that the government didn't even collect taxes in gold or silver). This is exactly why Diocletian's reforms made work hereditary, as a stabilizing measure to compensate for any labor shortages in markets for particular essential goods that were necessary to support the legions (mainly agriculture, mining, and the manufacture of clothes and other equipment). However, if there was a population surge due to new agricultural techniques (crop rotation, the invention of fertilizer, or the introduction of higher calorie produce like rice or beans), this sort of industry-specific labor shortage may be abolished, at least for long enough to produce a healthier economy for the Empire in general. In my view, one of the leading factors leading to the eventual fall of Rome was the evolution of the tax system into a predatory institution whereby the poor paid the largest share of taxes (this made the poor less supportive of the government as a whole, and made it impossible to recruit legions from the citizenry). If the economy as a whole is more productive, the central government would not have to resort to these sorts of predatory tax policies, and the empire may be stabler for long enough to have the technology listed above produced.

In short, a population surge could help stabilize the economy a bit, which could lead to a longer-lived empire, which could lead to more innovation, but the reverse is not true, in my view. Greater innovation could not be fully realized without a larger population (because of the gross inefficiencies of the Roman economy that you alluded to above), so it would be a half-measure towards meaningful long-term industrialization.

Plus that's how industrialization happened IOTL. First there were land enclosures which led to better agricultural techniques, which caused a population surge, which fueled economic growth from more factory jobs in cities (hugely oversimplified but the general idea is sound I believe).
 
@Atamolos You raise some interesting points. One thing that I didn’t adress in detail in my opening posts was free vs slave labor. I think either scenario would actually result in an expansion of free labor in the economy.

From the tech side, most of these smaller labor saving devices help small operations more (a spinning wheel is far more useful to a household, relatively speaking). From the population side, any growth is likely to be predominantly among the free population (possibly especially citizens, as immunization would start in the army, if things followed our pattern), thus increasing the supply of free labor. Not to mention that the Romans seemed not to be inclined towards the idea of breeding slaves, and tended to import/capture them as their main source (though I have no numbers on this).
 
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