Roman Spinning Wheel

Hecatee

Donor
Well from what I gather waterwheel-propelled spinning wheels were made, so I could see large scale villae and latifundia build water powered infrastructure...
Now the thing is also that by the late republic a lot of the pastoral work was done by slaves who lived in periphery of the villae, isolated in the mountains, often turning to brigancy too. I could well see the amount of people staying the same but with less time for mischief due to larger herds to manage and to shear...
Also you must not forget the role spinning played in the Egyptian economy as flax was turned into linen. It took roughly a kilometer of linen to make a mummy in the classical era, less in the roman era, but it still was a lot of linen to spin : it was done in factories where women worked by the dozens according to papyri I read in the great economical archives back when I was doing my studies... They also used nettles (which fibers' they included in linen clothes to improve the look) and other plant fibers...
 
I think you are forgetting another source of natural fibber to make clothes widely used in Europe before the cotton HEMP, with a spinning well, will become easier to make hemp into textiles and clothes, at industrial or semi-industrial scale in marginal lands,the drug level Marijuana is soil sensitive, but the hemp grade marijuana grow just fine in any soil and is technically a bad weed (jejeje) soo need less precaution and care
Well from what I gather waterwheel-propelled spinning wheels were made, so I could see large scale villae and latifundia build water powered infrastructure...
Now the thing is also that by the late republic a lot of the pastoral work was done by slaves who lived in periphery of the villae, isolated in the mountains, often turning to brigancy too. I could well see the amount of people staying the same but with less time for mischief due to larger herds to manage and to shear...
Also you must not forget the role spinning played in the Egyptian economy as flax was turned into linen. It took roughly a kilometer of linen to make a mummy in the classical era, less in the roman era, but it still was a lot of linen to spin : it was done in factories where women worked by the dozens according to papyri I read in the great economical archives back when I was doing my studies... They also used nettles (which fibers' they included in linen clothes to improve the look) and other plant fibers...

More good points about the other textile sources.

I also don't think that we should underestimate the importance of reducing the cost of textiles, overall. Lets remember how expensive cloth could be in ancient times (consider soldiers casting lots for a condemned prisoner's clothing, a reference that contemporaries would find utterly unremarkable). Also, if cloth becomes cheaper, then colder climates become more tolerable. Not just for the Romans, but those already living in cold climates.
 
Hmm, I wonder how much spinning would make sense on a ‘roman industrial’ scale. Whay I mean by that is the latge scale specialization of slave labor augmented by various forms of water power common in the Roman Empire. Or does the nature of the spinning wheel just lend itself to cottage industry so well that the spinning would stay in that realm?

Well Rome already had perpetual problems with the land being concentrated into large estates so I think that a system similar to 1700's England is likely arise where wool is sold to free poor that spin it and sell it back to the landowners. Depending on when it happened I don't necessarily think this would be a bad thing though. In the later Republic poor farmers were being forced off their land and unemployment was sky high. Baring effective land reforms an additional cottage industry which also decreased the price of cloth would be an economic boon.

I don't have numbers but I suspect that using masses of slaves to spin might not be terribly cost effective given the individual person's output/time. The slave labor might be better spent elsewhere.
 
Well Rome already had perpetual problems with the land being concentrated into large estates so I think that a system similar to 1700's England is likely arise where wool is sold to free poor that spin it and sell it back to the landowners. Depending on when it happened I don't necessarily think this would be a bad thing though. In the later Republic poor farmers were being forced off their land and unemployment was sky high. Baring effective land reforms an additional cottage industry which also decreased the price of cloth would be an economic boon.

I don't have numbers but I suspect that using masses of slaves to spin might not be terribly cost effective given the individual person's output/time. The slave labor might be better spent elsewhere.

Certainly angles worth considering.

You know, as much as I was saying this wouldn't lead to a super early industrial revolution, the conditions in the Roman Empire are similar enough to 18th century Britain that its not entirely impossible, either - particularly when we consider that the IR started in the textile industry. Plenty of landless poor, which were put to good use in Britain, but not nearly as much in Rome. And when we look at the antebellum US, where a slave-based agricultural sector was a key component of a free-labor industrial textile industry, perhaps Rome is even better suited than Britain. That is not to say it would be an easy or automatic thing, but I do think that there would be enough knock-on effects and changes in supply chain bottlenecks to provide some fertile ground. On the other hand, I could see the spinning wheel triggering all sorts of innovations in the textile industries, and then sort of petering out beyond that for some time.
 
That really depends on the nature and extent of such revolutions. An agricultural revolution, for instance, would drastically change things in the roman world socially, economically, and politically.
A revolution in glass making, not so much.

The Goths would entertain themselves breaking glass.
 
Here's the thing, the idea of labour saving is a very, very modern and industrial focus not really applicable outside an era of plenty. Pre-18/19th century the main limit on production wasn't labour costs that tended to sit around 10-30% or capital at around 5-25% but rather working capital at around 60%-80% (raw materials). In this era where raw materials was the main limit on production productivity improvements were often processes that used less raw materials or increased the land's productivity as opposed to the rarer improvements in labour or capital productivity. Having easier spinning was nice but it doesn't mean much if 10x capacity can't be matched by the other parts of the process, flocks are limited by increasingly marginal land, fullers, bleachers, merchants, felters, weavers, shearers, dyers, whatever the domestic women and children who wetted and arranged the strands were called, and more were all still bottlenecks.

The best case would be agricultural improvements and iron-working improvements, both things would expand the starvation & tool limits of the time. I'd suggest starting with more intensive husbandry for their agriculture to provide a source of fertilizer.
 
Here's the thing, the idea of labour saving is a very, very modern and industrial focus not really applicable outside an era of plenty. Pre-18/19th century the main limit on production wasn't labour costs that tended to sit around 10-30% or capital at around 5-25% but rather working capital at around 60%-80% (raw materials). In this era where raw materials was the main limit on production productivity improvements were often processes that used less raw materials or increased the land's productivity as opposed to the rarer improvements in labour or capital productivity. Having easier spinning was nice but it doesn't mean much if 10x capacity can't be matched by the other parts of the process, flocks are limited by increasingly marginal land, fullers, bleachers, merchants, felters, weavers, shearers, dyers, whatever the domestic women and children who wetted and arranged the strands were called, and more were all still bottlenecks.

The best case would be agricultural improvements and iron-working improvements, both things would expand the starvation & tool limits of the time. I'd suggest starting with more intensive husbandry for their agriculture to provide a source of fertilizer.

I have to disagree with the overall outcome of your points. First, pastoralism is specifically an activity that happens on marginal lands. Second, much of the progress is inherently contigent upon all these other bottlenecks you mention existing in the first place. Third, it is not as though I’m propsing a Jacquard loom here, I’m proposaling a piece of technology that dates back to the first millennium in India. It was considered valuable then, and was widely used in areas like India and China where labor was even more plentiful than in Rome.

It doesn’t matter so much if a patrician didn't care about labor costs, and could just buy more slaves to meet any demand. What matters is that the small scale cottage industries we saw in the Middle Ages valued such labor savings, and those same classes were already there in Roman times.
 
I have to disagree with the overall outcome of your points. First, pastoralism is specifically an activity that happens on marginal lands. Second, much of the progress is inherently contigent upon all these other bottlenecks you mention existing in the first place. Third, it is not as though I’m propsing a Jacquard loom here, I’m proposaling a piece of technology that dates back to the first millennium in India. It was considered valuable then, and was widely used in areas like India and China where labor was even more plentiful than in Rome.

Yes but my point is that while some lands are marginal, they are still limited. The other point was that solving one bottleneck in a production chain that's a fraction of a larger economy doesn't necessarily increase overall wealth; there's no reason for more shepherds or people associated with textiles if there wasn't enough food to feed them overall or demand to follow suit. Also IOTL industry for people on marginal lands was something they used to supplement their agriculture/husbandry, not as an end to itself. Families (women specifically) engaged in textile work to supplement income during down-time and with lulls in the agricultural seasons yet it tended to be used to maintain their land ownership to maintain freeholder status and the perceived stability of land (marginal) ownership.

It doesn’t matter so much if a patrician didn't care about labor costs, and could just buy more slaves to meet any demand. What matters is that the small scale cottage industries we saw in the Middle Ages valued such labor savings, and those same classes were already there in Roman times.

It matters very much, cottages don't exist in a vacuum and you can't assume modern standards of market access.

Take for example the central German princes around Thuringia of the 16th century, the princes engaged in industrialized feudalism where they invested in production themselves alongside cottages and controlled all market access; the cottages were forced to buy and sell at rates their lords specified and give all of their surplus to their lord. The culture is also a big thing, what's to say the people will spend it on anything productive; look at Lyon, the late Roman empire, and so on; people that made it rich choose to buy prestige by abandoning "low-born" productive activities by investing in land/slaves and even the common man was expected to have a few slaves for more "menial tasks".

It's a decent idea you have, just flesh it out more; create the market conditions for small time cottages to participate, alter the culture to be more productive or at least less glorifying for rent-seeking, and integrate husbandry into fertilizer production.
 
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Yes but my point is that while some lands are marginal, they are still limited. The other point was that solving one bottleneck in a production chain that's a fraction of a larger economy doesn't necessarily increase overall wealth; there's no reason for more shepherds or people associated with textiles if there wasn't enough food to feed them overall or demand to follow suit. Also IOTL industry for people on marginal lands was something they used to supplement their agriculture/husbandry, not as an end to itself. Families (women specifically) engaged in textile work to supplement income during down-time and with lulls in the agricultural seasons yet it tended to be used to maintain their land ownership to maintain freeholder status and the perceived stability of land (marginal) ownership.

None of that is any different in the 1st century AD than it is in the 13th century AD.

It matters very much, cottages don't exist in a vacuum and you can't assume modern standards of market access.

Take for example the central German princes around Thuringia of the 16th century, the princes engaged in industrialized feudalism where they invested in production themselves alongside cottages and controlled all market access; the cottages were forced to buy and sell at rates their lords specified and give all of their surplus to their lord. The culture is also a big thing, what's to say the people will spend it on anything productive; look at Lyon, the late Roman empire, and so on; people that made it rich choose to buy prestige by abandoning "low-born" productive activities by investing in land/slaves and even the common man was expected to have a few slaves for more "menial tasks".

It's a decent idea you have, just flesh it out more; create the market conditions for small time cottages to participate, alter the culture to be more productive or at least less glorifying for rent-seeking, and integrate husbandry into fertilizer production.

I disagree with multiple premises here. A roman aristocrat was expected to be intimately involved in the overseeing of their agricultural estates, and we have plenty of writings from the more famous ones discussing their techniques. Yes, they had cultural and political reasons to disdain mercantile and industrial endeavors, but show me a Senator that turned their nose up at installing a wine press in the vineyards.

As for rent-seeking, its hard to imagine a society more based ultimately on rent-seeking than feudal Europe, the very society which was able to utilize the spinning wheel to such great effect. Not that they were special in that regard. I think the burden of proof is on anyone suggesting that there was somethig special about the Romans that they couldn’t utilize this tech well, when every other society that encountered it picked it up quite handily. In fact, given the slow transmission of technology in a fracture mediecal Europe, one could make an argument that the Romans were better suited to adopt it.

Also, the Roman Empire made plenty of use of animal dung as fertilizer, as any agricultural society did, and I do believe that pastures produced enough to merit some trading in fertilizer.
 
This is a few months old, but I was thinking about this idea recently and it occurred to me that we left out some very important topics: non-Romans.

After all, the reason that Germania and Caledonia and Hibernia were never conquered was tha those regions were sparsely populated by poor pastoralists. There’s another group of pastoralists the Romans never conquered either: the Persians. I’m being a bit cheeky there, but shepharding was a relatively prominent part of the Persian economy, particularly in the Iranian plateau.

I’m not sure what conclusion we should draw from the likely increased wealth of Rome’s neighbors. On the one hand, it makes Persia even more dangerous. On the other hand, it likely makes the Germanic tribes less dangerous. Their societies may become more settled and urbanized, and could provide a nice buffer region for Rome along its frontiers - unles the Romans manage to conquer them once they start producing something worth conquering. I do see that being Caledonia’s likely fate.

Overall, I see the outside effects as a diplomatic-military wash for Rome: one border is more secure, the other less so.
 
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One group I didn’t think about in the previous post were the berbers. They certainly would value an increase in the price of wool, but my gut says that their land can’t support much more population, so that leaves them dependent on imports bought with the sale of wool. Ultimately, I’d say that that frontier would see the most improvement in security and stability, particularly since there’s no chain reaction migrations going on.

That said, I could see the Rhine-Danube tribes being more dangerous. This is still an economic change that promotes pastoralism, so even if they’re richer, they still have the ability to pick up shop easily.
 

Marc

Donor
Well, I wouldn't too underestimate the impact of spinning wheels, it is the cornerstone of the textile revolution that led to some remarkable economic gains in Europe and elsewhere. (Not to mention the huge, mostly positive, impact it would have on the lives of women). A 1st century discovery and spread could easily double GDP for the Romans by the 4th (that is using a modest .35% annual growth rate resulting from primary, secondary and tertiary effects of the invention on fabric production) - and that would add quite a great deal to the empire's revenue stream, with serious consequences.
Also, that bit of technology is going to spread quickly across Eurasia, with known history diverging utterly

The key takeaway is that anything, however modest initially, that increases worker productivity is going engineer massive changes over time.
 
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Here's the thing, the idea of labour saving is a very, very modern and industrial focus not really applicable outside an era of plenty. Pre-18/19th century the main limit on production wasn't labour costs that tended to sit around 10-30% or capital at around 5-25% but rather working capital at around 60%-80% (raw materials). In this era where raw materials was the main limit on production productivity improvements were often processes that used less raw materials or increased the land's productivity as opposed to the rarer improvements in labour or capital productivity. Having easier spinning was nice but it doesn't mean much if 10x capacity can't be matched by the other parts of the process, flocks are limited by increasingly marginal land, fullers, bleachers, merchants, felters, weavers, shearers, dyers, whatever the domestic women and children who wetted and arranged the strands were called, and more were all still bottlenecks.
As a general rule for most pre-modern production the raw materials were indeed usually the most expensive part of the process. For textiles in particular, though, labour costs are an extremely expensive part of the process, if not the majority of the finished price. Well, for everyday textiles like linen, wool etc that were available in Europe at the time. Silk and (to a lesser degree) cotton were a different story.

The cost of raw materials for textiles, ie mostly the fibre, was much cheaper than the more expensive aspects of all the spinning, weaving and dyeing (if dye was being used). Labour costs remain a major component of textiles even today, despite industrialisation and modern tech. This is the reason that the textile industry has been so sensitive to labour costs that it has moved between regions and countries many times in history, even before the Industrial Revolution. As far back as the seventeenth century, Dutch urban manufacturers started to contract out their textile weaving to rural areas where the cost of labour was lower. It was estimated at the time that the cost of labour was about 40% of the total cost of production of woolen cloth when produced in Dutch cities, but a significantly lower percentage in rural areas (less than 30%). And this was an era well after the introduction of the spinning wheel and other technological developments in weaving. In Roman times, the relative cost of labour for textiles was even higher since they were pre-spinning wheel and related inventions, so the proportion of labour costs in finished textiles could even have been the majority of the finished price, or close to it.

Given how textile production was moved around in pre-industrial Europe, I think that the spinning wheel and advantages in saving labour will still be extremely appealing to a Roman mindset. It doesn't make for an industrial revolution, but it does make for a very welcome development.
 
Another thing to consider, that I hadn’t thought of before but is obvious in hindsight: any pastoralist that is raising sheep for wool is one that is not raising horses for warfare. Further, horses are the most demanding of all livestock commonly raised by pastoralists.

This is no to suggest that we’ll see vast numbers of Hunnic shephards, but that the economic calculus of livestock changes: the profit potential of a sheep (wool) relative to a horse (plunder) goes up, so morw grazing land will be set aside for sheep rather than horses. Thus, per capita, the pastoralists are less dangerous.

On the other hand (ain’t that the way with economics?), there will be more pastoralists to deal with - but still only so much grazing land. This should lead to a slightly faster pace of civilizing these regions, even well beyond those near Rome (yeah, I’m calling the nomads less civilized, how archaic of me ).
 
Don't forget that early modern Spain had HUGE problems with sheep. The farmers had been given vast reserved areas to roam their flocks over, which were then not available for agricultural exploitation. Could you see something like that develop in Italy if sheep and wool render a higher income than arable or cattle farming, or horse rearing?
 
Don't forget that early modern Spain had HUGE problems with sheep. The farmers had been given vast reserved areas to roam their flocks over, which were then not available for agricultural exploitation. Could you see something like that develop in Italy if sheep and wool render a higher income than arable or cattle farming, or horse rearing?

I’m quite intrigued, do you have any more information about this? The way I see it, other animals are still generally nore valuable, this just makes sheep more valuable than they were at this point in history (its not like we don’t know what the economy looks like with the spinning wheel around).

On the other hand, this is the Roman Empire, a pretty sizable semi-free trade area, allowing for plenty of specialization. Pastoralism has plenty of positives (when done properly, it doesn’t deplete the soil, and actually helps replenish it), but I’d be surprised if we saw much monoculture with sheep in this scenario. I still think the more likely result is that the latifundia will have a greater percentage of their livestock be sheep, and that the marginal lands will be more valuable to the poorer classes that would have them. I’m totally open to other evidence, though!
 
Sure, there's lot of farmers in Scotland, Wales, the English Marches etc who farm sheep because that's the best use of marginal land

I can't remember the right words and terms to search for the Spanish example, right now, but I know which book it's in. As far as I understood it, the roaming herders had become a political heavyweight due to a mixture of tradition and economic weight, and even when this was now less viable they stuck to it.

Regarding Rome, as we see vast estates come into being, rather than smallholdings, it might be the case that if sheep-farming through technology becomes the most profitable route then we could see a similar situation
 
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