Stoicism(ban on slavery) push for a industrial revolution in the roman empire, 1 AD.

We do know that steam engine is around in the past, however, it is always viewed as a toy.

So, what happens now, is the stoicism movement, which wanted to ban or take away slavery, push for a industrial/steam engine movement as well?


That they believe that slavery can be replaced by a more 'correct' form of labour, machines, and starts to recruit/attract all those mechanics and engineers? And simply push for more research and to build reliable steam engines that can replace alot of the heavy lifting work.

What happens to the roman empire now?
 
The Romans didn't have steam power per se in the past, but they did possess enough technological know-how that could have eventually got them there.

Stoicists, while they might have been as approving of technological advancement as anyone else, were not necessarily big advocates.

A couple of months ago, someone on this board suggested that printing should be invented before any tangible technological break-throughs could be accomplished in greater quantity. I believe that devices like grape and cloth presses were in use in the Principate Era, so you might need to have some enterprising and educated citizen with an engineering background to come up with the idea of producing numerous copies of books this way.
 
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We do know that steam engine is around in the past, however, it is always viewed as a toy.

So, what happens now, is the stoicism movement, which wanted to ban or take away slavery, push for a industrial/steam engine movement as well?


That they believe that slavery can be replaced by a more 'correct' form of labour, machines, and starts to recruit/attract all those mechanics and engineers? And simply push for more research and to build reliable steam engines that can replace alot of the heavy lifting work.

What happens to the roman empire now?

The problem of course is whether the emperor will listen to them and abolish slavery and encourage science.
 

ninebucks

Banned
Stoicism was never a united movement, and the abolition of slavery was never the mainstream opinion anywhere and anywhen within the Roman Empire. If slavery were to be abolished, it would be a legal technicality, the elites will still find a way to get the most labour for the smallest cost.

And the Roman steam engine was a toy. There were no metals strong enough at the time to build a useful steam engine. You would either have to build it with really thick metal casings, (which would make it too heavy), or build it out of thinner metals and hope to the gods that it doesn't explode under pressure.
 
That they believe that slavery can be replaced by a more 'correct' form of labour, machines, and starts to recruit/attract all those mechanics and engineers? And simply push for more research and to build reliable steam engines that can replace alot of the heavy lifting work.

That's not terribly Stoic. Stoic philosophers by and large believed that humanity was a unifying bond between all men, including slaves, so slavery was something vaguely distasteful to them. But the idea that you need to remodel the state to accommodate this idea better is a bit out of whack with a school that teaches fate must be accepted and dealt with in the most dignified manner possible. The laws that eased manumission and improved the lot of slaves are much more in keeping.

More to the point, though, I think slavery is a red herring. Marxist and Western historians alike have been able to grasp it as a simplistic explanation of why the Romans were so shockingly unvictorian. A lot of research has been done since, though, and we tend to find that we really don't understand slavery very well - with the exception of late Republican Italian slavery. That, unfortunately, evolved under exceptional circumstances and can not be extrapolated from.

If Rome had wanted an industrial revolution, it would have been doable. The main problems here are neither slavery nor technology. Roman slavery could have accommodated industrialisation fairly well, with the verna system and manumission for highly trained staff as an incentive to perform. Technology could have provided machionery easily enough - it was fashionable for a long time to denigrate Roman technology and trade, but archeology is so full of publications showing the exception that we are coming around to understanding the exception is the rule. The Romans were good at technology (There were big, probably insurmountable, obstacles to building viable steam engines, but they are the same that would have prevented building a computer in 1820. It would take time is all).

The problems you'd need to solve are, in no particular order, the absence of complex financial thinking and applied higher maths, the relative dearth of raw materials, limited written communications, dearth of technically skilled labour at the base and heavy transport infrastructure. All of this is doable.
 
There were no metals strong enough at the time to build a useful steam engine. You would either have to build it with really thick metal casings, (which would make it too heavy),
That's not really a problem. Stationary engines are very useful.
 
It simply would not work. The Romans had no other substitute and were not in a hurry to develop one. Unless someone went back in time and gave them a steam engine they would never do it.
 
If Rome had wanted an industrial revolution, it would have been doable. The main problems here are neither slavery nor technology. Roman slavery could have accommodated industrialisation fairly well, with the verna system and manumission for highly trained staff as an incentive to perform. Technology could have provided machionery easily enough - it was fashionable for a long time to denigrate Roman technology and trade, but archeology is so full of publications showing the exception that we are coming around to understanding the exception is the rule. The Romans were good at technology (There were big, probably insurmountable, obstacles to building viable steam engines, but they are the same that would have prevented building a computer in 1820. It would take time is all).

The problem is that there is no such thing as 'wanting' an industrial revolution. An industrial revolution is virtually inconcievable until one has happened somewhere. It has to just happen, and there was no force driving Rome towards that.
 
The problem is that there is no such thing as 'wanting' an industrial revolution. An industrial revolution is virtually inconcievable until one has happened somewhere. It has to just happen, and there was no force driving Rome towards that.

Could Carthage have caused an industrial revolution and thus forced the Romans to do so as well?
 

ninebucks

Banned
Could Carthage have caused an industrial revolution and thus forced the Romans to do so as well?

Carthage is probably a worse candidate than Rome. For one thing, they controlled most of the trans-Saharan slave routes, meaning they never had a shortage of labour, and secondly, they didn't do much actual work themselves, Carthage was a merchant state, it traded for everything it needed - even its agricultural production was outsourced to the client Berber states.
 
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