The Romans valued research and engineering highly enough to be way ahead of both contemporary and successor civilisations in many aspects of it and have people willing to document their pure research into steam (which as the article acknowledges, turned out to be at best orthogonal to the pure research that got us pistons and condensing engines), they just didn't have all the intermediate inventions like high quality iron, rail lines and spinning jennies to make large scale use of steam that the British did 1500 years later, the same level of demand and competition for new products etc etc. But the abundance of cheap labour was something they actually had in common with the British Empire; it's just the British Empire used it differently (and displaced even more cheap labour by killing off craft industries as a result)
I think there’s a bit more to it: “high speed” is something which took a long time to be true. A lot of these things were simpler applications which seem to have big situational components: if you have literal tons of coal and ore to haul, plus relatively amenable terrain, but not competition from boats, iron to make rails and boilers, and a good source of fuel (coal or wood) steam engines are a great investment. Similarly, if you have fixed industrial demand and abundant fuel but not water power, stationary engines make sense.
If you have different answers for enough of those points, it’s hard to justify the development - it took the Europeans a couple of centuries in starting in the 1600s, after their population already exceeded Rome’s, and as you mentioned they already had or started a lot of related technologies, too. An agrarian society, a hilly one, land without lots of easily available fuel, etc. might not have had it ever make sense or only after someone else has made multiple generations of technology development.
Which is why our word for the ultimate automaton--the "robot," comes from the Czech robotnik, or forced laborer/slave.
Ignoring the obvious moral question, in a primarily agrarian economy slave labor is useful because it's relatively easy to control and there is no need for specialization. OTOH in an industrialized society you wouldn't want slaves even if you could have them.
Really? Leaving aside the moral issues most associated with slavery specifically, there is a huge demand in modern industrialized society for all sorts of low cost human labor. If middle class-ish people in the West could hire more people for the equivalent of a couple dollars an hour many would absolutely do so.
They absolutely could if there was any political desire to allow temporary low skilled immigration. In practice this doesn’t seem to be compatible with democracy. Singapore is not a shining light of labour rights or democracy but their government does have to pay attention to public opinion which is why they use less migrant labor than the Gulf monarchies.
Cleaning houses, mowing lawns, sure. But you wouldn't even get as far as a taxi/truck driver, which is one of the least qualified jobs today.
>Cleaning houses, mowing lawns, sure. But you wouldn't even get as far as a taxi/truck driver
Again I see how one might expect this to be true but it isn't.
some industries where slavery is widespread:
- Sex work - ocean fishing - mining
I'm sure there are others
Of course most slaves were just hard labor, but they did hold other positions. I think you can find examples of slaves holding every position in society other than government leader.
Even that one seems available:
Also, just by the way, we ought to be able to talk without implying that other people have "those tendencies". There is simply no reasonable way a comment about the structure of an industrialized economy can be constructed as "having those tendencies". Appending "slavery = bad" to every comment is tiresome, there is such a thing as context.
But I think there is a point when it makes more sense to just pay the guy a wage, instead of running a big expensive police state controlling everything...
In its essence slavery is an exchange of labor deal where the buying party has it way better than the selling party.
No, it's the notion that you have second-class citizens or even non-citizens with limited legal rights enforced by the state, said limitations usually being in the realm of property rights, personal freedoms, etc. At least that is fairly easy to define, whereas "grossly under compensating someone" is a vastly more nebulous term (who decides what is and isn't "under-compensating"?)
At its essence slavery is complete ownership of another person. Whether or not you put that person to "work" is a separate issue.
Try starting with the textbook definitions. Pretty much the defining factor of being a slave is that you are owned by someone else and have to follow their orders. You can be highly compensated and still a slave (see the myriad of anecdotes about “kind” slave owners who paid them well).
If a gang of armed men kidnap, brand, and return you, you're enslaved.
That is a misconception. Slaves were expensive: one slave was about a soldier's pay for an entire year; and things made using manual labor, too, were very expensive - if you had to buy them, of course.
Slaves. Slaves in the mines, slaves in the home, slave driving the rowboats and all services.
Labour was cheap and plenty, also intelligent - with entrenched "automation" like this, no inventions are actually needed. Which goes to show, that technology stratifyng society strangles itself, by producing a servant class outcompeting all technology. Give it a hundred years and the "natural" order of things seaps into relgion and culture such that to perform science is to dare the gods.
PS: There are tons of good alternate history .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Years_of_Rice_and_Salt