The scale of planning and engineering put into their infrastructure is just awesome.
It's not just roads. Their sewage systems, water treatment plants, siphons, aqueducts, pipes... IDK if any of you had a deep dive into this, but I watch some YT channels by spanish professors and this people were no joke.
And they seemed to have some research on materials too.
"What have the Romans given us in return?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ
Oh, and the wine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_metallurgy#Mechanisation:
“There is direct evidence that the Romans mechanised at least part of the extraction processes. They used water power from water wheels for grinding grains and sawing timber or stone, for example. A set of sixteen such overshot wheels is still visible at Barbegal near Arles dating from the 1st century AD or possibly earlier, the water being supplied by the main aqueduct to Arles.”
I think that aqueduct is an example of energy transmission.
“Ausonius attests the use of a water mill for sawing stone in his poem Mosella from the 4th century AD. They could easily have adapted the technology to crush ore using tilt hammers, and just such is mentioned by Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia dating to about 75 AD, and there is evidence for the method from Dolaucothi in South Wales”
“They also used reverse overshot water-wheel for draining mines, the parts being prefabricated and numbered for ease of assembly. Multiple set of such wheels have been found in Spain at the Rio Tinto copper mines and a fragment of a wheel at Dolaucothi. An incomplete wheel from Spain is now on public show in the British Museum.“
I think that shows innovation in technologies (not as fast as happened in the industrial revolution, but it is innovation)
"Italy never got as large number of mills as Britain as the rivers flowing into Northern Italy have too large variation in water flow. That is part of the reason Romans could never utilize waterwheels to a great extent."
Neoliberal capitalism has given us a lot of very cheap, very technologically advanced stuff. An extremely basic integrated circuit in the 1960s costs the same as an entire iPhone now, accounting for inflation. Accounting for inflation, automobiles are as cheap as they've ever been, and have many more features that work much better than they ever have.
But ... the edges wear thin. A Raspberry Pi (computer) and a Raspberry Pie (food) may be purchased for around the same price. A varied and healthy diet can be quite expensive (though there are deals to be found if you can travel to get them). Companies want to "add value" to food with extensive processing that increases the engineered taste factors to make us consume more. Housing is insanely expensive in many areas. Health care in the United States is not designed for any humans - not doctors, nurses, other professionals, and certainly not patients.
Neoliberal capitalism won't innovate on these areas. Are we just stuck with what we have? Certainly government mandates could change the game, but just like the Romans, people think the system is working because they can buy a smart phone and a gaming console and some cheap snacks and go for a ride in their fine automobile.
We can't see what the collapse will be, and we can't see what's next. I wonder how many Romans talked like this? I don't believe that our doom is inevitable, but I also think that progress requires specific intention, and progress can be very easily disrupted.
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I have a thesis that the economic benefits of integrated circuit microchip and the economic benefits of neoliberalism cannot be distinguished. They both feed each other. I don't see myself putting enough effort into researching it and writing it up, but I strongly believe that thesis.
I'm sorry if I'm misunderstanding, but a couple of reads of your comment and I still think you're complaining that things go well :)
Why would healthcare be inexpensive? Go into a clinic today and there’s a legion of professionals who attend to each patient. Each of them has years of training, even the clerk at the desk.
They use a whole battery of expensive equipment. Multi-million dollar machines to literally see inside your body.
Every piece of tubing, bandage, needle, plastic fitting, etc is sterile, and used only once. They are made in a facility to exacting standards which is in turn monitored and supervised by another network of professionals with reams of policy dictating how the equipment is made, accounted for, and an army of lawyers behind the scenes as well.
The facility itself has exacting standards for cleanliness, emergency power, disaster-resistance.
The medical records are held in computer systems which abide by HIPAA requirements, again with a team of engineers and cybersecurity professionals ensuring that standards are met.
Healthcare is expensive because it’s expensive. The alternative is suffering with untreatable injuries or just dying, which we take for granted because we don’t see it that much anymore. We don’t have country doctors working out of their house charging a few bucks for a visit.
Are there inefficiencies? Is there waste, fraud and abuse? Are there greedy pharmaceutical execs making billions of dollars on the backs of unsuspecting pill poppers? Could we do things better or cheaper? I’m sure we could, but I don’t think there’s some kind of grand conspiracy to make us slaves to our employers vía medicine.
The alternative isn't a lack of healthcare, it's a compassionate experience that understands that we are people, not bags of money. Individual medical centers may live up to that standard, but the industry does not.
There doesn't need to be a grand conspiracy, just aligned incentives. The result is the same. It's also true that modern cutting-edge healthcare is expensive any way you slice it. In free market capitalism it is up to each person to bear that cost. This means that some people will not be able to afford treatment or will be plunged into crippling debt. I'm of the belief that if we can treat someone with a health problem then that treatment should be available to them either for some marginal cost or for free. Basic human needs can not be subject to market pricing as consumers are essentially under duress when making purchasing decisions; they cannot choose to forgo lifesaving medicine should the price be unreasonable.
The Romans had a huge blind spot because of their economic system.
We have a huge blind spot because of our economic system.
What is that blind spot? What's in that blind spot? We're in the last stages of the information revolution. The maturity of the information revolution will continue for as long as civilization does; we are continuing the industrial revolution even now.
The Star Trek Original Series and Next Generation both showed a "post-scarcity" society. What is most scarce in our society that prevents a post-scarcity society? What does an economy look like in post-scarcity?
We have Science Fiction, it's entirely possible that ancient Rome had futurists too.
Think of my comment about RPi/Pie in terms of economic revolutions. A society that can make a pie only needs a few things that are relatively easily gathered. An adult human could reasonably invent a pie in any age, from the Stone Age until now. That such an incredibly simple food may be underpriced by advanced technology requiring millions of cumulative person-hours of technical progress is simply astounding.
Nothing. We could have had post-scarcity society since 1950s at least (Haber Bosch process means enough food for everybody, everything else is optional and/or could be achieved by redistribution). Yet we refused to do it cause we value marginal improvements in our comfort more than survival and lack of serious suffering of others. We're already making things scarce on purpose (see NFTs and art in general). People want things that are scarce even if that's the only property of these things, and they value these desires enough to deny other people resources they need to live.
Thinking that this will somehow change in the future just because of some new technology making more stuff non-scarce is naive. We'll invent something that doesn't exist yet just so that we can have it while others can't. There will never be post-scarcity as long as people are people.
Wouldn't you put the transition from agriculture based economy under neoliberal capitalism? We went from 90% farm employment to 10% while massively increasing output.
Tech folks don't think food production is exciting so they miss all the innovation.
https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/1/8/22872749/john-deere-self...
As to housing and health care, we don't have "neoliberal capitalism", we have highly regulated, captured, markets. If you moved to zero zoning in SF you'd start to have innovative building.
That's the entire point of capitalism. Reinstitution of feudal economy, or even worse, slave economies, through economic system. In post Civil War US and post-emancipation Brazil, the slave economy was reinstituted through 'free market' precisely using capitalist methodology. Former slave owners kept wages low, which forced now-freed slaves to work for even less economic return than before. Because now the slave-owners did not even have to feed their slaves and keep them healthy enough to work. They could just discard them when they couldn't work.
> but just like the Romans, people think the system is working because they can buy a smart phone and a gaming console and some cheap snacks and go for a ride in their fine automobile.
I very much think that people don't think that the system works. Only those who are in or above the top 10% of the society. The rest are aware of the brutal reality of the system and they are unwilling participants in it for that reason. Exactly the same with later Rome. Which is a reason why Rome fall so easily and so fast - there was no difference in between their former Roman masters and their new feudal overlords as far as Romans were concerned.
Yes, capitalism will happily cater to your worst vices. But then again, it will just as happily cater to your best virtues. I'd call it a problem of information and education, not a problem of capitalism.
You still pay housing, food and time at a minimum.
Not saying that slavery is by any means even slightly positive. Just that economic system allows for extreme exploitation of people without alternatives.
People still romanticize the antique so much they miss that the medieval period saw quite a few advancements.
Why did the Romans not have an industrial Revolution?
For that you need a society that actually has incentives to efficiently use the labor available. Like in capitalism where you pay the workers based on hours. And the prerequisite for that was feudalism, the development of cities, start of manufacturing and so on. One economic system leads to another. Not easy to just leapfrog from a slave-holding society into the industrial age.
- Steam engine - the Aeolipile
- Concrete - even underwater concrete
- Automations - see Heron of Alexandria
However...
Aside from that and what advances Rome was able to do from their inception until the Late Republic period, Romans did not innovate as you would describe it. That's why the Roman history from Middle Republic until its fall is a story of slow decline and deterioration into feudalism.
they knew it worked, and Caesarea in Israel shows that it really did.
The roman experience is one reason why the pre-Reformation church was so set against usury.
Thankfully, we won't make the mistake of allowing usury to dominate our civilization again. :|
I don’t think there is much evidence that free citzens were often reduced to slavery. Slaves were almost exclusively war captives or imported from abroad.
I would submit that any Roman farmer or businessman relying on slave labor would be overjoyed to purchase any device that would cut the need for slaves in half. (Or even by 10-20%.)
For mechanization to reduce manual labor on Roman farms they would need to switch to monoculture crops of a type that were conducive to mechanization. It would take machines being extremely cheap to beat Roman slave labor where conquests of neighboring territories were constantly bringing in new slaves.
More pertinently, the "expensive" farm workers of the industrializing countries weren't expensive enough for farming to be mechanized until the 20th century. Second half of that before it had replaced manual forms of farming entirely. Farming itself never was the driver for industrialization, but a rather late profiteer of it. It follows that farm slaves couldn't have been the blocker for industrialization, at least not as directly as you assume.
The lack of innovation in this field was likely because of class issues, especially the upper class wanting to retain control over knowledge.
There is a reason why industrialization followed the invention of the printing press, and not the other way around.
The educated elite mostly wrote about things they knew and cared about - law, warfare, religion. Learning in these fields often advanced much faster than, say, blacksmithing since the elite class was invested in writing and sharing and learning about them.
If you look at a very broad sweep of cultures at various times... the classification of social classes get very blurry: slavery, peasantry, serfs, cottiers, indentured labour, wage labour... Which of these best represents Middle Kingdom Egypt's labour structure? Is sharecropping the same as medieval european peasantry?
The definition or labeling of these labour class structures don't tell you much about their economic implications. Slaves don't necessarily cost less than sharecroppers, serfs or tribesman. That doesn't mean it doesn't have implications, but they are complicated and relative to the specific of that system.
I just don't buy this linear extrapolation from A to B.
Plus, industrialization didn't start with the steam engine, it started with the water wheel and windmill. Whether it was grinding grain, cutting wood, or even running power hammers (some smithies were found around rivers), the industrialization effort before the steam engine was nearly three or four hundred years earlier than the official starting of the late 18th century as told in popular narratives. In fact, I believe there's evidence of industrialization in Europe happening as early as the 11th century in some countries (again, windmills and water wheels running milling and other labor intensive operations).
Another problem with the Roman economy was the lack of complex financial arrangements and instruments. There wasn't any conception of the modern loan or corporate bonds in their world which are integral to the acceleration of industrialization and the growth of capitalism. Rome basically couldn't industrialize because its people and its norms were incongruent with the possibility. And even if some ancient engineer magically did create a simple two stroke engine, there wouldn't be any incentive to invest as to produce them with regularity. At most, they would've been a curiosity of the wealthy with little usage beyond some minor conveniences.
To confirm this, ancient greeks invented a simple steam turbine, and was regarded as a "party trick".
Rome's problem was always crony captilism and the fact that any Voltaire's that might have existed would have been violently executed by the state. Without freedom of thought you have no Industrial Revolution.
A lot of Rome's more ingenious feats of engineering were geared towards military uses or grand public works in the name of Emperors and aristocrats. There wasn't really the same infrastructure for smart engineers that dreamed they could become wealthy from researching and building a new process for making garments at a lower cost (and they were missing lots of intermediate improvements the British had). Ancient Rome had more freedom of thought than, say, modern China, but a lot less entrepreneurial culture.
Because the ability to amortize your costs is a boon for outpacing smaller firms. Basically, the more cash you can get your hands on that you can defer the lump sum payment on the more you can build out and thus the more you can produce. It basically becomes a positive feedback loop (this includes state subsidies indirect and direct which I'll leave as a generalized foundation for the sake of a clearer argument).
>The Romans had modularized home construction so that they could scale and that doesn't happen without financial incentives and some level of an industrial revolution.
Modularity was born out of the immediate demand for the product (housing). Note that modern, capitalist, economies build on the basis of volume whether it's housing, smart phones, clothes, and so on. And it can do this due to the fact that costs are amortized over the payment of debt along with the state subsidization as mentioned. Essentially, capitalism fuels itself through debt and state based subsidies (ex. interstate highways subsidize trucking yielding higher profits than would be possible if interstate highways were wholly private). This includes the inducement of markets (ex. prior to the trans-continental railroad the US markets were regional at best and most international trade was by sea for commodities such as cotton, gold, or ores).
Also, Roman upper class had no social need to turn their profits into more profits. They would often build themselves villas, have lavish feasts, and many other temporary luxuries in their place as their social standing was more based in that than in sheer monetary/accounting wealth.
>Rome's problem was always crony capitalism and the fact that any Voltaire's that might have existed would have been violently executed by the state. Without freedom of thought you have no Industrial Revolution.
This here is your primary error, capitalism did not exist prior to the the 17th century (merchant capitalism) at the earliest. Yes, there were loans but nothing to the complexity or legal arrangements that even a modern small business loan has in terms of legal and social dimensions. Today, debts can be carried by corporate entities. In the past though, loans were only to be held by the person or people who agreed to them. It was a rare concept that loans or debts could be owned by someone else (ex. one nation conquering another taking on their debts which is a new concept) which is an important construct for financial capitalism to emerge from industrial capitalism.
The UK had the tech to build mills and the financial system to fund the capital costs of building them though (and a larger, more global market to sell mass produced cotton to)
Yes! Great theory. Financial innovation seems as big a driver of industrialization as the discovery of coal or oil.
I would imagine that an oversupply of laborers (i.e. too many people, not enough places for them to be productive) was a bigger factor.
If you read A Farewell to Alms - it has a pretty convincing argument that the industrial revolution only happened because England ran out of land and birth rates declined and that, combined with thriving merchant and textile and finance industries, led to a shortage of labor - which led to innovation.
Time matters, places matter, culture matters, food, existing technology, technological connections with other regions, math, scientific progress, etc etc.
For example you need to be able to make blueprints. To make blueprints you need the math technology, the printing technology, and drafting technology, and the language necessary to all be developed first.
There are hundreds of thousands of different variables. Probably millions. More probably trillions.
None of them aligned for the Romans. All of them aligned for coal mining industry in Britain.
Obviously. The point of the book was to highlight the major factors.
> None of them aligned for the Romans. All of them aligned for coal mining industry in Britain.
> Trying to point out single factor is a exercise in stupidity.
Are you saying the coal mining industry is the cause? Because the industrial revolution leads to the explosion of the coal mining industry, not the other way around.
Why do you need so much coal? For steam engines.
Why do you need steam engines? Because people and animals aren't enough any more.
It seems the textile industry and the train are the large drivers that demand more coal. But it doesn't mention the water pumping problem or the atmospheric steam engine.
That being said - assuming you have an abundance of "Big Burly Men and Daft Animals" - as the article put it - I'm skeptical the steam engine would've found a viable use.
Assuming England hadn't run out of forested land - they wouldn't have been extracting so much coal.
I still think the key points from A Farewell to Alms stand - but this is a super interesting nugget that should've made the book (if it didn't).
(Basing this all on the history of Rome podcast)
If the south hadn't gotten paranoid that Lincoln was going to take their slaves away (he wasn't), they might still have slavery because the slave system meant that the southern elite didn't have to do any work whatsoever (which is basically the gist of why Calhoun called slavery a "positive good"). Sure, they weren't ever going to be as rich as the northern tycoons but they lived far more comfortable lives and didn't see any reason to change that. The north had given up slavery because, in the late 1700s before the cotton gin, it seemed like it wasn't going to be economically viable in the future and most of the founding generation viewed it as a "necessary evil" and genuinely wanted to get rid of it as soon as they could but felt they couldn't (Jefferson, a slaveowner who owned slaves he wanted to free but couldn't because he was always deep in debt, is probably the most famous example of this point of view). Northerners also believed in the ideal of the self-sufficient family farmer and (especially in New England) a Calvinist work ethic. When you regard leisure as a sin, you don't have as much interest in being freed from having to work.
In short, I think the slave economy is a sufficient explanation for why Rome didn't industrialize. When you have tons of slaves and the republic/empire was always fighting more wars to get more slaves, why would you need machines? Especially when the machines would likely require free men to do work to maintain them.
That's a pretty strong claim. Can you share your source?
My impression has always been that Southern leadership (including generals) spent most of the war LARPing, without any real understanding of how badly things could go for them personally, with their forces having no particular tactical advantages advantage over the North.
2 speeches that are really good in terms of understanding the motivations of both sides at the beginning of the Civil War are the Cornerstone Speech by the Confederate VP (Alexander H Stephens) and Lincoln's first inaugural. Neither speech is particularly hard to read especially with Wikipedia available to look up unfamiliar terminology (i.e. "internal improvements" = 19th century name for infrastructure spending and "domestic institutions" = polite euphemism for slavery). Its especially fortunate for the sake of history that Stephens came right out and said what the Confederates believed because it makes it easy to refute the "it was about economics not slavery" line of argument from Confederate apologists. Lincoln's first inaugural is important as well because it refutes the "it was always only about slavery" argument you sometimes hear in response.
One rather interesting angle in the Cornerstone Speech is how Stephens cites Adam Smith's economics. In the north, the economic nationalist "American School" of Friedrich List and Henry Carey (Carey was Lincoln's primary economic advisor) was more influential than Adam Smith. Unless you're really interested in reading economic theory, I'd say the Wikipedia article on the American School of economics is sufficient to get the gist of the economic ideas that influenced Lincoln.
I'm not entirely sure what to recommend regarding the abolitionist movement because that's an area that's already heavily emphasized in the American education system, at least in my experience. I'm also not sure what to recommend regarding the wave of immigration that finally shifted control of the federal government from south to north in 1860 but this would definitely show up in the Census data and you can still see evidence of it today in how white people from the south are more likely to have English last names than white people from other parts of the country (the mid 1800s wave of immigration was heavily Irish and German).
Another great source for learning about what happened is to get a chance to talk to tour guides at the Civil War battlefields. I think most of my history professors from when I was majoring in history also did tours of the Gettysburg battlefield. The best time to visit is when it isn't as crowded. In the case of Gettysburg, that means avoiding the first 2 weeks of July (reenactment week followed by biker week) unless you specifically want to see the reenactment because the traffic is notoriously awful for those 2 weeks and everything is going to be packed.
That slavery is bad for industrial production was a major abolitionist argument. It's been repeated for at least 150-200 years.
de Tocqueville dedicates many pages to just that aspect. He describes sailing down the Ohio, seeing on the right bank teeming with factories and mills, and on the left one only loafers and undeveloped land.
In pop culture too; in Gone with the Wind, Rhett Butler is the cosmopolitan embarrassing the old southern aristocrats at cocktails parties, regaling stories about the Union being flush with money and factories, the south being a backwater. That's how he knew which way the war would go.
https://beardyhistory.com/2018/01/01/roman-slavery-and-ameri...
The American industrial revolution was primarily a northern thing. Plus some tooling (like the cotton gin) used in the south to process slave output.
If anything, Roman slaves would have been more fit to be part of an industrial revolution as they could hold educated jobs.
When the slaves imagine themselves free and have a slightly greater amount of agency, they are more productive than those who are motivated by the whip alone.
The "funny" part about those barely-not-slavery practices, some were outlawed and successfully defended in court by arguing it was... actually slavery, which was illegal but had no "or else".
The US didn't crack down on this until World War 2, and that was just because they were getting bad press about it.
South ressembled and seen itself more like aristocratic gentlemens so to speak. Slavery meant that trades and smaller production were jobs for slaved, looked down at.
A vast improvement from a chattel slave economy, to be sure.
It can also be done (on paper at least) with automation. The key point is "capital consolidation (which can scale) divorced from individual labor output (which does not scale)," and however you get there (slaves or robots), you can create a massive societal wealth imbalance that results in an economic arrangement utterly unlike the arrangement that spawned it.
... that reminds me, my phone pinged five minutes ago. I should go pick up that Amazon package off my porch.