The End of the Past
Why ancient Rome, rich and inventive, never had an industrial revolution. An Italian historian blames slavery.
Aldo Schiavone, an Italian historian of ancient Rome, asks why the Roman economy, with its markets, trade and technical know-how, did not grow into something like modern capitalism. His answer centres on slavery. Cheap forced labour removed the incentive to invest in labour-saving machines, and it taught the elite to despise productive work.
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Branko Milanovic
Schiavone’s answer is that the main culprit was the existence of slave labour. Most of the slaves in Rome were the product of military conquests. Slaves were relatively expensive, meaning that they could produce output above their own subsistence, but they were not sufficiently expensive to encourage the use of labour saving, and thus more technologically productive, techniques. Slavery, as argued already by Marx, was the key reason why ancient societies could not go past a certain level of economic development (even if they knew of some technologies – most famously the steam engine invented in Alexandria). They developed well enough to know how to use slaves but didn’t develop sufficiently to make it profitable to replace them with machines.
Interview · January 2011
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