2. Relating incentives to productivity is an anachronistic grafting of industrial and post-industrial economic thought onto a subsistence farming economy where it doesn't apply. If a serf works harder and produces more crop, what are they going to do with it? Sell it to their neighbor, who is also a farmer and grows all the same things? To the best of my knowledge, there was not a significant cash crop economy in medieval Europe.
3. As others have pointed out, slavery continued long after the Roman Empire. It was much more prevalent in the encomienda system and the antebellum South than it ever was in Rome. The proportion of enslaved people in mid 1700s South Carolina about 3 to 5x that of ancient Rome. And even that's nothing compared to the Caribbean.
2. Cities can not sustain themselves but need the existence of villages that would sell them the food.
In the late medieval period farmers absolute would sell the surplus for money on the market. We also see also traveling merchants that would go from village to village to offer wares.
> Sell it to their neighbor, who is also a farmer and grows all the same things?
Some people in a village did not have land but were craftsmen like the iconic blacksmith.
An yes it was a development and early medieval period ages the serf was probably just happy to have slightly more to eat. It didn't all happen over night. Villages started very self-sufficient. Basically producing everything they needed themselves while we see much more diversification of labor later on.
3. I made a comment about the US South as well. An yes, history is not linear. There are just general tendencies.
By the late medieval period, sure, there was somewhat more robust intercity trade. But that's approaching 1000 years after the fall of the western Roman empire, which is stretching it if you want to claim cause and effect.
You are picking a very specific area and comparing it to the entire Roman empire? The proportion of the population that was enslaved was significantly higher in Italy than in the rest of the empire (and it was about on the same level as in the Southern States by 1860, around 30-35%).
I can't find reliable figures but it was significantly higher in Sicily and Southern Italy and probably as high if not higher than in South Carolina.
> Sell it to their neighbor, who is also a farmer and grows all the same things?
No but there was still extensive trade on the regional level. Not by modern standards of course since surpluses were very low (but not by Roman standards since productivity had likely increased significantly throughout large swaths of the former Roman empire due to technological progress). e.g. the production of wool which was exported to the low countries made up a non insignificant fraction of the English economy.
> significant cash crop economy in medieval Europe.
I think people often tend to compare Northern and Western Europe during the middle ages with the Mediterranean centered Roman empire for some reasons. I'm not sure there was an extensive crash crop economy was particularly more extensive in Northern Gaul, Germany or Britain during the Roman period (probably the opposite since the population sizes seem to have been much higher in those regions during the middle ages).
The plantation/latifundia based economy in Southern Italy had collapsed of course but I'm not sure that the production of main cash crops wine/olives was necessarily much lower overall by the high middle ages even in Southern Europe (though of course it varied by exact period and region).
There was a fair bit of specialization and cash-cropping in Rome, though - it's unfair to assume that Rome and the medieval period are the same here, when the key difference is Rome, which 1) acted as basically a giant trade union, economically, and 2) Rome was built around the mediterranean, which obviously made shipping easier than in the middle of Europe.
And please don't draw parallels, you shouldn't, the society now is very different.
[edit] for clarification, the last sentence is a general 'you', I'm not talking about my parent who made an overall good point.
The form of society that is more efficient will always win out in the end. Same as companies that can produce goods more efficiently under free market capitalism will always dominate.
It's a strange take that hyper-focuses on slavery and the economy when slavery was being used by western nations well into the 1800s.
If I need to use 90% of my population just to produce enough food to sustain them, I can only use 10% for other things. The society that only needs 50% of the workforce to be in agriculture can easily entertain for example a vastly bigger military even with the same population.
Economics is what wins war. Economics is what allows technological progress.
Yes, slavery existed but the question is what the dominant form of ding agriculture.
I feel like you're talking about economic abstractions without understanding the actual historical context.
And is there any good evidence/sources for this? Surely both groups generally performed pretty extreme levels of backbreaking labour. I can't exactly imagine a slave slacking off while literally being whipped.
Also, even if feudalism made us more efficient at food production as you say* - did it not also make societies less effective at producing great works of infrastructure (roads being a good example) than imperial Rome? One just needs to compare the dark ages/low middle ages to the Roman era to see the stark contrast.
Isn't the entire narrative basically: Roman prosperity -> bad times -> rediscovery of classic values (renaissance) -> parity with the Romans 1000 years later?
Genuine questions, not trying to be combative. My history just might not be very good
* Also I'd be interested to find out if there were more famines during pax romana or in the period after the fall of the western empire..
> The important part is incentives to work harder. Slaves only have the incentives to avoid the whip. They do not own what they produce. They need to be closely supervised and micromanaged. In contrast many forms of serfdom allowed to the serfs to keep some of the stuff they produced so they had incentives to work more efficiently.
Serfs often were provided a bit of land of their own that they could cultivate for themselves.
Note that many people point out rightfully that where were many forms of serfdom and some where closer so slavery while others were more free. Also the development of big cities only really happened towards the end of the medieval period so it was a longer process and not like immediate benefit.
> Isn't the entire narrative basically: Roman prosperity -> bad times -> rediscovery of classic values (renaissance) -> parity with the Romans 1000 years later?
Yes that is the narrative created by renaissance people to explain whey they are better than the people in the medieval period. It is basically propaganda that has survived till this day.
The truth is things got much worse before they got better. The whole inquisition, witch hunts, religious fundamentalism, yeah that happened AFTER the medieval period. That is modernity. It was this transition period that saw lots of war and plagues and much uncertainty. So it is natural that people longed for a romanticized golden age that they project their ideas on.
The dark ages were originally called dark in the sense that there are less written sources from this time period. They are "dark" in the sense that historians know less about them time, like blind spots. They are not dark because times where horrible. That is a modern interpretation.
Historians today don't use the term "dark ages" because in reality they weren't that dark.
Roads were primarily built for military use, but once they were built anyone travelling on foot would benefit from them, which meant had real economic impacts. That said, boats can carry far more goods than pack mules far faster, and don't eat a ton of fodder every day. There's a reason all the big old cities are on rivers. It's also why the Roman empire was primarily on the Mediterranean.
If anyone wants to read pages and pages of info about classical-era and roman roads, I recommend https://acoup.blog/2023/06/02/collections-roman-roads/
> The Roman empire was based on slavery
Something only a recent college grad who's ignorant of history would ever say.
Yes, apart from the aqueducts, the sanitation, the roads, the wine, public health, public baths, public order, cheese, medication, law, education and entertainment the Romans accomplished very little.
Making a statement with confidence doesn’t make it true. You might want to provide substance for this statement as the rest of your comment is based on it.
Diocletian reforms, the corruption, civil wars and the inability of defend itself eroded and destroyed all the structures that made the Republic great all those are the reasons that made the Empire fall.
Slavery, in lots of different forms, flourished for nearly a millennium and a half throughout the world after the fall of the Western Roman Empire (including, quite conspicuously, in the Eastern Roman Empire for nearly another thousand years...) It's very strange to me that you consider slavery responsible for the downfall of Rome given how it was so prevalent everywhere for so long after.
Slavery is extremely economically efficient in reality, especially if you have the power to force the slaves into utter servitude, like they did in the US South. The south, and the USA as a whole, would never have been as rich if they didn't have slavery at the right time. It was important enough that h he confederacy was willing to fight a war over it: they knew, and they were proven right, that losing slavery would plunge them into poverty, as it did.
Of course, this is not a defense of slavery: in all its forms, it is a disgusting, disturbing, inhuman institution that must always be fought against and dismantled. But this can only ever be done by the will of the people, against the economic interests of the slave masters. An unregulated free market will always seek to reintroduce slavery (just like it will converge to monopolies or at least oligopolies and many other undesirable traits).
If the South was so enriched by slavery, why did they have such a lack of guns and industry with which to build them? And why could they only buy less than a tenth of the guns that the North bought?
The answer is that they never industrialized because if you force slaves to work expensive machines, then those machines will be sabotaged. Slavery cripples your ability to mechanize.
If slavery really were better for the economy, then the South could have won the war even despite their lack of numbers - if the South had armed every single soldier with a breach-loading rifle (they mostly just had smoothbores, mostly muzzle-loading) then the North simply wouldn't have been able to push the offensive and would probably have been losing ground. The South's strategic goals were easier than the North's - the North needed to annex the south (or re-annex, semantics) whereas the South only needed a stalemate. The South mobilized first, so if anything they should have had more guns than the North.
You're quite correct that slavery is wildly profitable for the slave-owner, so they had more than enough capital to industrialize, so why didn't they?
>In Southern Europe, if you consider serfs different from slaves (they were, but only to a small extent).
The ethnicity is important here: if a serf runs away, there's no obvious inherent indicator they're a serf, making it easy to make a new life nearby (e.g. a few towns away). If a black slave runs away in the Antebellum South, then other villages will assume he's a runaway slave until proven otherwise - that runaway will have to escape the entire South. The serf's greater ability to escape if he's treated too poorly gave him bargaining power that limited the abuse of feudal lords.
I think this highlights some differences between Roman slavery and slavery in America (and many other states). While many Roman slaves were engaged in menial labour some of them were trusted enough (and presumably comfortable enough) to be in positions of responsibility in nearly every facet of the Roman economy.
Freed slaves could go on to have successful careers, sometimes rising to high positions in Roman society, something that it is hard to imagine happening in the American south.
Slavery is very profitable for the slave holder but not for the society as a whole.
Like if you take Nazi Germany. Many companies got rich by being provided essentially free slave labor that they could free work to death. But does it really make sense to have educated people work themselves to an early grave doing menial inefficient labor that needed to be closely supervised? Could they not have provided much more to the economy if they had been free? The practice is as sustainable as eating your own flesh.
Nazi Germany could keep going as long as the war machine kept going and there were countries to occupy but it wouldn't have been a very sustainable society in the long run.
Yes capitalist have an individual interest in slave labor and in forming monopolies. But in doing so they also also create conditions for the undoing of the very society that made them rich. That is exactly the point. Slavery is amazing for the slave owner but not for everyone else.
And the Roman empire had in large part shifted to serfdom in its later periods as the supply of cheap slaved dried up.
> That allowed producing more food with less workforce
Also the population collapsing resulted in significant increase in per capita productivity (more land per person)
``` Once again in Roman Italy our situation is perhaps a touch better, although not particularly good. Because we have better demographic data for the rest of the free population and a better grasp on the mechanics of Roman agriculture, we can do something a bit better than blind guessing here (though blind guessing there has been in abundance), but not much better. Walter Scheidel walked through much of this math, guesstimating the urban enslaved population under Augustus (r. 31BC-14AD) at around 600,000 (based on an estimated breakdown of Roman social classes and estimates of how many enslaved persons each elite household might have) and another c. 600,000 in the countryside (based on rather more confident agricultural modeling showing the figure can’t be much higher than this without pushing out all of the small farmers and tenants we know from our sources there were) for a total of 1.2m probably representing the height of the enslaved population in Italy, coming as it does at the explosive conclusion of Rome’s long streak of rapid expansion in warfare.12 For an Italy under August between perhaps 5.7m and 7.0m that would imply an enslaved population of very roughly 15-20%, with a bit of wiggle room on both sides.13 This, we can be quite sure, is a significant increase from the earlier period so the figure for 225 BC and the Middle Republic must be lower, perhaps very roughly around 10%. Again, those figures are very rough, but I think Scheidel14 does a good job showing that something much higher, say, 30+% simply doesn’t make much sense given our evidence.
That actually is a useful conclusion, by the by, the full import of which I think has not been fully observed: while Rome has a reputation as the slaveholding society – and it certainly was a slaveholding society, make no mistake – those rates are probably rather lower than what we see in Greece, suggestive of an Italy countryside in particular that had more freeholding citizen small farmers than a comparable Greek polis. ```
[1]https://acoup.blog/2023/12/22/collections-how-many-people-an...
Besides slavery was practiced in Europe for long after Rome, especially by the Vikings who would raid the serfs and take them as slaves. The Byzantine empire that survived the fall of Rome practiced slavery until its fall a thousand years later so your thesis doesn’t make much sense.
> By the eighteenth century, the practice of selling serfs without land had become commonplace.
As I said the big difference is that serfs could also keep part of what they produce. They have incentives to work harder while slaves do not have any.
Feudal lords couldn't just do with them as they wanted. Yes, they were tied to specific piece of land but in return also got the protection of the lord in times of war.
Slavery was replaced as the dominant form for doing agriculture. Slavery still exists to this day but I don't see how this is relevant. We are talking broad stroke tendencies over a very long, long time. The more efficient forms of productions will always win out in the end. It shouldn't really be controversial that slave labor is not very efficient.
Additionally, feuds between neighboring lords, which were extremely commonplace in much of Medieval Europe, often involved deliberate attacks on serfs, with the sole purpose of killing them off. This was also mostly unheard of in Rome, and would have led to legal punishments against the slave killers if it could be proven.
Of course, this started gradually changing, and the exact conditions for serfs varied greatly between regions. But by-and-large, Medieval Europe was much worse off then many areas of the Roman Empire.
And in regards to efficiency, this all makes no sense. The Roman Empire was vastly more economically efficient than medieval Europe, particularly when it came to food production. The kinds of armies the Roman Empire could field (which is mostly limited by feeding them) were not seen again in Europe until near the modern era. The Roman Army ranged from ~300,000 soldiers in the time of Tiberius, to more than 600,000 in the time of Constantine. By comparison, with the exception of Charlemagne (who still raised at most 100,000 troops once, and could hardly sustain this), medieval Europe had tiny armies - William the Conqieror conquered England with 14,000 troops, for one example of the scale.
Bullshit. Also, when you say "Yes, they were tied to specific piece of land but in return also got the protection of the lord in times of war", that was generally true of chattel slaves as well - owners like to protect what they see as their property, after all.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom_in_Russia#Slaves_and_s... (and there are other linked sources on that page if you want to follow up):
> Formal conversion to serf status and the later ban on the sale of serfs without land did not stop the trade in household slaves; this trade merely changed its name. The private owners of the serfs regarded the law as a mere formality. Instead of "sale of a peasant" the papers would advertise "servant for hire" or similar.
> By the eighteenth century, the practice of selling serfs without land had become commonplace. Owners had absolute control over their serfs' lives, and could buy, sell and trade them at will, giving them as much power over serfs as Americans had over chattel slaves, though owners did not always choose to exercise their powers over serfs to the fullest extent.
People here focus on the aspect of freedom which isn't really that important. That is a more modern idea that we see when capitalism develops and there is an actual free workforce.
The point again is economic incentives. Slaves have the incentives to avoid the whip and otherwise work as slowly as possible. Most forms of serfdom allowed working part of the land for yourselves and getting to keep some of which you produce. So you have an interest in being efficient in your work.
The Russian Empire was considered a "Great Power" for nearly 400 years. Sure, the lives of the average citizen sucked just like that of slaves, but the lords in Russia were able to harness their labor for nearly unfathomable levels of wealth and domination.
The idea that serfs somehow worked harder because "they got to keep some of what they produced" is just pure fantasy. Serfs had to work hard because a lot of the time they were on the verge of starvation.
The Russian Empire was far behind Western Europe in terms of economic development. People still used the wooden plow in the beginning of the 20th century. Something like 80 or 90 percent of the population still lived in villages.
I not really sure what point you are making. I mean no one is going argue that the Russian model of serfdom was a good idea?
> The idea that serfs somehow worked harder because "they got to keep some of what they produced" is just pure fantasy. Serfs had to work hard because a lot of the time they were on the verge of starvation.
Slaves are fed regardless of much or little they produce so you are saying serfs they had a pretty big incentive to work harder. Well case in point.
Everything else is just some weird romanticism of the antique when in reality many things got better in the medieval period. There wasn't a sudden fall of the Roman Empire. It was a gradual process and the structures coming after it saw themselves not as a replacement but as a continuation of Roman traditions.
Edit: As people misunderstand. The important difference between serfdom and slavery is not freedom. The important part is incentives to work harder. Slaves only have the incentives to avoid the whip. They do not own what they produce. They need to be closely supervised and micromanaged. In contrast many forms of serfdom allowed to the serfs to keep some of the stuff they produced so they had incentives to work more efficiently.