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karl fungus posted:Isn't serfdom distinct from Roman slavery, though? Yes, but it served the same purpose (more or less). Slavery was already mostly gone by the end of the Western Empire because the primary source of slaves was conquest - not exactly a thing that the Romans did much after a certain point. Slaves had also gained a lot of rights compared to the days of the Republic, so it was a much less advantageous relationship for the master than it had been. Why even bother owning your workers? It was much easier to lock an indebted farmer into a multigenerational debt slavery contract - he has to provide for himself, but you still get a legally bound worker. The price to buy off these contracts could be set higher than the legal manumission price for a "real" slave, so your sharecroppers weren't going to free themselves very often either. Diocletian formalized this debt slavery into proto-serfdom by eliminating the ability to buy off the debt. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 15:46 on Aug 6, 2014 |
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Aug 6, 2014 14:47
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Right and if I remember correctly the plagues made labor so loving valuable that the state passed and enforced all types of restrictive laws on the peasants which lead to modern feudalism. Well. Modern in the past. YOu know what I mean. Basically the peasants had an opportunity for an revolution but oh well.
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Aug 6, 2014 14:52
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euphronius posted:Right and if I remember correctly the plagues made labor so loving valuable that the state passed and enforced all types of restrictive laws on the peasants which lead to modern feudalism. Well. Modern in the past. YOu know what I mean. Serfdom (in the west) was bookended by plagues. The plague of Justinian did exactly what you say, though things had been going that way anyway. The labor shortage caused by the Black Death, on the other hand, was the beginning of the end of serfdom.
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Aug 6, 2014 15:33
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Halloween Jack posted:What was farming like in Roman Egypt, by the way? Farming didn't change much, they just shipped all the excess off to Italy. There were farms in Italy but nowhere near enough to sustain things. Sicily was essentially one giant farm to feed Italy, and a huge portion of Egypt's grain was for Rome alone. Sicily could make up the shortfall if Egypt didn't supply enough.
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Aug 6, 2014 16:58
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I'm always suprised with how cheap an short life was that more land owners didn't get the sharp end of a pruner in the guys.
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Aug 6, 2014 18:05
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Any idea what their standard of living was like? I understand that rural native Egyptians were considered lowest on the social hierarchy. I had always imagined Italian farms being more scattered and specialized, and Egyptian farming being more close-knit even if it covered more square mileage. (Because of irrigation and the labor requirements to harvest vast fields of grain, I suppose).
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Aug 6, 2014 18:06
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LingcodKilla posted:I'm always suprised with how cheap an short life was that more land owners didn't get the sharp end of a pruner in the guys. No matter how cheap, lovely, and short life is it's still your life and most people really don't care to throw theirs away on a worthless gesture. Besides, it's not like slave/peasant revolts were put down with anything like a sense of restraint, regardless of the historical era you're talking about. It's not just your life you're throwing away, it's pretty much everyone you personally know and care about. Whatever community you have, whatever family you have, whatever you care for even a little - all of that is going to be on the wrong end of really pissed off state that can muster way more in the way of force than you can. As if that's not enough, chances are you and your loved ones won't even get good, clean deaths. We're not talking "stabbed to death" as the consequence for your actions, we're talking "crucified and left to hang at the side of the road next to your also-crucified family." Let's not even get into what's probably in store for your wife and daughters if you have female relatives.
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Aug 6, 2014 18:17
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LingcodKilla posted:I'm always suprised with how cheap an short life was that more land owners didn't get the sharp end of a pruner in the guys. After the slave revolts culminating with Spartacus, the Romans shifted their treatment of slaves to a more humane system, and then as the slaves gained in the conquests of new regions got old and died, they did not have nearly as many anymore, so it was sensible to keep them relatively healthy and productive. Life as a farm slave was probably not all that horrible, at least compared to chattel slavery as practiced in the new world.
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Aug 6, 2014 18:36
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Cyrano4747 posted:No matter how cheap, lovely, and short life is it's still your life and most people really don't care to throw theirs away on a worthless gesture. Besides, it's not like slave/peasant revolts were put down with anything like a sense of restraint, regardless of the historical era you're talking about. It's not just your life you're throwing away, it's pretty much everyone you personally know and care about. Whatever community you have, whatever family you have, whatever you care for even a little - all of that is going to be on the wrong end of really pissed off state that can muster way more in the way of force than you can. Any particular cases of this happening? That'd be interesting to read about.
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Aug 6, 2014 18:44
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WoodrowSkillson posted:After the slave revolts culminating with Spartacus, the Romans shifted their treatment of slaves to a more humane system, and then as the slaves gained in the conquests of new regions got old and died, they did not have nearly as many anymore, so it was sensible to keep them relatively healthy and productive. Life as a farm slave was probably not all that horrible, at least compared to chattel slavery as practiced in the new world. Moreover theres all the doctors/tutors/clerks/chefs who were slaves. If you had the good fortune to be an educated slave then (comparatively) life could be quite good.
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Aug 6, 2014 19:23
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I would think that in a culture like Rome where personal liberty was not considered particularly important and society was arranged for everyone into mostly-strict classes that it would be less morally repulsive to be a slave than it would be now, or was in recent history. I'm a layman when it comes to that subject but that's the impression that I've gotten from reading and listening about the time period.
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Aug 6, 2014 19:58
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Halloween Jack posted:What was farming like in Roman Egypt, by the way? Anyway, private farming continued as it always had. And Egypt essentially became the Emperor's private grain reserve. The province was managed very differently from the others. A high-ranking centurion served as a permanent military governor. Members of the Senate were prohibited from even entering the province without direct leave of the Emperor, to prevent them from trying to seize control of the place. I'm honestly not sure what became of it in the later Empire, would like to hear from anyone that does though.
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Aug 6, 2014 20:21
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Koramei posted:Any particular cases of this happening? That'd be interesting to read about. poo poo, just google around on slave revolts and peasant revolts. The results are uniformly violent and depressing with the exception of a very, VERY small handful. Off the top of my head the Haitian slave revolt is the only truly successful one I can think of, although I think there was a semi-successful one (as in not everybody died) in New Spain sometime around the early 17th century. But, just to provide a quick list, I know the Servile Wars didn't end particularly well for the Roman slaves who revolted (sparticus is number three, I forget what the other two were about), Turner's Rebellion in the US ended with a whole poo poo-ton of completely unrelated slaves getting lynched, The Christmas Uprising in Jamaica ended with a whole lot of torture and executions, and then you've got about 200 years of Cossack revolts in late medieval/early early modern period in Russia and the Peasant's War in Germany during the Reformation. The latter one involved the slaughter of something on the order of a quarter million revolting peasants. So, yeah. Being a revolting peasant, slave, or serf never really works out well at any point in history that you care to name. The ones involving actual slaves that we have good records of (mostly more modern ones involving caribbean or N. American slave-owning industries) frequently feature some really ugly extra-judicial executions during the "putting down" phase and barely more palatable executions during the judicial phase.
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Aug 6, 2014 20:24
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Jerusalem posted:I've also found the mixture of outright xenophobia AND being a meritocracy fascinating. Foreigners and rural yokels (and plebs!) are absolutely inferior to glorious patrician Romans who can date their families back to the Gods... but if you're a proven soldier or politician who gets things done then you get respect and admiration right up until the moment you're no longer the flavor of the month. Unless you became Emperor then no more rural yokel in you.
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Aug 6, 2014 20:25
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Cyrano4747 posted:poo poo, just google around on slave revolts and peasant revolts. The results are uniformly violent and depressing with the exception of a very, VERY small handful. Off the top of my head the Haitian slave revolt is the only truly successful one I can think of, although I think there was a semi-successful one (as in not everybody died) in New Spain sometime around the early 17th century. I thought that Roman (or just general ancient/classical) slavery was a little different from colonial slavery though, on account of how in Rome it was based on class and conquest, whereas in colonial times it was deeply founded in straight up race hate. I would think that the latter would inspire people to be a little more brutal to slaves who tried to assert themselves, I don't know if looking at instances of slave revolts in the US or Jamaica is indicative of what happened in ancient Rome. But then again I'm not an expert of any sort. Did Romans have a similar view towards their slaves (as in, "they're property, not human beings") that the more modern colonial empires did, or was their system different at all? They did apparently send them to work themselves to death in gold mines, so I suppose they can't have liked them that much. Edit: For the record, I want to make it clear that I'm not trying to say that being a slave at any point in history "wasn't that bad" or anything--just that I was under the impression that colonial slavery was exceptionally brutal compared to ancient/classical times.
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Aug 6, 2014 20:32
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You don't have the race issues that you get with more modern forms of slavery in classical slavery, but classical slavery could be more or less brutal at various phases of history depending mostly on what kind of slave you were and how expensive slaves were at that particular time. Regardless of time or place, though, violently rising up against your master was a quick route to a painful death, which was the larger point that I was making.
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Aug 6, 2014 20:37
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Jazerus posted:Yes, but it served the same purpose (more or less). Slavery was already mostly gone by the end of the Western Empire because the primary source of slaves was conquest - not exactly a thing that the Romans did much after a certain point. Slaves had also gained a lot of rights compared to the days of the Republic, so it was a much less advantageous relationship for the master than it had been. Why even bother owning your workers? It was much easier to lock an indebted farmer into a multigenerational debt slavery contract - he has to provide for himself, but you still get a legally bound worker. The price to buy off these contracts could be set higher than the legal manumission price for a "real" slave, so your sharecroppers weren't going to free themselves very often either. Diocletian formalized this debt slavery into proto-serfdom by eliminating the ability to buy off the debt. I guess another difference would be that serfs weren't commodotized like slaves were, and operated more akin to a patronage system. Feudal lords didn't go around just "buying up serfs" to work the fields or think of serfs in terms of items with value attached to them. So yeah, you weren't really a slave, more like a lawn ornament.
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Aug 6, 2014 21:07
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Ainsley McTree posted:But then again I'm not an expert of any sort. Did Romans have a similar view towards their slaves (as in, "they're property, not human beings") that the more modern colonial empires did, or was their system different at all? It was more "they're human beings AND property". Colonial slavery existed in an era that mostly had the notion that you can't own a person, but justified it by saying that black people aren't entirely people. Their status as subhuman slaves was supposedly inherent in their nature. Hence both the horrific brutality of it, the ban on manumission, and the godawful situation of former slaves after they were liberated. The Romans, on the other hand, were all "oh you can totally own a person if you captured them fair and square" they had no issue with this because ultimately they adhered to some pretty might-makes-right ethics, but that dude was still a person. They understood that slavery was a social construct, something that happened to someone rather than being intrinsic to their nature. Thus, the frequent releasing of slaves. They're human beings, but subordinate ones whose social status makes them an exploitable asset. This is hard to wrap our heads around today, but you gotta remember that these people were pragmatic to the point of ruthlessness and had no concept of human rights or ideology. There's none of the hypocrisy inherent in colonial slavery, where the elite are yammering on about the Rights of Man and working up ridiculous justifications to excluse some people. To the Romans the world is simple: sometimes weak people get enslaved by strong people, tough poo poo, but once you have house slaves it's good form to exercise vritue in your role as a master. The mines are far away and someone else's problem, why the gently caress would you think about it?
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Aug 6, 2014 21:40
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Cyrano4747 posted:poo poo, just google around on slave revolts and peasant revolts. The results are uniformly violent and depressing with the exception of a very, VERY small handful. Off the top of my head the Haitian slave revolt is the only truly successful one I can think of, although I think there was a semi-successful one (as in not everybody died) in New Spain sometime around the early 17th century. Haitian slave revolt is the only successful one that I can think of too. If by success we mean that they got independence and changed the ruling class. Forced labour and plantations didn't go anywhere.
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Aug 6, 2014 21:49
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Think of cars. You own a car. You might hate, like or love your car. Everyone treats their car differently. If you own a really nice car, you probably keep it in a nice garage and pay lots of money to have it looked after. A truck I buy to work on a ranch isn't going to be treated as well, or have the same resale value, as a Ferrari. That truck is there to work and die doing it. But just because its chattel doesn't mean I wake up and go start beating on it with a stick just because it's mine. In fact, any unnecessary harm coming to that truck is going to piss me off, not because I care about truck civil rights but because it's mine and I want my money's worth. When it finally breaks down after a few years and 300k miles on it, I'm not going to cry about it. Welp, good working with you Truck #4, better go down to the dealership and get another one. Roman "cars" ranged from farm trucks to demolition derby throwaways to Lambos, and they usually were treated in accordance with their value to their owners because it made economic sense. It was also socially practical, because those "cars" could talk, run away and steal poo poo if they weren't treated half-decently or chained up all the time. It's not a perfect metaphor, because in the Roman system these "cars" often transform into humans, but it helps people wrap their heads around a wierd cultural system that we just don't have anymore.
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Aug 6, 2014 21:52
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Hogge Wild posted:Haitian slave revolt is the only successful one that I can think of too. If by success we mean that they got independence and changed the ruling class. Forced labour and plantations didn't go anywhere. This is very much an edge case that I'm stretching on purpose, but you could argue for Dithmarschen in the medieval period as an example of a successful peasant revolt. Although it probably doesn't really count because it wasn't the conventional example of a rebellion where the serfs overthrow and murder their established masters. Instead, it was remote marshland on the HRE-Danish border that had absentee landlords who couldn't enforce serfdom very well, so at some point the peasants just said "eh, gently caress this, we're gonna do our own thing now" and the local petty rulers couldn't do much to stop them. They managed to maintain a tiny republic and hold off a whole bunch of invasions over the next three hundred years or so, mainly by virtue of the terrain. Not exactly epic folk heroics material, but probably the most successful example of peasants breaking away from serfdom.
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Aug 6, 2014 22:15
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Guildencrantz posted:Not exactly epic folk heroics material, but probably the most successful example of peasants breaking away from serfdom. If you want to include that kind of stuff and categorize "running away" as a form of resistance and rebellion there are all sorts of Maroon settlements scattered across the more remote and inhospitable parts of the Americas basically from the onset of New World colonization to the post-ACW period. The fact that we can potentially categorize "not being brutally murdered and living out your probably short life living in a swamp" as a 'successful example' of rebellion further underscores just how rough a gamble overt resistance was and just how profound the power disparities at play in a master/slave relationship are.
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Aug 6, 2014 22:24
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physeter posted:Think of cars. You own a car. You might hate, like or love your car. Everyone treats their car differently. If you own a really nice car, you probably keep it in a nice garage and pay lots of money to have it looked after. A truck I buy to work on a ranch isn't going to be treated as well, or have the same resale value, as a Ferrari. That truck is there to work and die doing it. But just because its chattel doesn't mean I wake up and go start beating on it with a stick just because it's mine. In fact, any unnecessary harm coming to that truck is going to piss me off, not because I care about truck civil rights but because it's mine and I want my money's worth. When it finally breaks down after a few years and 300k miles on it, I'm not going to cry about it. Welp, good working with you Truck #4, better go down to the dealership and get another one. Yup, that was the idea defended by Cato the Elder in his agriculture treatise, but he was a very strict man and a bit of a douche, so the standard of treatment for the slaves was a bit more humane in practice, except for the grand latifundia, mines and other heavy duty labor, which was a meat grinder. One thing was the power the law bestowed upon the owners of the slave and other was how people dealt with slaves in their every day life. It's easy to treat them as things if you are a big owner who will never work their own field or even be there and the other is being a small land owner, with a bunch of slaves who probably work with him shoulder by shoulder and sleep with the family inside the house. Domestic slaves were a different world altogether, of course, if they worked for a rich family or were skilled/cultured, they probably lived a far better life than the free but poor plebeians. Almost nobody in the Ancient world argued against slavery as an institution, only the place they occupied in the social hierarchy. Also, do not forget the Romans, at least in the early/mid Republic were very strict/douchebags, remember that by law a father could kill their own children or sell them into slavery without having to give explanations or fear legal repercussions. It got better with time.
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Aug 6, 2014 22:32
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Cyrano4747 posted:If you want to include that kind of stuff and categorize "running away" as a form of resistance and rebellion there are all sorts of Maroon settlements scattered across the more remote and inhospitable parts of the Americas basically from the onset of New World colonization to the post-ACW period. Well, it's not exactly the same category. The Ditmarsians didn't "run away", they'd been there for generations. They just cleverly took advantage of their peripheral position and a period of strife between feudal overlords to essentially "opt out" of the feudal system, and for a good long while their potential masters were weak and splintered and had to deal with it. (Also good luck conquering marshland with armored horsemen) On the whole though you're right, it's why I called it a huge stretch, especially since this concerns a region where the system of oppression wasn't very well-rooted in the first place. The topic could use a little optimism though 
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Aug 6, 2014 22:35
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Guildencrantz posted:The topic could use a little optimism though Man, gently caress that. If there's anything that studying history makes you realize it's that the vast, vast, VAST majority of people born from the speciation of homo sapiens sapiens to the current day have lived really short, brutal lives in awful conditions that ended unpleasantly. There just isn't much optimism to be had in the average human experience. The key is to realize that the fact that you are reading this right now makes you one of the unbelievably lucky few to have been born not only in the modern era, but into one of the socio-economic categories lucky enough to have access to the internet and enough free time to waste some of it on Something Awful. This implies that you probably also have at least minimum access to some level of modern health care (even if only via emergency room visits), some level of public education (at least enough to be literate), and aren't too busy working yourself to death in a shoe factory or something to log online once in a while. In short, no matter how lovely you think you have it you're actually a member of the 1% when you dial things out to the extreme big picture. That's where I choose to find my optimism. 
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Aug 6, 2014 23:25
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Well, considering that about 6-7% of all humans ever are currently alive today, it doesn't take too much luck to be in the modern era, at least.
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Aug 6, 2014 23:43
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Tunicate posted:Well, considering that about 6-7% of all humans ever are currently alive today, it doesn't take too much luck to be in the modern era, at least. Less than 1 in 10 isn't exactly great odds. edit: well, if you consider "modern era" to be "within a average person's life span of today" and not the actual history definition of the modern era. I'd rather be born today than, say, 1830 all things considered. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 23:53 on Aug 6, 2014 |
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Aug 6, 2014 23:51
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Guildencrantz posted:It was more "they're human beings AND property". This also contributed to the fall of classical slavery - a lot of slaves were freed by Christian masters if they converted as well. There was no sense of slaves being intrinsically subhuman, and early Christianity had a serious problem with Christians owning other Christians. I will say that the godawful situation of the former slaves in the American South after the ACW was very Roman-esque though. I have never found anything on the subject, but I would be surprised if sharecropping wasn't directly inspired by the pre-serfdom debt slavery contracts I mentioned above. The only real difference is that restricting freedom of movement on paper wasn't part of the deal, and Southern elites were certainly very familiar with Roman slave history.
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Aug 7, 2014 00:30
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Cyrano4747 posted:Man, gently caress that. If there's anything that studying history makes you realize it's that the vast, vast, VAST majority of people born from the speciation of homo sapiens sapiens to the current day have lived really short, brutal lives in awful conditions that ended unpleasantly. There just isn't much optimism to be had in the average human experience. To put it another way, I read somewhere that the age we live in now is one of the (if not just straight up the) least violent periods of human history. So just keep that in mind as you browse the headlines and thank your lucky stars you weren't born 2000 years ago  .
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Aug 7, 2014 00:38
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Ainsley McTree posted:To put it another way, I read somewhere that the age we live in now is one of the (if not just straight up the) least violent periods of human history. So just keep that in mind as you browse the headlines and thank your lucky stars you weren't born 2000 years ago Yep. No contest. If there's anything you learn from studying history, it's that right now is the best time to be alive. People who want to live in past eras are people who don't actually know anything about them and need to go read a book about smallpox.
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Aug 7, 2014 02:58
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sbaldrick posted:Unless you became Emperor then no more rural yokel in you. Things you're allowed to do when you're Emperor: Almost everything you can possibly imagine. Things you're not allowed to do when you're Emperor: Let another dude rock your can.
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Aug 7, 2014 04:20
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Jerusalem posted:Things you're allowed to do when you're Emperor: That, and "take it for granted that the Praetorian Guard won't try to assassinate you".
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Aug 7, 2014 04:24
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Ainsley McTree posted:That, and "take it for granted that the Praetorian Guard won't try to assassinate you". 1. Disband the Praetorian Guard. 2. Try and take it for granted your co-emperors won't kill you. It worked well for Constantine.
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Aug 7, 2014 04:50
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Diocletian: Well I've saved the Empire and everything is stable and well, so I am retiring.... and so is my Co-Emperor Maximian! Maximian: 
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Aug 7, 2014 05:02
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Jerusalem posted:Diocletian: Well I've saved the Empire and everything is stable and well, so I am retiring.... and so is my Co-Emperor Maximian! Maximian: I can still be in charge, I know how to handle our two Caesari! Diocletian: Dude, you're punching Galerius right as we speak!
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Aug 7, 2014 05:27
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Or you can be like Aurelian and get murdered because one of your secretaries is worried about what will happen to him if Aurelian finds out he lied. I've always wondered what might have happened had Aurelian lived a bit longer. The dude was titled "The Restorer of the World" for fucks sake. How could anyone assassinate such a badass motherfucker?
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Aug 7, 2014 05:36
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Mustang posted:How could anyone assassinate such a badass motherfucker? Well first you forge documents listing a bunch of praetorian officers to be purged for bullshit reasons. . .
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Aug 7, 2014 05:51
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Hogge Wild posted:Haitian slave revolt is the only successful one that I can think of too. If by success we mean that they got independence and changed the ruling class. Forced labour and plantations didn't go anywhere. Quite a few major peasant rebellions in the 14th century, some of which at least hit the "success...then failure" bar (which is lower than the success bar, but hey!) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peasant_revolt_in_Flanders_1323%E2%80%9328 Drove out the Count of Flanders for a good five years, leaving the area in a state of "anarchy" until the King of France invaded (which turned Flanders from a semi-independent county into a French vassal). Same count was driven out again by another peasant revolt in 1339. Flanders wasn't exactly a marginal territory.
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Aug 8, 2014 21:03
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I think I'm forced by my conscience to interject that basically most of the reasons our lives are as good as they are has came from class struggle, from the peasants fighting against serfdom, through to the French against absolution, to the early workers against the horrible working conditions of the early Industrial revolution. Which is why I continue to support such actions. Rich people have almost always had it extremely good, but for the vast majority, it's been bad. But this is simple Marxist analysis I guess. Just felt like it was an appropriate time to bring it up. I just find my support of such thinking comes from my understanding of past conditions, rather than an analysis of current conditions. To bring it back on topic, the discussion of how all the grain of Egypt went to Rome brought to my mind the economic effects of colonialism, do you feel that the Romans were the forefront of such thinking or is such an arrangement merely the difference between metropolis and hinterland writ large?
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Aug 9, 2014 01:10
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Ardent Communist posted:To bring it back on topic, the discussion of how all the grain of Egypt went to Rome brought to my mind the economic effects of colonialism, do you feel that the Romans were the forefront of such thinking or is such an arrangement merely the difference between metropolis and hinterland writ large? I hardly think what they were doing was unique in anyway, it's just that the Romans were particularly good at it.
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Aug 9, 2014 01:16
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.