|
My Imaginary GF posted:Reading a couple hundred pages ago, a question came to me: Are there any accounts of migrant laborers or seasonal mass migrations in antiquity? I recall that Egyptians built public works during the off-seasons; did that happen elsewhere in the empire? Well we know transhumant pastoralism was a part of the economy of much of Greece certainly by the Hellenistic period. That is during summers shepherds would take their flocks up into the mountains and stay with them before returning to winter pastures in the lowlands. This pattern of migration remained common in much of the balkans, Italy, and Anatolia until the modern era.  Of course things would have been different from this map in antiquity. It's harder to move around when the world is divided between bickering city states and tribes. However you would have seen similar behavior in much of the region whenever practical. It does make me wonder about other kinds of labor though. I'm not sure we can count shepherds as "laborers," though some of them were probably working for a wage from wealthy persons that owned the flock. In the modern era we often see mass migration of agricultural laborers performing seasonal tasks. The Roman empire seems like it would have been an ideal environment for this kind of lifestyle, given it would have been relatively safe to travel and there were many regions that were specialized in producing wine or olive oil or w/e that would have needed lots of hands during a brief harvest season. I have never seen anything written about how such economies were handled unfortunately. There's several occupations that in many cultures are dominated by peripatetic peoples. Blacksmiths/tinkers, animal traders, fruit pickers, musicians, shepherds, and priest/wizard/fortune teller all come to mind. Unfortunately, the kinds of people who were writing 2000 years ago are not usually the sort to give a poo poo about these sorts of people, who are often marginalized and despised minorities. So I don't know what sources if any are available on these lifestyle.
|
#
?
May 5, 2018 21:54
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 10, 2024 07:27 |
|
|
My Imaginary GF posted:Also, pirate chat: Did Romans ever co-opt pirates? I read the story of Ching Shih and was wondering whether anything similar happened with Rome. If I recall correctly, wasn't Pompey's "subjugation" of the pirates him basically just paying them all off to chill out for a little while? Also Sextus Pompeius I guess would technically have been a pirate during his opposition to the second Triumvirate? And he and Octavian/Antony came to at least a temporary arrangement for a time before it became more convenient for the latter to execute him.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2018 00:33
|
|
|
Jerusalem posted:If I recall correctly, wasn't Pompey's "subjugation" of the pirates him basically just paying them all off to chill out for a little while? Pompey’s fight against the pirates combined military action against them (to destroy their fleets and pin them in their havens) with an effort to solve the problem that provoked the piracy (the devastation caused by the Mithridatic wars drove many people in Asia to desperate measures and criminality, and Mithridates encouraged this as a means to inconvenience Roman shipping) by sparing and resettling the pirates. It’s clear from the sources that the pirates were not able to offer more than a token resistance to Pompey’s armada and that once they were brought to bay, a minority fought to the death whereas most surrendered and cast themselves on his clemency. He did not directly pay them off though, which was probably for the best. Sextus was less like these sorts of pirates — essentially large numbers of impoverished coastal people resorting to crime, who were only a problem for Rome because of sheer scale. Sextus constructed a pretty strong and well-organized navy and ruled Sicily in the way that a Roman governor on a war footing would, the difference being the difficulty he had in obtaining any sense of legitimacy for his actions. His fleet was an existential threat to the population of Rome and he succeeded in holding it to ransom. He forced the triumvirs to the negotiating table with very favorable terms even though they had absolutely no wish to leave him in power/alive. If not for Agrippa kicking his rear end he could very possibly have gained prominence in Roman politics by threat alone, in the way that Caesar and Antony had. His methods seem piratical because he focused on sea power rather than land armies, but I think it makes more sense to approach him as just one of the slightly more successful warlords of the end of the republic.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2018 01:05
|
|
|
My Imaginary GF posted:Reading a couple hundred pages ago, a question came to me: Are there any accounts of migrant laborers or seasonal mass migrations in antiquity? I recall that Egyptians built public works during the off-seasons; did that happen elsewhere in the empire? Really long migrations wouldn't be practical in antiquity, since travel was so slow. Egypt and Sumer and probably the other main agricultural early civs used the corvee pretty extensively. In Egypt, the Nile floods during the off-season, fertilizing the fields, allowing the workers to build other stuff, while in Sumer the rivers flood during the growing season, destroying the crops, so they had to focus on flood control and irrigation. The Chinese civs certainly had to do flood control, if the stories of Baron Yu have any basis in reality, and certainly during the Qin period, they used forced labor pretty extensively.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2018 04:20
|
|
|
There was definitely real work done on flood control in China--one of the big flood control engineering projects is right by Chengdu, it's very cool and one of the few genuinely old things left in China.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2018 04:32
|
|
|
If you think about it, a non-corvee income tax situation is actually shittier for low earners. You work and work and work and are taxed a portion of your income for that work (and sales taxes and license renewal fees and all the other stuff). What if you just had to do forced labor for the state, 1-3 weeks a year? You wouldn't get paid, but you would make more money overall. Also you would be able to have time off from your regular job, and they couldn't penalize you for that! Of course it would never work out this wonderfully.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2018 05:48
|
|
|
I think most peasants would have disagreed. At least in China and Korea's case, it was absolutely loathed, to the point where people literally crippling themselves to get out of having to do it was a genuine problem. And then there's all the times you had to do corvee and pay tax, or sometimes even pay tax while doing corvee too. Plus it lasted a lot longer than 1-3 weeks, lol.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2018 05:58
|
|
|
I'm pretty sure they also got free food and board for the duration. Not the worst deal in the world for a farmer.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2018 05:58
|
|
|
This again is depending on the ruler forcing you to perform unpaid labor to care enough to feed you well. This was definitely not the case with China fairly frequently.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2018 06:03
|
|
|
Corvee + tax: bad Corvee + Medieval working conditions: also bad Corvee + 21st century labor protections, where I might get a break and a meal and not have to lift more than 40 pounds: I'd rather that than income and sales tax.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2018 06:04
|
|
|
Oh, I guess in a modern context that could be pretty cool. Shame most nations aren't building pyramids and poo poo anymore though.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2018 06:06
|
|
|
The modern equivalent would be building roads and other infrastructure with the taxed labor There's enough stuff a government does that couldn't be done by just throwing enough unskilled labor at it that it doesn't seem like a workable system though
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2018 06:13
|
|
|
The median American household pays about $10,000 a year in taxes. Hope you like working 333 hours a year for the government on top of your normal work schedule to make an equivalent contribution, assuming you're worth about $30 an hour. In the 1930s The US marines instituted a corvee on Haitians to construct basic road infrastructure. Unsurprisingly it contributed to a bloody uprising.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2018 06:41
|
|
|
That's what I was saying I would enjoy, working for the state instead of my regular work, as a substitute for taxes. Not in addition to it. With ample workplace protections.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2018 07:08
|
|
|
From what I've heard about the Egyptian pyramid builders there's evidence they ate a ton of meat, drank a lot of beer, and were proud of their accomplishments in building the pyramids. So I don't know, maybe they, at least, didn't consider it such a bad time?
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2018 10:19
|
|
|
cheetah7071 posted:The modern equivalent would be building roads and other infrastructure with the taxed labor I feel like a modern corvee system would be more like "OK, so we got all these disorganized records from the '30s that need to be transcribed into a modern computer system and cross-indexed with each other, have fun." Or "OK the trash situation in this city is getting out of hand and hiring proper sanitation workers is a bit much for our budget, but hey you're free labor so get to it. Bring your own nose plugs." Basically doing all the unpleasant drudge work that's kinda important but not important enough to justify the wages it'd cost to convince someone to do something so unpleasant. Dunno if that really works out better for the government than just taxing cash, though, since even if you'd get more of a focus on those kinds of tasks you're starving the budget of all the fields where you actually need trained professionals.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2018 11:19
|
|
|
Yeah, in theory you are paid for the work you do during the corvee. In pre-currency times, this means being paid in food & beer and other supplies. We know this in Sumeria because those guys loved their receipts and record-keeping. If you don't pay & feed your corvee laborers, yeah, they starve. This is probably what happened in China during the Qing years.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2018 11:56
|
|
|
Grevling posted:From what I've heard about the Egyptian pyramid builders there's evidence they ate a ton of meat, drank a lot of beer, and were proud of their accomplishments in building the pyramids. So I don't know, maybe they, at least, didn't consider it such a bad time? I recently read about them digging up a worker graveyard full of teenagers with catastrophically worn out joints so this surprises me a bit.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2018 12:45
|
|
|
Koramei posted:Oh, I guess in a modern context that could be pretty cool. Shame most nations aren't building pyramids and poo poo anymore though. The Uzbek government uses pressed labour for cotton production. Usually government employees including teachers and doctors. They stopped using schoolchildren back in 2012. It's not great. Also Uzbekistan is a major source of cotton for south east Asian yarn producers, so it ends up in clothing sold all round the world, and is very hard to trace. The system probably won't last much longer, because it is insanely inefficient to have skilled government employees leave their jobs for weeks every year to pick very low grade commodity cotton (and actually might have ended by now, the last time I was following this was a couple of years ago, and the government was ripping out hectares of cotton to make space for fruit and vegetable production) but it's the only largescale use by governments of forced labour outside the military that I know of.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2018 14:45
|
|
|
aphid_licker posted:I recently read about them digging up a worker graveyard full of teenagers with catastrophically worn out joints so this surprises me a bit. It wouldn't surprise me if it were one of those things that varied greatly across time even within a particular civilization.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2018 14:47
|
|
|
hailthefish posted:It wouldn't surprise me if it were one of those things that varied greatly across time even within a particular civilization. That's a big problem generalizing about Egypt, literally thousands of years. The pyramid building period was relatively short, but they used corvee labor for other stuff too.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2018 14:51
|
|
|
Mr Enderby posted:The Uzbek government uses pressed labour for cotton production. Usually government employees including teachers and doctors. They stopped using schoolchildren back in 2012. It's not great. Also Uzbekistan is a major source of cotton for south east Asian yarn producers, so it ends up in clothing sold all round the world, and is very hard to trace. Yes well, if they were using them to make pyramids instead then maybe it would be cool.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2018 15:18
|
|
|
Grand Fromage posted:That's a big problem generalizing about Egypt, literally thousands of years. I always thought as impressive as the pyramids were, the period before that one were the Egyptians built all those loving underground dungeons instead was a lot more interesting.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2018 15:31
|
|
|
During WWII, Gen. Tang Enbo used a corvee system to build roads in Henan but it was very unpopular. Even though it was claimed to be for the war effort, people doubted that and didn't believe it worthwhile for them to cripple themselves for a public works project.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2018 16:13
|
|
|
There was corvee service in the US. . Virginia, for instance, had a law that said that all healthy men between 16 and 60 had to either work 2 days a year on public roads or pay a fine (It was found to violate the Virginia Constitution in 1892). Kansas, Ohio, North Carolina, Florida and Nevada all had similar laws. The US Supreme Court actually ruled it constitutional in the 1916 case Butler v Perry:quote:A reasonable amount of work on public roads near his residence is a part of the duty owed by able-bodied men to the public, and a requirement by a state to that effect does not amount to imposition of involuntary servitude otherwise than as a punishment for crime within the prohibition of the Thirteenth Amendment, nor does the enforcement of such requirement deprive persons of their liberty and property without due process of law in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Here's what the Florida law actually said: quote:Every able-bodied male person over the age of twenty-one years, and under the age of forty-five years, residing in said county for thirty days or more continuously next prior to the date of making of the list by the Board of County Commissioners, or the date of the summons or notice to work, shall be subject, liable, and required to work on the roads and bridges of the several counties for six days of not less than ten hours each in each year when summoned so to do, as herein provided; that such persons so subject to road duty may perform such services by an able-bodied substitute over the age of eighteen years, or in lieu thereof may pay to the road overseer on or before the day he is called upon to render such service the sum of $3, and such overseer shall turn into the county treasury of his county any and all moneys so paid to him, the same to be placed to the credit of the road and bridge fund and subject to the order of the Board of County Commissioners for road and bridge purposes
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2018 16:21
|
|
|
The problem is that most people provide far more value to the government through taxes on what what they make in their proper career than they'd ever be worth as just raw unskilled labor, and today isn't like Diocletian's day when most people had careers producing output that the government can make use of. Imagine the government having to constantly find work for graphic designers, insurance salesmen, or network executives. Most people prefer to choose how to live their lives anyways. They may grouse about taxes, but people are way more annoyed by something as simple as jury duty pulling them away from their lives. Squalid posted:transhumant pastoralism This sounds like a really interesting subject, but also a lot to try to take in. Is there a good book on the subject or something similar?
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2018 17:51
|
|
|
Cuba had a corvee to harvest sugar, IIRC. Promoting solidarity, a work ethic, and producing a cash crop to send to the USSR. But yeah, in the modern age, it's more efficient to collect taxes and hire well-connected contractors to take a cut while overcharging the government.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2018 17:57
|
|
|
RocknRollaAyatollah posted:During WWII, Gen. Tang Enbo used a corvee system to build roads in Henan but it was very unpopular. Even though it was claimed to be for the war effort, people doubted that and didn't believe it worthwhile for them to cripple themselves for a public works project. China had the problem of being almost completely cut off from trade by that point so cash taxes wouldn't do much good, hence corvee and payment in rice. In Henan it resulted in a particularly nasty famine. Then the communists tried the same "take away your food and make you spend your time digging ditches instead of growing more food" thing. It resulted in a particularly nasty famine!
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2018 18:04
|
|
|
Mr Enderby posted:The Uzbek government uses pressed labour for cotton production. Usually government employees including teachers and doctors. They stopped using schoolchildren back in 2012. It's not great. Also Uzbekistan is a major source of cotton for south east Asian yarn producers, so it ends up in clothing sold all round the world, and is very hard to trace. Well, it's technically in the military, but that's just an excuse so I think it's worth a mention here - in practice the social model of Eritrea is based to a considerable degree on forced labor. Most young people are conscripted indefinitely into the "national service", supposedly as an army draft, but most of them spend most of their time doing hard labor on construction projects and such, and they get released on a completely arbitrary basis. Eritrea a pretty horrible country that basically forces its own people into slavery.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2018 18:22
|
|
|
I couldn't help but look a little more into seasonal labor migrants in antiquity, as it is an area of special interest to me. I was able to find a bit about the subject. Unsurprisingly we have very few primary sources on the subject because nobody writing in antiquity cares how poor workers stay alive. Therefore all theories must rely on indirect and contextual evidence, and will necessarily be ambiguous and contentious. Historian Paul Erdkamp argues that in the Roman Empire there was probably a large seasonal urban-rural migration as well as large seasonal movements of workers within rural regions. The basis for his claim is that we have good sources for a large seasonal fluctuations in the demand for labor in cities like Rome and in the big latifundium, demand that could most efficiently be filled by free labor from the class of rural smallholders. For urban Rome Erdkamp points to two sectors know to be markedly seasonal, dockworkers and construction. In the Roman era most seagoing trade was restricted to April-October, meaning most work around the ports would be similarly restricted, while construction work dropped off substantially in the winter and possibly high summer. These two sectors would require thousands of worker who would have to be able to support themselves in the off season through other means. In addition, many thousands of draft oxen would be required by Rome during the summer months which would require winter pasture somewhere nearby. LIkely both the human and ox labor was provided by the rural poor/middle class. Seasonal workers probably could not have relied on the grain dole, which wasn't available in all Roman cities and even in Rome probably never covered more than half the population. Instead many laborers and ox-drivers probably returned to family farms during off season.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2018 18:36
|
|
|
SlothfulCobra posted:This sounds like a really interesting subject, but also a lot to try to take in. Is there a good book on the subject or something similar? I've never read one but it's a super common subsistence mode, I'm sure something exists. Because it's kind of intermediate between true nomadism and more sedentary agriculture it's easy to just simplify its practitioners into one category or the other and ignore the complexity.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2018 19:04
|
|
|
There are a bunch of articles and a few films about it. Your best bet is to look up archaeology or anthropology sources since its talked about a lot.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2018 20:00
|
|
|
SlothfulCobra posted:This sounds like a really interesting subject, but also a lot to try to take in. Is there a good book on the subject or something similar? It's still really common. Fattening cattle on grain is pretty much unique to North America (they do it a bit in Brazil, but for a much shorter time before slaughter). Everywhere else, most meat is raised predominantly on pasture, and the animals are moved across pasture as the seasons change. If you live in the European Alps, that means moving herds up and down mountains. In Australia its based on moving animals into river flood planes. In a lot of eastern and southern Africa they just move the herds across the landscape, to find grazing where they can.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2018 23:15
|
|
|
P-Mack posted:China had the problem of being almost completely cut off from trade by that point so cash taxes wouldn't do much good, hence corvee and payment in rice. In Henan it resulted in a particularly nasty famine. Yeah, they actually started doing payment in kind with wheat and rice at the recommendation of the US. It helped stave off even more crushing inflation, it was already bad but nowhere near the levels of interwar Hungary or Weimar Germany, but it all came together as the perfect storm of awfulness.
|
|
#
?
May 7, 2018 13:22
|
|
|
All questions answered here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuCn8ux2gbs
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2018 05:22
|
|
|
Mr Enderby posted:If you live in the European Alps, that means moving herds up and down mountains. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DB3kaUSHTiA
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2018 18:22
|
|
|
Grevling posted:From what I've heard about the Egyptian pyramid builders there's evidence they ate a ton of meat, drank a lot of beer, and were proud of their accomplishments in building the pyramids. So I don't know, maybe they, at least, didn't consider it such a bad time? The egyptian pyramid builders had the right to free medical help, sick days and were paid in grain. The first recorded strike in history happened when a pharaoh failed to give grain to the pyramid builders (it was successful too, the pharaoh was forced to give in to the strikers demands).
|
|
#
?
May 12, 2018 09:16
|
|
|
More on Greenland Ice Cores telling us about Roman times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/14/science/ice-core-lead-roman-empire.html Though, I thought I read in this thread that there had already been analysis like this done and thats how we could tell about Roman mining in places like Spain.
|
|
#
?
May 14, 2018 21:20
|
|
|
Epicurius posted:There was corvee service in the US. . Virginia, for instance, had a law that said that all healthy men between 16 and 60 had to either work 2 days a year on public roads or pay a fine (It was found to violate the Virginia Constitution in 1892). Kansas, Ohio, North Carolina, Florida and Nevada all had similar laws. The US Supreme Court actually ruled it constitutional in the 1916 case Butler v Perry: They'd probably say it violates the interstate commerce clause now.
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2018 20:34
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 10, 2024 07:27 |
|
|
AvesPKS posted:They'd probably say it violates the interstate commerce clause now. What if they work on paving new roads but get paid for connecting the last mile to the highway
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2018 14:16
|
|
