Just discovered this Substack. This post is very interesting, subscribed.
Haven't had a chance to look at your back posts yet, but question: have you read "When Histories Collide" by Raymond Crotty? It's an interesting book that never seems to have received much notice, perhaps because Crotty died on the eve of its publication and therefore very little was done to publicize it, and I think it only had a single print run. But it sits on my bookshelf.
Crotty was a farmer-turned-economist, which naturally leads to a unique perspective. Perhaps a bit crankish, but that doesn't mean he was wrong about everything. I found the most interesting part of the book to be the early chapters, which offered a certain farmer-economist view of ancient history, especially in the West.
Regarding the productivity of agricultural slaves:
One mathematical observation I took from Crotty about slave agricultural labor is that slave-owning elites can derive gains (and the ancient Mediterranean civilizations probably did so) by burning through the slave population by refusing to support unproductive dependents.
To expand: since a free farmer and his wife and children, even at zero rate of population increase (which means something like 4 births, 2 children that survive to 18), likely consumes more than double the calories of a single prime-age man, there is a surplus to be extracted if you can get a prime-age man to work at a low enough wage that he can't support any dependents.
The trouble is that a free prime-aged man probably will not toil at agricultural labor if the wages are so low that he cannot hope to even support a wife. He'll sooner become a beggar, pirate, bandit, soldier, poacher, etc. Slaves in general might be less motivated than free men and therefore produce less, but if the system of coercion is efficient, they can be forced to accept a much lower wage that is subsistence for themselves only. Though to sustain this system, you will need to continually capture new slaves.
Crotty spends a lot of time on the notion that the stock of "arable land" is dynamic, that marginal land may be brought under cultivation by a new technological or social development. So he argues a major way this slave surplus is expressed is by bringing certain marginal lands under cultivation that are too poor to support a family under the current set of agricultural technologies, but sufficient for a single prime-age man to produce a surplus.
EDIT: I just took another look at your post and saw that you had a sentence about slaves not being allowed to reproduce. Ah well, consider my comment an expansion on that idea.
Thanks for the comment. I will check out the Crotty book.
Interesting comment on slavery and marginal land. Mediterranean biomes had a great deal of marginal land, so it may be particularly important in those regions.
"Transportation was even more primitive. The Greeks and Romans, despite all of their achievements, lacked wagons and rarely used carts. " So Egyptian chariots led to Roman chariots, but not to carts and wagons? I gather Greece was pretty rugged, and parts of Italy as well, but not all of it, so decently wide animal/cart paths might have been problematic? If they used stone blocks for their roadwork, too, then that might jostle wheeled vehicles too much, and loose gravel would not be helpful either with wheel ruts, but packed gravel would. [If the Romans used concrete for their buildings, is there any evidence they used it for their roads? Probably too expensive?]
"Lacking large food surpluses and having major transportation limitations, the Ancient Greeks and Romans were forced to disperse to be close to their land. " Thus also exposing them to danger from organized mobile herders, as discussed in another post? On the other hand, I would have thought calvary equivalent warfare would be difficult on rocky and hilly ground?
Chariots were weapons of war. They were not used for transportation, except by elites who wanted to show off their status.
As far as I know, widespread wagon and cart usage came mainly in the Medieval period. A big reason was the lack of horses.
And Roman roads were mainly for military purposes.
An interesting side note is that wheeled vehicles almost totally disappeared from the Middle East after the Roman period. They were replaced by pack animals, particularly the camel, who were not dependent upon roads. Wheeled vehicles were rare in the Middle East well into the 20th Century.
Mediterranean warfare was dominated by Heavy Infantry. Calvary was a supplement, and both the Romans and Greeks thought of them as effete elites who were not masculine enough to be in the infantry.
Real Greeks and Romans were in the Heavy Infantry.
DIdn't the Romans use nitrogen-fixing legumes as cover crops when the fields were fallow, though? Depending on how widespread this practice was, it should have a significant impact on yield per hectare (or whatever measure Romans used), and therefore on potential economic growth.
I presume it was never widespread enough to matter much?
I am far from an expert on Roman agriculture. I have not seen the technique mentioned in any of the books that I have read on the subject.
As far as I know, it was not until about the 15th Century in Northwest Europe that nitrogen-fixing legumes became widespread.
And I believe that planting legumes means that the land is not technically "fallow" as humans and animals can eat the legumes. It is more of a form of crop rotation.
Perhaps the practice was used in some places of the Roman Empire, but I doubt that it was a widespread practice. And, yes, this would have raise agricultural productivity by increasing the levels of nitrogen.
Yes, one of the problems with historical research is that there is a tendency to focus on when a technology or practice first started.
Yes, that is important, but far more important is how widespread a technology or practice is used in a specific society at a specific time.
It is not at all unusual for a society to have a technology or practice, but it was never widely used within that society. That makes it more of a historical curiosity rather than an important historical trend.
I think this phenomenon accounts for the many instances of China inventing a technology, but that same technology never being used widely until Western Europeans got a hold of it.
Just discovered this Substack. This post is very interesting, subscribed.
Haven't had a chance to look at your back posts yet, but question: have you read "When Histories Collide" by Raymond Crotty? It's an interesting book that never seems to have received much notice, perhaps because Crotty died on the eve of its publication and therefore very little was done to publicize it, and I think it only had a single print run. But it sits on my bookshelf.
Crotty was a farmer-turned-economist, which naturally leads to a unique perspective. Perhaps a bit crankish, but that doesn't mean he was wrong about everything. I found the most interesting part of the book to be the early chapters, which offered a certain farmer-economist view of ancient history, especially in the West.
Regarding the productivity of agricultural slaves:
One mathematical observation I took from Crotty about slave agricultural labor is that slave-owning elites can derive gains (and the ancient Mediterranean civilizations probably did so) by burning through the slave population by refusing to support unproductive dependents.
To expand: since a free farmer and his wife and children, even at zero rate of population increase (which means something like 4 births, 2 children that survive to 18), likely consumes more than double the calories of a single prime-age man, there is a surplus to be extracted if you can get a prime-age man to work at a low enough wage that he can't support any dependents.
The trouble is that a free prime-aged man probably will not toil at agricultural labor if the wages are so low that he cannot hope to even support a wife. He'll sooner become a beggar, pirate, bandit, soldier, poacher, etc. Slaves in general might be less motivated than free men and therefore produce less, but if the system of coercion is efficient, they can be forced to accept a much lower wage that is subsistence for themselves only. Though to sustain this system, you will need to continually capture new slaves.
Crotty spends a lot of time on the notion that the stock of "arable land" is dynamic, that marginal land may be brought under cultivation by a new technological or social development. So he argues a major way this slave surplus is expressed is by bringing certain marginal lands under cultivation that are too poor to support a family under the current set of agricultural technologies, but sufficient for a single prime-age man to produce a surplus.
EDIT: I just took another look at your post and saw that you had a sentence about slaves not being allowed to reproduce. Ah well, consider my comment an expansion on that idea.
Thanks for the comment. I will check out the Crotty book.
Interesting comment on slavery and marginal land. Mediterranean biomes had a great deal of marginal land, so it may be particularly important in those regions.
Great post!
"Transportation was even more primitive. The Greeks and Romans, despite all of their achievements, lacked wagons and rarely used carts. " So Egyptian chariots led to Roman chariots, but not to carts and wagons? I gather Greece was pretty rugged, and parts of Italy as well, but not all of it, so decently wide animal/cart paths might have been problematic? If they used stone blocks for their roadwork, too, then that might jostle wheeled vehicles too much, and loose gravel would not be helpful either with wheel ruts, but packed gravel would. [If the Romans used concrete for their buildings, is there any evidence they used it for their roads? Probably too expensive?]
"Lacking large food surpluses and having major transportation limitations, the Ancient Greeks and Romans were forced to disperse to be close to their land. " Thus also exposing them to danger from organized mobile herders, as discussed in another post? On the other hand, I would have thought calvary equivalent warfare would be difficult on rocky and hilly ground?
Chariots were weapons of war. They were not used for transportation, except by elites who wanted to show off their status.
As far as I know, widespread wagon and cart usage came mainly in the Medieval period. A big reason was the lack of horses.
And Roman roads were mainly for military purposes.
An interesting side note is that wheeled vehicles almost totally disappeared from the Middle East after the Roman period. They were replaced by pack animals, particularly the camel, who were not dependent upon roads. Wheeled vehicles were rare in the Middle East well into the 20th Century.
Mediterranean warfare was dominated by Heavy Infantry. Calvary was a supplement, and both the Romans and Greeks thought of them as effete elites who were not masculine enough to be in the infantry.
Real Greeks and Romans were in the Heavy Infantry.
DIdn't the Romans use nitrogen-fixing legumes as cover crops when the fields were fallow, though? Depending on how widespread this practice was, it should have a significant impact on yield per hectare (or whatever measure Romans used), and therefore on potential economic growth.
I presume it was never widespread enough to matter much?
Thanks for the comment.
I am far from an expert on Roman agriculture. I have not seen the technique mentioned in any of the books that I have read on the subject.
As far as I know, it was not until about the 15th Century in Northwest Europe that nitrogen-fixing legumes became widespread.
And I believe that planting legumes means that the land is not technically "fallow" as humans and animals can eat the legumes. It is more of a form of crop rotation.
Perhaps the practice was used in some places of the Roman Empire, but I doubt that it was a widespread practice. And, yes, this would have raise agricultural productivity by increasing the levels of nitrogen.
Columella talks about it in De Rustica, well before 15th cen. But I don't really have any idea how widespread it was.
Yes, one of the problems with historical research is that there is a tendency to focus on when a technology or practice first started.
Yes, that is important, but far more important is how widespread a technology or practice is used in a specific society at a specific time.
It is not at all unusual for a society to have a technology or practice, but it was never widely used within that society. That makes it more of a historical curiosity rather than an important historical trend.
I think this phenomenon accounts for the many instances of China inventing a technology, but that same technology never being used widely until Western Europeans got a hold of it.
Probably a good question for Brett Devereaux over at acoup, if anyone would know I'd expect him to:
https://acoup.blog/author/aimedtact/
Perhaps, but I am always amazed about how little period experts know about agricultural practices or subsistence patterns in general.
It is a hugely neglected field in historiography.
When I am studying a new society, the first question that I ask myself is:
"How did they acquire the food they ate?"
It is often completely missing from the literature.
The reason this matters is this:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/why-you-need-to-know-about-society