Kyle Harper: evaluation

Transcript context

…So you're pointing towards from the supply side, all the Roman conquests lead to all this surplus labor that they can make use of, and on the demand side, these cash crops. Exactly. I'm very big proponent of the idea that you have to have both. You have to have a source of slaves. After the conquest stops, the Romans figure out other sources of slaves. If anything, the demand is equally or perhaps even more important because if there's not a mechanism, if there's not institutions that let you turn this kind of exploitation into cash flow, the institution's not gonna go very far. It really is the institutions, the presence of markets where you can take labor and turn it into profit that's the most important element. One of the things I find interesting is in the age of colonization we're used to thinking about slavery in terms of race but also religion and other things which more obviously demarcate free and slave populations. In the Roman world, it doesn't seem that that's clearly the case, yet there's no abolition movement the way that emerges out of England in the 19th century or maybe even before that. The reason that's mysterious is, if you were literally descended from slaves, if you were like, "My grandfather was a slave but then we were freed," and they're basically just like you, you would think that there would be more of a sense of... not everybody would be an abolitionist, but at least some people would be writing about abolition. With Christianity and so forth burgeoning, they didn't seem to have a problem with it. Why is there no abolition movement despite the heterogeneous nature of the slave population?…

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