Kyle Harper: evaluation

Transcript context

…Let's turn to another one of your books, the one about slavery in the Roman world. I did not realize before I read that one how much Rome was a slave society. I guess that just isn't a salient thing in a conventional understanding of Rome. Why don't you paint us a picture of how much slavery was involved in that world? Slavery tragically is a really important institution throughout history. We sometimes tend to think of it as a distinctly modern phenomenon, but that actually misses the deeper picture. In fact, it obscures the importance of modern slavery because modern slavery is uniquely important and it's uniquely tied up with certain kinds of market exchange and certain kinds of production, certain kinds of racial ideologies. There are things about modern slavery that are really important to understand are different, but not just because slavery is there. Slavery has this longer history and slavery is more important in some societies than others, and we want to try and understand that, to ask why and then what implications does that have for understanding those societies? Rome is one of those societies. Slavery is really a prominent institution in Rome from the late republic. As the Romans conquer other parts of the Mediterranean, they start taking captives as slaves en masse, and they build an economy that really relies on slave labor in important sectors of the economy. Plantations where commodities like wine, olive oil are produced for market exchange that allow landowners to amass enormous amounts of wealth. Slavery becomes this really important institution that's entangled in the development of the Roman economy from maybe the third or second century BCE, and then with ups and downs and really important changes along the way for centuries and centuries. 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.…

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