Slavery Past & Present

How Slavery Destroyed the Roman Empire

Overview

This essay is part of a series comparing the twilights of (1) Rome's slave-based economic system and (2) the Middle Ages' feudal system to (3) today's capitalism. In addition to the broad life cycles of these economic systems, we’ll compare similarities in communication technology and communicable disease across all three eras. Finally, we’ll see how belief systems rise and fall in tandem with broad economic systems. When economic systems inevitably seize up and stop functioning, people begin to question and expose authority of all kinds, leading to the collapse of bedrock conceptions of reality itself.

---

Introduction

Modern, race-based slavery is different from the slavery practiced in Classical Rome. Combined with a rigid legal system that recklessly sanctified debt with no regard for social consequences, slavery became a major factor in the collapse of Roman society.

Slavery in Rome

Wealth in the form of slaves was one of the main incentives that drove Rome's rapid military expansion. Along with precious metals, the populations of captured cities were seized by the Roman army or pledged as slaves. However, the en masse introduction of slaves into the Roman economy doomed it to eventual collapse.

Once the influx of slaves from conquered territories began in earnest, the citizen farmers who worked to feed Rome's population couldn't hope to compete economically. The introduction of cheap, plentiful slaves dropped the price of grain below that at which free farmers could profit from its sale. In desperation, those small farmers bought themselves time by pledging their farms as collateral to borrow money from Rome’s wealthy oligarchy.

When those loans inevitably defaulted for non-payment, the Roman legal system rigidly enforced contract terms. It systematically delivered huge swaths of collateralized small farms into the hands of a few creditor oligarchs, who brought in even more slaves to cultivate these new holdings. These massive farming estates were called “latifundia.”

Meanwhile, displaced former farmers descended upon the urban slums of Rome, where they avoided starvation by going on the infamous grain dole that temporarily propped up Roman society.

The Roman legal system upheld the sanctity of debt and provided no mechanism for debt forgiveness, even when enforcing contracts posed an existential threat to Roman society. That’s why Jesus' ministry was focused on forgiveness and why the Lord’s prayer is given as, “And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”

As its apocalyptic prophecies played out before their eyes, Christianity became wildly popular among the population of the late Roman Empire. Even the last Emperors and the rest of the oligarchy eventually joined the new faith. But Rome’s wealthy elite refused to save their sinking ship by accepting the redistribution of their wealth. Instead, they endorsed early church fathers like Augustine of Hippo, who reinterpreted “sins” mainly as sexual misdeeds instead of falling into debt.

That reinterpretation rendered Christianity powerless to save Rome. Instead, Roman civilization gradually disappeared from the Italian peninsula. Wealth disparity reached such extreme levels that no one outside the narrow oligarchic minority had any incentive to risk their lives defending Rome. The masses of slaves who worked on the latifundia eventually became attached to that land as peasants, while the few oligarchs who owned them retreated into heavily fortified homes. That’s how the economic structure of the Middle Ages arose from the smoldering embers of Rome.

Modern Slavery

Slavery in Roman times was not like modern slavery. Slaves could be set free by their masters, and free people could become slaves if their city was captured in war or if they fell into debt. Slavery was an unfortunate economic event—like a bankruptcy—rather than a permanent state of affairs. Furthermore, slaves were sometimes fully integrated into their masters’ households. They could be lovers or tutors of children. Although the economic rules of the time compelled these slaves to labor on behalf of a master, they weren’t considered sub-human by definition. That perception would come with modern slavery.

Modern slavery began on the archipelago of Madiera, located in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Africa. Having imported sugarcane from Sicily, the Portuguese set up a sugar operation there in the 1420s. Madeira’s fertile soil and climate were well-suited to sugarcane cultivation, and the islands soon became significant sugar producers. Known as "white gold," this crop contributed greatly to the Portuguese economy.

Sugarcane cultivation is a brutally labor-intensive process. That tough and sinewy plant has to be boiled down in giant evaporators to yield molasses and sugar. All these tasks are extremely unpleasant in the hot, tropical climates where sugarcane thrives. Thus, the Portuguese began forcing Africans from the mainland to perform the labor. Slavery had returned, this time with a pernicious racial component.

To assuage a guilty national conscience, Prince Henry the Navigator commissioned a rationale from one of Portugal’s best-known writers, Gomes Eanes de Zurara. The unfortunate result was his book Crónica dos Feitos de Guiné, or “Chronicle of the Deeds of Guinea” (in those days, “Guinea” meant the West coast of Africa). It justified the use of Africans for forced labor by claiming that proximity to Christianity might lead to their salvation.

Everyone knows the horrific sequel to the story. This racial-slavery-based production model was used to establish the sugar plantations of the Caribbean islands and the cotton plantations of the Southern United States.

Conclusion

Slavery, in which people are owned and traded as commodities, was the economic system of Rome. Capitalism, in which businesses are owned and traded as commodities, often contains the practice of slavery. Particularly the modern invention of race-based slavery. Though not race-based, the Roman version of slavery—combined with the lack of a debt forgiveness mechanism—turned Roman society into a ticking time bomb.