> The Antonine plague would continue to rage in the cities and military camps of the Roman Empire for at least another decade. A second wave of an undiagnosed epidemic disease hit Rome in 190 AD; if this too was part of the Antonine plague, then the pandemic lasted at least a quarter-century.
What ended it? Decade or quarter century - how did it subside, and why?
Can't help but draw parallels with the covid-19 pandemic -- most people you'll talk to will refer to it in the past tense, even though folks continue to get sick with it. We've stopped most monitoring and data collection, and it most definitely disappeared from the media. The one remaining reliable source of information is the wastewater analysis, which tends to indicate the virus is more or less as present in the population now as it's been in the past few years.
My conclusion to all this was kind of a sad lightbulb moment -- all the past pandemics, they didn't magically end. People just got tired, it became too expensive or politically inconvenient, we collectively turned away and pretended "it went away". The quarter-century timeframe on the Antonine plague looks starkly realistic in this light.
> My conclusion to all this was kind of a sad lightbulb moments -- all the past pandemics, they didn't magically end. People just got tired, it became too expensive or politically inconvenient, we collectively turned away and pretended "it went away". The quarter-century timeframe on the Antonine plague looks starkly realistic in this light.
You make it sound like it's just a political decision, but a main reason why attention fades because the virus just becomes less deadly. E.g. the Spanish flu killed >20 M people, and yes you're correct it didn't go away, essentially every current flu virus can be traced back to the Spanish flu. People are just not dying from it to the same degree, so naturally we pay less attention.
Even that really is impossible to say. Our methods and frequency of testing for CoV-2 infections, both before and after death, have changed dramatically. Previously we were telling everyone to get tested when they feel sick at all, and considering anyone who dies after testing positive to be a Covid death. Now we rarely test and only considering it a Covid death when its as obvious a death from any other cold. We simply can't compare the numbers at all, at best we could say we have drastically reduced how often we mark Covid as the cause of a death.
Noe the excess deaths data has absolutely reverted to pre-pandemic levels, but again we were horrible about collecting unbiased data. Excess deaths actually seem to line up better with the vaccine rollout than with the initial viral outbreak. That could be completely coincidental and a sign that the virus was more deadly in its second year, but again we didn't collect the right data and don't know because during the rollout no one was willing to (or allowed to) consider that the vaccines could be killing people, leaving us with a gap in data that would have been really handy to now be able to definitively show that it was a more deadly virus killing people rather than the vaccine itself.
In 2020 those in power in the media and government told us that left unchecked, the virus would overwhelm hospitals and cause even more people to die, and to some extent that did happen.
The pandemic is over because if you go to the hospital now, on a random day, there are empty beds, and there isn't a COVID ward. There doesn't have to be careful testing and whatnot to know that the pandemic is over. You can just look around. It's either over or so minor that calling it a pandemic seems to be a misuse of the word.
> Excess deaths actually seem to line up better with the vaccine rollout than with the initial viral outbreak.
This seems to be a bizarre statement. I can't speak to other countries, but at least in England the widespread rollout of vaccines (just beginning in January 2021) only started at the end of the final major spike in excess deaths.
It's simply not possible for excess deaths to line up better with vaccine rollout than with the initial outbreak, because both major spikes in excess deaths were before mass vaccination rollout.
Except in the case of Covid the host is contagious before symptoms develop, so there is no evolutionary pressure on it to be less deadly (i.e. give itself more time to spread by not killing the host).
It is common for people to become contagious before symptoms. But contagiousness is not a binary on/off switch. As your virus load increases, you get others sick more easily. And the result is that most people continue to become more contagious as they develop symptoms.
But there is also a second factor. We have multiple layers of immune defenses. COVID is very good at getting past our initial defenses and getting us sick. Over and over again. But if you've had it once, you have the ability to ramp up against it quickly in a way that limits how sick you can get from it. So if you've ever had it, it is now much less deadly for you. (Unless you become immunocompromised.)
Evolutionary pressure doesn't factor into this. Imagine the virus doing a random walk over a bell curve of virulence. On average an outlier is going to mutate into a not outlier.
SARS-1 was an outlier, very deadly. SARS-2 s probably not an outlier.
That said I think a virus can evolve to the point where it's arguably a different virus in which case the median virulence can change.
Fun fact: while the IFR of the seasonal flu is around 0.1%, there's around a 2.5% chance you will die from it.
The thing about endemic diseases is that we get them over and over and over. Eventually it gets you.
I was really hopeful at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic that we would start taking the flu more seriously. There was essentially no flu season that year because of the precautions taken for COVID; we are actually removing one of the strains from flu vaccines next year because it went extinct.
Things have changed since 2019. In 2023, only around 1.5% of deaths were from the flu; of course, another 1.5% of deaths were from COVID. So as things stand now, instead of a 2.5% chance that we will eventually be killed by our major endemic respiratory disease, there's a 3% chance we will eventually be killed by one of our two major endemic respiratory diseases.
The flu death rate in the 0-4 age bracket for the 2022-2023 was 1.2 per 100k, compared to 26.6 per 100k for the 65+ age bracket. Meanwhile, the death rate of the 1-4 age bracket [different sources; different buckets] was only 28 per 100k, compared to 2000 per 100k for ages 65-74 or 15,000 per 100k for ages 85+.
So, flu deaths are a larger percentage of child deaths than than elder deaths, even though most people who die of the flu are old. The answer to "How can we most readily lower child mortality?" is always going to be "Keep infectious diseases under control."
>Fun fact: while the IFR of the seasonal flu is around 0.1%, there's around a 2.5% chance you will die from it.
That's an incorrect statement unless the age distribution of people on this forum exactly matches the age distribution of the US population, which it doesn't. The overwhelming majority of flu deaths are concentrated in the elderly; someone under sixty is orders of magnitude less likely to die than someone older than eighty.
I don't think this has to be incorrect. Or that your "unless the age distribution...." needs to be true either.
Everyone eventually dies. When that happens, as things currently stand, it will be a 2.5% chance the cause will be the flu.
You might die young or old. Across those possibilities, it is 2.5%
That can be consistent with the idea that if you were to die next year, it probably (i.e., much less than 2.5%) won't be the flu because you are a young person.
There is no way the fatality rate of someone with my health profile or the health profile of the average HN user has a 2.5% chance to die from the flu this year. That must be including sick and/or elderly.
Unless you do something unusual, that's almost exactly what it means. (Almost exactly because new causes appear, and those chances won't stay constant during your life.)
It makes no difference at all. But whatever set of statistics you use has to represent the same period. We could use daily deaths from flu, or decadal deaths from flu, or forthnightly deaths from flu .. as long as the total deaths we're comparing with cover the same period.
We're all going to die some day. Based on current causes of death, there's a 20% chance, give or take, that it will be heart disease. A 20% chance it will be cancer. A 2% chance one of us will die from kidney failure. And around a 1.5% chance it will be from the seasonal flu, which has an IFR of 0.1% or less.
Anyway, bringing this back around to the Spanish flu, it's fascinating, to me, that if you were alive in 1918, there was around a 1% chance you would die, that year, of the Spanish flu, and around a 2% chance you would die, years or decades later, of a seasonal flu. Pandemics get you upfront, all at once, epidemics get us eventually, over time.
TBH I'm not sure where I'm getting the 2.5% number from; it's the one that stuck in my memory from the last time I dug into this data. It's entirely possible that my memory is wrong or the data I was looking at represented an outlier in flu deaths.
Looking at past years (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db355_tables-508.pd...), I get more like 2%, even for bad flu years like 2018. So that 2.5% number is probably either completely misremembered or based on provisional data that has since been revised downward.
Yeah, 1 - 1.5% seems inline with most data. That is: about 1.5% of all deaths are deaths from flu.
However, deaths among those infected by flu are much, much smaller than this (because the number infected is much, much bigger than the total number of deaths)
Except that current strains can't be traced back to the 1918 strain - they are separate strains, not descendants. We don't really know why the 1918 strain disappeared.
> You make it sound like it's just a political decision, but a main reason why attention fades because the virus just becomes less deadly
That's an interesting point, right? I don't know that we have so much control over our attention, living in the age we do. Mass media and advertising, the two pillars of a massive propaganda machine (in a sense of building consensus) continue to pump out opinions, which shape our perception of reality.
In that sense, our attention to the pandemic did not have a chance to develop organically, but it was rather guided and instrumented by the mechanisms in place. The relatively smaller subset of society that controls them (not in a conspiratorial way, but in a practical "business pays for minutes of airtime / ad impressions" way) gets to decide how we perceive world events.
I'd posit (given historical datasets and what we see in wastewater) that the level of infection across communities is roughly comparable to the past few years (why wouldn't it be? nothing's changed after all in our behaviour). It's only in public perception that the pandemic has diminished.
> we collectively turned away and pretended "it went away".
The most vulnerable population succumbed to it and died. Everyone who could be infected was infected. This pandemic became endemic, like some but not all other pandemics. Once it's endemic, the policy interventions that were apparently controversial are less effective. Survivors become more immune than they were before.
"By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain."
Looking at it in terms of "died"/"didn't die" is such a convenient oversimplification. Lots and lots of people didn't die, but suffered greatly; many of them developed long-term consequences like organ damage (and all the chronic illness that comes with that) or disability.
The claim that "survivors become more immune than they were before" is an outright lie, contradicted by an ever-growing body of research. Covid-19 does not grant you lasting immunity - it weakens the immune system, it causes neurological damage, and affects the cardiovascular system in a dramatic way.
The initial policy interventions were heavy-handed in a time of chaos and relative ignorance -- and there's no place for them now. There's opportunity now to go after the method of transmission in a more systemic way, legislating "clean air" efforts to make indoor spaces less of a breeding/spreading grounds for airborne pathogens.
> The initial policy interventions were heavy-handed in a time of chaos and relative ignorance
While I don't think we should go back to 2020 practices, I do think that what happened was less heavy-handed than we all remember. The US at least never had a real lockdown. You were always allowed to leave your house. The only places that got shut down by the government were bars, restaurants and schools. All other closures and people stopping to go out and socialize was pro-active behavior by citizens. Sure, some places required you to wear a mask, but IMO this was much less inconvenient for most people than the politically motivated outcry would make you think.
I am 100% with you that we should invest in ventilation and IMO far-range UV-C light in public spaces. COVID or not, respiratory diseases suck and cost massive amounts of money each year. If we can reduce them and improve air indoors it's a huge win that we should take.
Do we actually want this, truely? If the species goes long enough in such sterile environs, free from voracious infection and without the constant assault upon the immune system, wouldn't the ultimate end result be far more disastrous? If removed from our protective civilization bubble or should a disease come along that can penetrate it, couldn't this be far more devastating to a population? Isn't a constant assault from the maximum amount of weakened and lesser disease of paramount importance to a robust and healthy immune response?
I don't think we'd accomplish a truly sterile environment. Even the places with good ventilation and far-UVC light won't be truly sterile. If someone coughs right at you, you are sor gonna get exposed. There will also still be plenty of places where we won't do these things. Most people won't have this in private homes for example. I think it would bring urban areas maybe somewhat closer in exposure levels to what you have in more rural areas.
> The only places that got shut down by the government were bars, restaurants and schools.
At least one SoCal city filled a skate park with sand.
There's a video of harbor cops going after a guy paddle-boarding in the ocean. (There was no one within 50 yards until the water cop on the jet-ski showed up.)
There were also churches where arrests happened.
California closed hair salons/barbers, but personal stylists were okay if you were connected. Then again, neither did the restaurant closing. (See Newsom, French Laundry.)
> "By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain."
For anyone wonder, H. G. Wells in The War of the Worlds
This applies to diseases which are importantly but not always mortal. And very contagious. Like coronavirus
Very contagious diseases which are rarely mortal never go away. Like chicken pox
Not very contagious diseases which are always mortal don't spread far away. Like ebola and maybe the original pest. They require a reservoir lest they vanish forever.
Very contagious and always mortal diseases are self limited, they kill whole populations. One of the downsides of a global community is that almost the whole humanity is one population.
Self sufficient populations are found in the north pole. And in some island east of India called "Sentry island". I hope there are more
> The most vulnerable population succumbed to it and died. Everyone who could be infected was infected.
This explanation has some extremely obvious flaws. The world is still full of people who meet all the criteria of being particularly vulnerable to coronavirus. I doubt I’d be able to leave my house without seeing somebody who’s extremely obese or old.
"vulnerable" is the combination of medical characteristics and probability. "Everyone who could be infected was infected." is not accurate, but the r value is significantly lower, despite not every at-risk person being dead.
> What ended it? Decade or quarter century - how did it subside, and why?
It probably killed everyone who wasn’t sufficiently resistant to it, leaving a population who were. Natural selection. The disease probably didn’t go away - it just stopped killing people. This is probably just one of many such events throughout European history that led to a population with various resistances - and when that population arrived on the shores of the Americas, it brought those diseases into contact with a population that enjoyed no such resistances.
Also, evolutionary pressure tends to make viruses less deadly. Variants that don't kill or incapacitate the host can spread faster, since the carriers are up and moving around. They'll inoculate the population against more deadly variants in the process. The longer a virus hangs around, the more variants there will be--with the more lethal ones tending to fade away, and the less lethal ones spreading far and wide.
The "Genomic Lineages" graph of Covid variants from the UKHSA gives a good view of how variants follow on from one another, at least with Covid. Flu certainly had three (?) popular variants doing the rounds (one of which was thought to have been eliminated by lockdown) but at the moment, it seems like there's usually one Covid to rule them all at any one time:
This is true for flu viruses, not covid, as it spreads before symptoms show, so there is no pressure on it to become less deadly, as the fate of the host is immaterial.
Of course there is still pressure on it to become less deadly. If deadly virus starts spreading, no matter when the symptoms show, people will start washing hands, wearing masks and socialize less. All those acts put pressure on virus to become less deadly.
Previous poster was implying that such measures will spread with any "sufficiently deadly" virus, and that presumably COVID19 is not perceived as such at this time (rightly or wrongly).
Pandemics burn out eventually. The weak are killed off, those who survive either have natural immunity or are strong enough to recover. The pathogen itself also evolves; it's not really good for a virus to kill its host, as that limits its ability to spread.
I strongly encourage you to use a word other than "weak" in this sort of context. "Susceptible" will do. Ditto for "strong". "Resistant" might suffice.
Plenty of people died of COVID19 who were by no measure "weak" (other than susceptibility to COVID19) and your language suggests that viruses act upon some sort of generically less well-adapted genotype. Viruses kill people who are more susceptible to the effects of the virus (which may also differ from person to person). Those people may have previously been judged "strong".
"Weak" and "strong" are incredibly poorly chosen words to use in discussing susceptibility to disease.
This is often mentioned but its true only from statistical or 'strategy' point of view, something viruses on their own simply don't possess. They just multiply via various mechanisms, what happens with their environment is well beyong their capability to care or plan around.
Their mutations are random, but its proverbial throwing gazillion bunch of stuff on the wall and seeing what sticks. Their numbers and short life span give them maybe 100 million? evolution speed advantage compared to humans. Maybe much more. Think how humans would change in say 100,000 generations.
The virus of course does not do this consciously, but simple darwinian logic dictates that the strains that are too deadly will kill its pool of hosts too quickly, and die off together with them.
There were 141 deaths attributed to COVID last week. It was 838 in 2023, 1,678 in 2022, 3,694 in 2021, and 11,243 in 2020. This is practically gone away.
> CDC COVID-19 data surveillance has been a cornerstone of our response, and during the PHE, HHS had the authority to require lab test reporting for COVID-19. At the end of the COVID-19 PHE, HHS will no longer have this express authority to require this data from labs, which will affect the reporting of negative test results and impact the ability to calculate percent positivity for COVID-19 tests in some jurisdictions. Hospital data reporting will continue as required by the CMS conditions of participation through April 30, 2024, but reporting will be reduced from the current daily reporting to weekly.
I think we as a mankind went through some collective mental trauma re dealing with covid pandemics, and our subconsiousness ain't best equipped to deal with it. Just like with other trauma it blurred it into into some hazy dreamy distant maybe-land.
Fascinating to see it happening in real time and be part of it.
Amen. All the economic and cultural and political upheaval, not to mention war that’s happened since, we seem to assume that the pandemic stressed a bunch of systems and that’s the causality.
I feel like we don’t sufficiently acknowledge that a mass-trauma event also made the entire damn species more irrational and reactive, and that’s going to be our reality for a generation.
Yeah it has jumped to too many other species to ever have a chance in hell of eradication. Literal fantasyland to think that it going away is a viable option at our technological level.
Immunity builds up over time, and diseases etiolate (become less virulent) because in the end, Ebola isn't a winning strategy for the DNA inside the virus.
We don't die of the English Sweating disease, which killed people inside 24h (notably Thomas Cromwell's family, in Hilary Mantel's telling of his life)
> they didn't magically end. People just got tired, it became too expensive or politically inconvenient, we collectively turned away and pretended "it went away"
Look, I get why it feels like this, but there is another take on this. The mass immunisation did what it needed to do for us: removed the high risk of mortality and replaced it by background levels of a mostly serious but not fatal disease.
The risk is of a new disease, or a new strain. It can be just as bad. If the peridicity of that happening was 10-20 years, you'd have the long tail of the antonine plague, modulated through RNA vaccine development timeframes and the rise and fall of mass public travel.
If we just become homebodies and stop flying, Plagues will become local again.
Given that we're talking about a plague from over a thousand years ago, once it spread to the populations that people were in frequent contact with it basically halts at that point. Everyone has gotten sick and either died or acquired limited immunity. If there is no trade route to spread it, it can't go anywhere on its own. Also I think we can be reasonably sure that if far away merchant arrives at an area where the bodies are literally piling up out side the gates, they won't enter.
It is a 19th and 20th century innovation that viruses can spread so easily.
However, I'm under the impression that the Roman Empire was a lot more linked than we think when we say "they didn't have cars or airplanes".
Sea/river transport has been available since the first monkey climbed on a floating log and it was already widespread, cheap and convenient even 2k years ago.
Human population was only a tiny fraction of 20th century numbers back then. There were no casual travelers from Constantinpole to Buenos Aires at all.
Can't help but draw parallels with the covid-19 pandemic . . .
I debated responding as there are other responses that get it mostly right . . .
You are correct that the virus is still around and will probably be forever more. But, it ceased being a public health issue 2-2.5 years ago. What happened? Everybody has either been vaccinated or had the virus or most likely, both. So the virus continues to exist and continues to evolve and people continue to get sick, but everyone's immune system has now seen something closely related and is much more able to fight the disease off. It has endemised and become basically like any other cold or flu that exists. There were already 3(?) coronavirus strains widely circulating in the human population before Covid-19 became a thing. Covid-19 has simply become one of ~200 different viruses that cause the common cold.
Covid-19 hasn't become - it is still much the same and not the same as the common cold. But as you point out we have become more tolerant of it (or at least are now able to convince ourselves that we are more tolerant to it).
There's a really interesting questionvof whether people get tired of past pandemics or over react to new pandemics. Did we get tired of masks and news of how many die from Covid, or did we exaggerate CoV-2 and expect a pandemic with high mortality rate when the data didn't support it?
The thing is, we DID see a high mortality rate. We DID have incinerators running up queues in Italy and mass graves being dug in New York. Those things happened. Millions of people died from COVID, either directly or (more likely) from opportunistic infections enabled by COVID.
However the mortality rate normalized as the total number of infections rose. It mostly killed off people in groups that were high risk. That's almost tautological - the people in those groups may not even have known they were high risk prior to COVID though.
In other words: if the purpose of the response to COVID was to prevent deaths, we largely failed. If the purpose of the response was to contain CoV-2, we definitely failed. In retrospect, the function if not the purpose of the response was to delay the spread and enable immunization from vaccines. I wouldn't call it a success, especially not globally due to the hesitance to waive patent restrictions for poorer countries, but it was less of a failure than the other two possible purposes of the response.
Of course the problem is that while the rightwing meme of "is it FROM COVID or WITH COVID" is already difficult enough to deal with, measuring the impact of COVID on patients who did not die is even more difficult because we not only can't fully know what variables we're looking for but those variables are also likely to be extremely difficult to isolate, especially given the stress of being in a pandemic, news coverage about the pandemic and the measures enacted as a response to the pandemic.
It is possible for both dying "from" and dying "with" to be true.
(although the medical meaning of each is imprecise IHMO)
I have read that many (most?) of the victims of the 1918 flu pandemic did not die from the virus, rather the virus weakened them to the point where pneumonia bacteria took hold in their lungs. With no recourse to antibiotics many did not survive the bacterial infection.
This sounds like how my great-grandfather died. It was reported that he contracted the flu and was sick for two weeks but began to recover, then relapsed and died. Sounds like a bacterial secondary infection after a viral infection.
> Of course the problem is that while the rightwing meme of "is it FROM COVID or WITH COVID" is already difficult enough to deal with
I don't actually understand why this is considered a meme or rightwing, its always seemed like a reasonable question to me.
As you pointed out, a large majority of those who died were already at high risk, meaning they already had underlying health conditions. If someone with high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, etc contracts a novel virus and dies is it really as simple as saying the virus is what killed them?
I don't think people often articulate the question well, that's for sure. Its usually used as a talking point, but it is a reasonable question in my opinion. Saying that Covid killed someone that has been dealing with health issues for years or decades, and likely is on multiple prescription medications, writes off all of their underlying conditions and boils it down to a statistic that reads as though the person was totally fine until they contracted CoV-2.
I think this is unintuitive to me, because “dying with Covid” makes the assumption that the person was actively dying from a completely separate cause and got Covid before they died… which isn’t necessarily true for folks with underlying health conditions. Like if I had uncontrolled diabetes which made me move slowly due to foot rot, and someone struck and killed me with their car, do they get to argue I actually “died with car accident”?
> I don't actually understand why this is considered a meme or rightwing, its always seemed like a reasonable question to me.
I mean, yeah, that's the school of Just Asking Questions. It's standard bad faith participation strategy in discussions, you play the role of an unconvinced fence sitter while actually pushing a narrative. In this case, it was that COVID was killing fewer people than it actually was.
While for a statistician or a medical practitioner looking to better understand the pandemic will find value in the answer to the question, your average laymen doesn't understand how to apply the difference to arrive at an informed opinion. People parroting this weren't concerned how many people were actually dying of COVID; they wanted to go get their hair cuts and eat out again.
A desire for a return to normal is a very... well, normal and human impulse but if it's not time yet, it's not time yet.
> Can't help but draw parallels with the covid-19 pandemic -- most people you'll talk to will refer to it in the past tense, even though folks continue to get sick with it. We've stopped most monitoring and data collection, and it most definitely disappeared from the media. The one remaining reliable source of information is the wastewater analysis, which tends to indicate the virus is more or less as present in the population now as it's been in the past few years.
> My conclusion to all this was kind of a sad lightbulb moment -- all the past pandemics, they didn't magically end. People just got tired, it became too expensive or politically inconvenient, we collectively turned away and pretended "it went away". The quarter-century timeframe on the Antonine plague looks starkly realistic in this light.
What exactly did you expect though? The pandemic stage has ended, it's now a novel virus that will continue to circulate among us for many, many years until we find a way to eradicate it. Eradicating requires broad vaccination of the population against it over generations, like smallpox, or the way polio is going (many societies have eradicated it).
There's not much more to talk about on COVID, for now the strains are not the same killing machines from the beginning of the pandemic, a lot of people have been vaccinated while many others refuse to vaccinate themselves. Just like influenza continues to kill (or maim) people year-over-year, COVID will keep killing and maiming people but it's not creating a huge strain in the healthcare system globally.
Also, there's not much more to do, the disease exists and will continue existing, we might get new vaccination schemes (like for influenza) to protect the most vulnerable people, we will continue to catch it and probably suffer side-effects but the emergency part of it is mostly over...
I'd expected something similar to the John Snow pump handle story -- that once we learned that the virus spreads via air, we would invest in clean indoor air, and innovate ways to make it safer to share spaces with large numbers of people over extended time.
The acute phase death rate may have dropped off (and the data collection has most definitely dropped off, stopped entirely, or became obfuscated, so it's hard to know for sure), but we know for a fact that about 15% of those who get sick, get a long-term sickness that ranges from seriously inconvenient to severely debilitating. We know this from collected data [1], not some statistical models.
My inner cynic concludes that in for-profit healthcare systems, having a growing proportion of the population be chronically ill is actually the optimal scenario: you can dole out treatments and medicines at high prices, and as long as your patients don't die or get better, it's a very profitable proposition. I'm not saying we're doing this consciously like some comic-book villain, but the incentives are aligned exactly so.
I can only speak for myself and I'm not in the US but having been raised on a diet of "end of history" era Hollywood stories about the world coming together to defeat a common threat, I expected something closer to a war economy than just a bunch of temporary subsidies, conflicting mandates and half-assed lockdowns that ultimatel fizzled out before even the lower bound of vaccination for what the scientists said would be required for herd immunity was met.
Instead we saw countries stepping over each other to buy last minute supplies from China because they had eliminated their stockpiles for "efficiency", politicians opportunistically demonstrating defiance in order to make a name for themselves and subsidies being tailored to the specific niche interests of major industries while public services were told to exercise "individual responsibility" instead of receiving additional funds. We clapped for the nurses and then went back to cutting the public health budget because the economy was tanking while a few lucky businesses redistributed societal wealth into their pockets.
Nobody demonstrated leadership. Anyone who did was kneecapped by opportunists. Even the EU couldn't commit to a joint plan without having individual member states decide they're special and allowed to do backroom deals to break the same rules they just agreed to. The only thing any politician could agree on was that the economy had to "keep running" at any cost.
What did I expect? I don't know, to be honest. But I expected something more coherent and closer to the lies we were told about the state and what it is good for. But what shocked me more is how after the mask came off and revealed that it's all always been false advertising, we simply went back to normal. But this already happened before, e.g. after the Wikileaks and Snowden revelations. I shouldn't be surprised that people prefer to forget.
I think when people talk about COVID-19 in the past tense they're referring to the period of national lockdowns, which are no longer necessary since the health services are not being overwhelmed in the way before anyone had immunity/vaccinations. I don't think anyone believes the virus was eradicated.
That's because the current variants are fairly mild. The original variant was brutal for the population at risk and we saw a jump in excess mortality. I believe mortality has since come back down. The anomaly was that the media were still making a big deal out of covid when vaccines were available and the variants were mild. Of course until the Ukrainian war started which magically "stopped covid".
It will take time before passion and fear cool down and people look objectively at our reaction to covid. I think it will appear as a gigantic overreaction compared to similar outbreaks like the 1958 flu.
What exactly do you propose we do about covid anyway? None of the mitigations that were forced upon us did anything beyond make things much worse.
Seriously. Covid wasn’t even that bad relative to other pandemics in the past.
Besides I think the real reason nobody really talks about it anymore is because a lot of people woke up to how badly they got scammed and are pretty embarrassed with their reaction. No to mention flushing several years of their life and their children’s life down the toilet for nothing. Not to mention the disastrous economic fallout we will be suffering through for quite some time.
For covid in particular (and also the Spanish Flu, to a large extent), number of deaths is the big factor; deaths are _dramatically_ down in most countries. Barring a perfect vaccine, it's likely never going away entirely, but it's also generally not threatening to collapse healthcare systems anymore.
That is, the Antonine, and other plauges of Rome relied on the dense urbanisation, highly-developed transportation, and long-range trading patterns, all of which served to provide the conditions in which pathogens which were either benign or simply too virulent to establish themselves in smaller, less-interconnected communities --- in such cases the epidemics would simply burn themselves out, perhaps decimating a village or small trading group of same, but not spreading further.
The fact that Yersinia pestis seems to have evolved first in rodent populations (themselves often microcosms of human civilisations with large and interconnected population clusters) seems relevant. IIRC Harper cites hamsters or gerbils as the prior host species to humans.
James Burke, of Connections fame, stated in a later interview "ReConnections* of how he'd extend the episodes of the original series that a key consequence of jet air travel would be an increased spread of global pandemics. This occurs toward the end of this video:
More broadly, it seems to me that any network will co-evolve parasite or pathogenic entities, whether we're talking human cities (look at the long list of urban vices, online abuse, network issues, and the like). One factor contributing to the "golden age" effect is that such ages exist before the parasites / pathogens evolve. As such, the sense that "something went wrong" seems to me misled, and a better formulation would be that such golden ages were living on borrowed time in the first place.
Yes, and rely highly on anonymity whether through large populations (cities) or distance (telecommunications and/or transportation).
The term "confidence man" came into general usage following publication of a novel by that title by Herman Melville (of Moby Dick fame). It is set on the first great interstate highway of the United States: the steamboat-plied Mississippi River. Harking back to Roman (and Greek) times, I find it quite telling that Mercury (or Hermes) is the god of messages, travel, roads, merchants, thieves, and cunning, amongst others. There's something inherent in travel that gives rise to trickery.
(It's difficult to be fooled by those one lives closely with in small communities for long periods of time. Those may be scoundrels or be known to be untrustworthy but rarely gain confidence in Melville's sense.)
Another curious relationship I suspect about telecommunications is that they effectively reduce reliance on social factors of trust. Mind that this may increase overall societal trustworthiness in many cases, but it's through the replacement of, well, just plain raw trust (unevidenced belief) through monitoring, assessments, and independent validation. In an age before telegraph and jet airlines (or even steamships and railroads), once someone was out of eyesight and earshot, they were lost to direct control or monitoring until either they returned or an emissary could reach them, whether for hours, days, weeks, months, or years. Merchants, diplomats, ships' captains, colonial governors, and the like all operated autonomously for periods of time which would strike us as utterly alien today. Many of the practices, and much of the language used in communications, seems to me to have arisen to express, reinforce, or establish trust in such circumstances. Post-telegraphic language became, well, telegraphic (short, abbreviated, costing or paid by the word) not only due to the expense of the medium, but, carrying over to even non-telegraphic correspondence, because long sustained absences or periods of incommunicado no longer occurred.
(This is one topic touched on in The Control Revolution by James Beniger (1986): <https://openlibrary.org/books/OL2549490M/The_control_revolut...> Not to be confused with another excellent book of the same title by Andrew Shapiro, addressing the nascent Internet and World Wide Web. Which, come to think of it, also addresses the themes of trust and communications.)
> There's something inherent in travel that gives rise to trickery.
On the road a person has a heavy dose of anonymity (especially in past times), a steady supply of new potential targets without the usual societal protection mechanisms around them, all likely carrying things someone else is very interested in.
For a long time being on the road was like operating outside of society so it was attractive to people who didn't fit in society and had to gain from staying outside, like tricksters.
The marks are also removed from their own support and defence networks, and have to rely on strangers.
There are any number of interesting consequences and manifestations of this. One that comes to mind is the development and prevalence of fast-food franchise networks (McDonalds, KFC, Jack in the Box, etc.) which largely co-evolved with the US Interstate Highway system. For the first time people were traveling long distances by automobile and needed identifiable foodservice options they could trust to at least offer consistent service. Similar effects in the hospitality sector with branded hotels and motels. Previously such services had almost entirely been local institutions, known to locals or the occasional transport workers (truckers, sailors) they served.
An interesting foreshadowing of the Interstate food/gas/lodging phenomenon developed on the passenger rail service of the Santa Fe, most especially that of the Harvey House chain of restaurants located at station stops and catering specifically to the rail passenger clientelle: a large passenger influx arriving on a (nominally) fixed schedule and requiring a full meal service within a specific interval during the train's station stop. The chain was launched in 1876 and grew to 45 restaurants (and 20 dining cars) in 12 states. I believe this was the first chain restaurant, literally strung along the rail lines:
This neatly fits into the history of economies as described by Graeber in Debt: in a close knit society gift economies are a logical extension of how families share resources so barter or trade only really arose when different societies had to interact with each other (with the alternative being war) because those societies did not have the same level of shared mutual trust as each group had within itself.
Under late stage[0] capitalism we're incentivized to think of all relationships as transactional. All interactions between friends are or should be transactions. We spend time, pay attention, give and expect a return. If you're wasting time just having fun instead of working on your side hustle, you're falling behind. Your girlfriend breaking up with you is a learning opportunity you should turn into a blogpost about leadership skills and human resources. If you trust a stranger enough to fall for a scam, that's your fault for being naive. This even manifests in fintech: the entire selling point of blockchain technologies and cryptocurrencies is "zero trust". But of course the hyperindividualized individual is also the perfect consumer: alone you lack communal spaces so you go somewhere you pay to be in order to talk to other people who paid to be there or have interactions with people you pay to talk to.
I guess I'm not surprised why religion is still so widespread in the US. Tithes and charity aside, churches and their communal spaces are rare opportunities to spend time with people without spending money or expecting anything in return.
[0]: There must be some unwritten law that anyone talking about present day capitalism will always think it's "late stage" with the expectation that it has developed to a point where it is so clearly self-destructive it must change into something else soon. Even the early 20th century communists were convinced capitalism would collapse under its social stresses any moment now and allow them to have communism rise out of its ashes.
Harper's analysis includes such factors (he pays a great deal of attention to global climate, particularly the characteristics of the Roman Climate Optimum, which spanned from 200 BCE to 150 CE, and other ecological, political, cultural, and technical factors.
It's also true that disease, as with many other pathologies, tends to observe Murphy's Law of Thermodynamics: things get worse under pressure.
Overexploitation of natural resources (soil depletion, deforestation, elimination of megafauna, depletion of watersheds and aquifers, exhaustion of mineral resources) all contribute to a general weakening of the civilisation which invokes these circumstances. It's worth noting that the Western Roman Empire at the time of its collapse was not generally in a state of pervasive famine.
And Harper isn't giving a One True Way response, he is carefully, with a great deal of historigraphic and scientific evidence building the case that, as I noted above, civilisations and pathogens co-evolve. (My expansion of that to networks or systems and pathologies generally is my own armchair contribution, though based on my own observations of numerous examples at first hand myself.)
As much as I appreciate and respect Socrates, he (as with virtually all pre-Baconian philosophers) relied strongly on reason and extremely unsystematic chosen exemplars to posit hypotheses, many of which have since proven greatly mistaken. (His student's student Aristotle polished this to a fine art.) Baconian science is empirical, Socrates is best known for an interrogative technique.
This isn't to say that some of the suggestions made by Socrates and other philosophers are necessarily wrong. But it is quite rare for same to have been grounded in anything remotely resembling what we'd now call scientific knowledge, a phrase whose apparent redundancy is best resolved by noting that "science" now means not merely knowledge but the systematic approach of observing, deducing, testing, and validating hypotheses, something Socrates did not practice, and Harper has.
Which isn't to say that the shallow interpretation of Harper's narrative might not also be false. But for a third time, that's not my point, the co-evolution of systems and pathologies is, and I'd hope that at least some of my readers here have managed to grasp that concept despite my own bungled attempts to express it.
I find it fascinating that most plague outbreaks seem to have taken down double digit percents of the populations. That's just wild. If 50% of humanity got wiped out suddenly by a pandemic I can't begin to imagine what the consequences would be.
I'm unsure about the time scale in question, but something of this magnitude occurred to the indigenous populations of North and Central Americas, with the introduction of urban diseases (smallpox, influenza, chicken pox, bubonic plague, etc.) from Western Europe that they had no prior exposure to.
If you narrow the geographic scope and widen the temporal scope, the tolls were much higher than 50%.
The consequences are difficult to de-correlate from the other effects of colonization, but no it wasn't pretty.
Prior to the 20th century, and even in through the first half of same, famine's population reductions frequently ranged from 10% to 90% over fairly wide areas. It's useful to keep this in mind as contrasted to several major famines of the past roughly 50--60 years, including Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Somalia, Rwanda, and the like, which dire as they've been, pale by comparison.
As Communist China's Great Leap Forward and ensuing Great Famine are often mentioned in this context, it's worth noting that a roughly comparable famine had occurred only about 20 years earlier, under the Republic of China, not to mention several similarly-scoped famines in the 19th century. The incidence of famine seems somewhat independent of political structure, and has arguably stopped under Communist Chinese rule. (I draw no causal inference here, just note the fact.)
Ireland saw its population fall by half during the Great Potato Famine of ~1840--1850, through a combination of direct deaths and migration, and only matched its pre-famine population within the past decade. (I've had to consciously note that this fact has changed recently, the fact that the population hadn't recovered was so profound.)
As to impacts: past civilisations were often far less complex and hence less dependent on highly specialised technical skills. We live in a world in which a relatively modest pandemic resulted in global disruptions of trade, commerce, finance, and governance. The global "bus factor" seems to be quite low. In a world in which 90%+ of the population tended farms or herds, and interdependence between towns and villages, let alone nation-states, tended to be fairly low, gave for somewhat greater redundancy. Ironically, the combined impacts of reducing populations (and hence pulling back from the famine frontier itself), as well as increased labour bargaining power and the liberation of property ownership often meant a comparative flourishing of civilisations following a major famine or plague. This is much discussed in the context of Europe's Black Death (25%--50% population reduction over roughly a decade).
Both the Great Famine and the 1942-1943 famines were politically caused, the first by communism and the latter by Japanese invasion.
> a relatively modest pandemic resulted in global disruptions of trade, commerce, finance, and governance
The pandemic didn't result in that directly. It was the political response to it that caused that. Some places just skipped many of the most damaging responses but had identical outcomes. Africa hardly did much and you can't see it in their population figures for example. Also it seems like resilience is remarkably high. Governments went crazy and used enormous force to create as much havoc as possible, yet the core supply chains (food, water, electricity) held up very well especially after people realized how robust it was and the panic buying stopped.
> Both the Great Famine and the 1942-1943 famines were politically caused, the first by communism and the latter by Japanese invasion.
The Great Famine wasn't caused "by communism", it was caused by incompetence. Mao rejected both Western science and the expertise of Chinese farmers which agreed to it, much like the Nazis rejected "Jew science" (which luckily hampered their war effort and prevented them from developing nuclear weapons). He also established a culture of fear that led to bureaucrats lying about their numbers instead of risking admitting failure.
I guess you could say the cause of the Great Famine therefore was bureaucracy, or maybe dogmatism. Neither of which is necessary, nor sufficient, for communism[0].
[0]: ... even without getting into the distinction between what governments have justified with the excuse that they want to achieve communism and what communism itself would look like. No so-called communist government I'm aware of has ever claimed to have achieved communism. Even Soviet-era Eastern Europe at best claimed to have achieved "real socialism" when they pretty much admitted giving up on communism by calling anyone expecting more of them "utopianist".
When the black death hit Norway in 1349, 2/3 of the population was wiped out. The whole structure of society broke down. Most of the state and church was just gone. It took 300 years to get everything back in operation because most people that could read and write had died.
I don't know how you define "long term", but for several generations society didn't work, there were no justice and people really suffered.
Think about how many highly specialized jobs are needed to run modern-day society. Think about how much of the required knowledge and skill to do those jobs would be lost, not to mention available person-hours. We could be set back a century or more, but without the cheap and plentiful natural resources that got us to where we are today.
They say you have to be lucky to get cancer statistically because you actually have to live a long time to even get it.
I guess if you are several hundred year old empire you will have run into just about everything. The plague was just the last thing they saw, not the ultimate thing that ended them.
We’d be lucky if all this crap lasts long enough to watch a plague run through it.
I almost wish we had actual imperial ambition instead of all the cloak and daggers garbage the CIA gets up to. At least there would be economic stability and decent education and infra in annexed countries.
There prob would be a lot of popular support. And there is an election coming up.
Personally, I was thinking we could privatize the entire military in one fell swoop. And then let them sell their services to various foreign nations. Turn that one big cost center into a revenue opp.
No way that could possibly go wrong…
But if America does get dragged into any more conflicts, can we make it a home game this time? You know… ‘fight em over here so we dont have to fight em over there’. Sucks always being the away team.
>Personally, I was thinking we could privatize the entire military in one fell swoop. And then let them sell their services to various foreign nations. Turn that one big cost center into a revenue opp.
The USA gets a whooole lot of soft power from its military hegemony, it's already paying for itself in the form of better trade deals - for instance, Taiwan basically only exists because of US hegemony, and they have better chips than the US does, and they don't sell their best outside of NATO.
The US is doomed to always be the away-team - they can't stay neutral because wars involve blocking the trade of their trading partner, which includes US merchant ships. They won't have a war on the home front, because they have the two biggest oceans in the world to make such an invasion a logistical impossibility (and the US navy is giant to enforce that).
The other thought that I've had is that we're exerting far less selective pressure on huamn infants now than a century or so ago, at least in modernised countries. By which I mean both rich and middle-income countries, as well as quite a few poorer ones which do have basic sanitation, hygiene, and healthcare availability. It's the first increment which matters far more than the last.
This was the high water mark of the Western Roman Empire, but at the time, a number of people were very concerned about the vast amount of wealth that was flowing out of the empire towards the east for luxury goods like silk and spices. This was a time that the rich got richer, spent more and more overseas, and strained the whole economy. (My source on this is Peter Frankopan's Silk Roads. If y'all have competing theories, or more detail, I'm all ears.)
By "wealth" I presume you mean gold and silver? Some sort of precious substance that I not easily replaced? Thus converting permanent for fleeting (assuming the spices were consumed and the silks were not currency.)
Could this lead to a shortage of "money" - which in turn limits production of essentials, like say food?
It's an interesting hypothesis but would take quite a lot of research to explore. It was a slave economy - so no money needed there. On the other hand perhaps non-slave workers were laid off, reducing production etc.
My gut sense is that it's not a significant issue. Conditions like drought and storms are more likely to have needle-moving effects. Food security is the root of stability and (as the article points out) there were periods of food insecurity towards the end if this period.
I'm also unaware as to the degree of currency production at this point (ie mining of gold etc which was what might be referred to as "wealth".)
The most obvious wealth of course is land, and that can't be sold "out" of the economy.
I suspect you are pondering though to analogize it with today. Since the supply of physical money is not constrained these days, there's no real risk of unrestrained imports impacting of the economy. Rather the loss of primary production would be a concern (a metaphorical drought) . However primary production (food, oil, mining etc) seems strong. Secondary production (factories) are weak though. Which is probably a bad thing overall.
My understanding was that they were buying silks and spices from abroad with silver and gold at higher and higher prices, so that whatever silver and gold they were able to obtain, ultimately flowed out towards the East, causing inflation. I don't think it was a core issue, but it was something that contemporary Romans considered very alarming. They felt that Rome was losing it's Roman-ness, and pouring money into other countries. How important that was in the grand scheme of things is debatable. If you have good resources to share, I'd like to read them!
Just throwing out ideas, but I don't think wealth flowing out is as much of a big deal as it was in the 70s. However, the opposite is the case with respect to concentration of wealth.
Also I think that the US and Europe are very different when it comes to concentration of wealth, and preserving that concentration. It is difficult to pin down why. For one, Europe is legally inferior in terms of the legal structures permitting early stage and disruptive companies. European countries are also biased toward favoring large employers in terms of preventing competition from former employees.
Ideally, you want a system where people who have generational wealth can lose it easily, as much as you want people who work really hard, and especially people who are extremely innovative to be able to catapult themselves to positions of consequence where they can determine good decision making.
Anyway, back to wealth flowing out. Europe in that respect might be the winner. LVMH and Hermes being among the largest companies in Europe by market cap, suggests the wealth is flowing in, even if Europe would likely prefer to be making money out of other less cyclical goods and services.
>> Ideally, you want a system where people who have generational wealth can lose it easily, as much as you want people who work really hard, and especially people who are extremely innovative to be able to catapult themselves to positions of consequence where they can determine good decision making.
Do you though? I'm not sure.
Social mobility certainly has benefits, it motivates etc. Equally, it would seem advantageous for the weak-aristocrat to fall, making way for new blood.
Certainly we've seen the end of formal feudal aristocracy. The French Revolution started a wave of royalty-ending power. Today, while monarchies and aristocracy dukes, barons etc) still exist, they are not major factors. (With the exception of the UK where they lack political power but are still wealthy.)
The second generation of wealth, the industrialists, also wax and wine. Competition comes from within and without. Large brands have faltered, new industries have risen, and fallen, but social structures have remained solid since ww2.
There is clearly economic mobility, but wealth concentration seems less obvious in Europe (although a trip to Monaco might weaken my argument.)
What Europe has is a bit more discretion. Mysql, Nokia, Skype, etc and plenty more are, or were, European. But you don't see those founders in the press, and outside very narrow communities you don't know who they are.
Which I suppose brings me back to your point. I think you are correct, but I'd add that the stability of society as a whole acts as a good framework for that mobility. I'm not sure the American system of massive disparity is ultimately good.
Let's not forget the loss of tax revenue, the loss of grain imports from Vandal-occupied North Africa to support large urban centers, and the rise of local Christian Nationalists in the rural areas who dismantled the administrative state to establish their own infighting fiefdoms.
it's kinda tiring when people assert that yxz ended the roman empire
allow me to be the akshully guy and point out, for one, it didn't, the eastern half of the SAME roman empire was still kicking around long after the western half "fell"
the western roman empire also didn't end because of migration (even if it had, what's the lesson? the world exists and people move around inside it, there's nothing anyone can do to stop that, certainly the romans couldn't, nor did they when they themselves INVITED the germanic tribes in, as they had for hundreds of years, because they had to, there was no alternative... if you can't successfully roll with immigration, your polity is doomed anyway, the world and the societies in it aren't some hermetically sealed snow globes that are possible to keep segregated and separated from each other)
nor corruption or incompetent leadership (Rome and every other political entity in history has also and did also have that, since forever)
or any other pet theory (plagues likewise came and went)
Recognizably roman to whom? They recognized themselves as roman, as did their peer polities in the region. That's not the only useful answer to this question but it's not a small thing either.
I should have been more precise. I meant in terms of being like the old Roman Empire. More in terms of vastness than anything.
The army for example had dropped about 75% in size by the timeframe I mentioned. And this is only the eastern half of the former empire.
So the empire was a shell of itself in terms of extent.
Would be as if California, Nevada and Oregon lived on as “Western America” in 2400 with continuity of govt. Impressive in some way but also nothing a contemporary from our time would recognize as being “The United States”.
Even the western roman empire wasn't really roman anymore. The emperor was not Italian, not based in Rome, and often with a disdain toward Rome, the vast majority of the army wasn't Italian either.
But the eastern roman empire was probably even less of an empire than it was roman. The definition of an "empire" is to rule over many kingdoms. When you are reduced to your own territory, you really aren't an empire anymore.
Western Romans, esp the elite, had already spoken Greek for hundreds of years at that point, and huge parts of the population of the west spoke Gaulish, Germanic, Celtic etc etc languages for hundreds of years too. So that's kind of a non argument.
Those Gaulish, Germanic and Celtic elements were becoming Romans as a result of them starting speaking Latin/the Vulgata, the same goes for all the peoples living at the periphery of the Empire. If you were still speaking Celt/German or whatever you were not a Roman, you were a barbarian.
In the Italian peninsula the only part where Greek might have still been a thing is of course Magna Grecia, but that’s a special case. Curious of how many Greek graffitis have been discovered in Pompeii.
This seems like an incredibly retrospective view of romanicity tbh. That part of the empire had always spoken greek, and had never afaik been considered less roman for it.
> and had never afaik been considered less roman for it.
That's quite debatable, as those parts (Western Anatolia, present-day Syria, the old Orient as a whole) had always been more advanced from a "civilisational" point of view (compared to Rome, that is), and hence them viewing themselves as Romans first and foremost would have been a "spiritual" demotion.
I didn't say they viewed themselves "first and foremost" as romans, where are you getting that?
I'm pointing out that their using greek didn't count against what they & others considered to be their "romanness" before the western empire fell, so why are you looking at it that way now?
To be honest I'm not really certain what you're trying to claim though so maybe the distinction is useful for your point. But anyway "to what extent & by whose measure were the eastern romans, and later the byzantines, roman" is one of the most active & scrutinized questions of one of the most visible and prestigious branches of historical scholarship.
And the overwhelming scholarly consensus is that they were roman by any standard that applied in their time and most that we can come up with as well. "They spoke greek and weren't roman because of that" hasn't been a serious reputable stance on the subject for a few generations now.
I am not sure how "they couldn't stop it" is an argument against migration being one of the major causes of the fall of the roman empire if not the leading one. Other causes being ineffective tax collection, ennemies adapting and learning from roman military techniques, and a general collapse of will, where the brightest and most capable ceased to want to serve aggressively in the army and administration for glory.
it's an intellectually lazy, blinkered thing to say
the empire had incorporated new peoples for hundreds of years, through both violent conquest and people migrating in
= immigration is the only reason there was an empire in the first place, and that it lasted as long as it did - it's not like the Roman Empire was constituted of pure Latin OG Romans, lol. (heck, even their founding myths were that they were NOT Latins - it took conflicts for Latins to be recognized and gain citizenship)
so you can't just cherry pick a single time germanic peoples migrated in (as they had successfully many times) and say LOOK IMMIGRATION IS WHY THE EMPIRE COLLAPSED, it's ridiculous
and even if you insist on doing that, again, what's the takeaway? if your policy rests on there being no migration, in a world where there is migration and there's nothing you can do about that, it's a bad and doomed policy - successful polities are the ones with the ability to roll with and take advantage of it, not the ones that stick their head in the sand in some misguided attempt to remain static and hermetically sealed off from the world
Western rome kept feuding with itself and hiring germanic tribes as mercenaries. After a while, the germanic mercenaries were thoroughly trained in fighting western romans, and eventually western rome pissed off germanic mercenaries and lost the resulting war.
Eastern rome didn't have as many germanic tribes as neighbors, and they had less infighting to begin with.
One of the major reasons earlier-rome had so much military success was that they conquered their neighbors before said neighbors successfully copied all their (really quite amazing) military doctrines.
Everyone knows it was caused by a massive decrease in the quality of Roman garum. After their supplies of the good stuff ran out, they just didn’t have enough umami to keep the empire united.
Once Constantinople developed their own garos, they had no reason to stay together with the west.
There is a great recent book on the Roman Empire's unique role in European history and why no other power in the region could matching it after "the fall" was, eventually, something that worked out in Europe's favour.
It's called: "Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity"
To be honest, people over-learn things from what's written down. That's just a different form of looking under the lamp for your lost keys. Plagues do damage civilizations but there's no lessons there. The US and China are two diametrically opposite kingdoms and they have both weathered the latest one just fine through diametrically opposite approaches.
Rome's big advantage in historical popularity is that its works survived being written down. Treat it as an existence proof of things, not its events as necessary conditions.
Here is something that I don't understand. Roman Empire had advanced science, it had lot of people, lot of money and resources, and could have more weapon and soldiers than anyone else. Where did tribes from Asia, who had no advanced technologies, poor economy, no literacy, get the resources and soldiers needed to successfully invade and win against the Empire? Where did they get the weapon? Why they were so numerous if all they did was riding the steppes on their horses? Is riding the steppes on a horse more profitable than building cities, roads, bridges and aqueducts?
Also why don't we see similar things in modern times, why don't wee see poor undeveloped nations successfully invading large developed countries?
The Romans didn't really have that much of a tech advantage vs. steppe riders like the Huns when it came to practical combat. They also had good horsemanship (learning to ride as toddlers) and the valuable ability to fire arrows from horseback.
However, the Huns were kind of an abberation. Most of the migrations/invasions were Germanic forest dwellers. In addition, for the most part it didn't look like an invasion. Many of the tribes were allowed to settle in the empire in exchange for military service, and Germans gradually started occupying the upper echelons of the military caste. By this time, the Western Roman Empire's institutions were just kind of falling apart. The local elites had little incentive to do much about it, and were happy enough to work with the Germans once Odoacer ripped off the bandaid and deposed the last emperor. Italy was actually quite prosperous for the century after the fall, until the Eastern Roman Empire initiated its reconquest and set off a series of wars.
Today's countries are incomparably more centralized than in the times of Rome.
When Georgia fired some missile on Russia (after weeks of harassment by Russian troops at the border), Putin knew about it within seconds. The same thing would have taken days if not weeks in Roman times.
And then, marching an army from a neighboring province again would have taken weeks, or even months if you needed to bring them from farther away. Today, your air force can arrive at any point on your (main) territory in a matter of hours, even for a country the size of Russia, and boots on the ground might take a day or two.
Also, everything about how war is fought and the impact of weapons has changed dramatically. The difference between the destructive power of the greatest (even non-nuclear) weapons that we have versus more common rifles or rockets is colossal. In Roman times, the difference between the best weapon and an improvised club was tiny by comparison.
> Also why don't we see similar things in modern times, why don't wee see poor undeveloped nations successfully invading large developed countries?
We will, in time. But there’s a huge technology gap in weapons and warfare compared to the past. I believe they could conquer and grow by recruiting the people and resources of the conquered. Making larger targets more achievable. So it was a process. It’s not that a conqueror had the resources and people needed to begin with or got them through peaceful growth.
That said, in modern times, the west is so outnumbered and richer than the east that it’s likely only a matter of time before this happens.
This. Ineffective feudal systems like slavery do not survive plagues. All those noble robber knights starved in there towers while the peasants went to town.
> All those noble robber knights starved in there towers
nitpick but ...
noble robber knights spelled it "their towers". even the peasants (those rare few who could read and write) would never have spelled it "there towers" :)
The plague was a factor in the demise of Rome, but it was not the factor. Mary Beard's SPQR discusses some that are not always mentioned today, perhaps because they are too close for comfort for Europe and the USA or too political. I recommend reading Beard's book.
I interpreted it as an omen of sorts. many dynasties believed plagues, natural disasters, famine were markers of decline.
ex) Dutch empire. There was a plague + ponzi finance bubble in the same decade. The gilder never recovered after this point began to steadily lose value and roughly 150 years later, Dutch empire was no more.
One can't help but wonder if America is on the same trajectory.
Roman elites' unwillingness to go on long military campaigns themselves and increasing reliance on foreign personnel who quickly figured out that it is easier and safer to simply turn against their paymasters than risk lives in far away lands.
Im not making the connections the top comment is. Her SPQR books are nice alternative history from a real historian. At a guess the parent comment is referring to some cultural aspects based on earlier roman and not our current judeo-christian values in the west. An emphasis on biological advancements, moralality that serves status hierarchy and empire, “polycule” style relationships in military and socioeconomic units, a different view on “sanctity of life.” Off the top of my head.
This is interesting because many believe the Black Plague is what caused the Renaissance. Maybe Roman leadership drained themselves ensuring that power structures stayed in place, whereas in post Black Plague Europe survivors were left with tons of land and hierarchies fell to pieces now that workers had so much leverage.
The Roman empire was based on slavery and had to die so that humanity could progress. Slave labor is vastly less efficient than having serfs that can keep (part of) what they produce and have incentives to +-work harder. That allowed producing more food with less workforce so many people were free to do other things and bigger cities could develop which in turn would set the foundation for making the industrial revolution possible.
Everything else is just some weird romanticism of the antique when in reality many things got better in the medieval period. There wasn't a sudden fall of the Roman Empire. It was a gradual process and the structures coming after it saw themselves not as a replacement but as a continuation of Roman traditions.
Edit: As people misunderstand. The important difference between serfdom and slavery is not freedom. The important part is incentives to work harder. Slaves only have the incentives to avoid the whip. They do not own what they produce. They need to be closely supervised and micromanaged. In contrast many forms of serfdom allowed to the serfs to keep some of the stuff they produced so they had incentives to work more efficiently.
1. I don't think it's accurate to call Rome a slave based economy. Most people in Rome were freemen. Slaves served certain functions that would have been hard to replace with freemen, but I wouldn't say that makes Rome a slave based economy. For example, migrant laborers can't be easily replaced in the modern US economy, but I wouldn't say that the US economy based on migrant labor.
2. Relating incentives to productivity is an anachronistic grafting of industrial and post-industrial economic thought onto a subsistence farming economy where it doesn't apply. If a serf works harder and produces more crop, what are they going to do with it? Sell it to their neighbor, who is also a farmer and grows all the same things? To the best of my knowledge, there was not a significant cash crop economy in medieval Europe.
3. As others have pointed out, slavery continued long after the Roman Empire. It was much more prevalent in the encomienda system and the antebellum South than it ever was in Rome. The proportion of enslaved people in mid 1700s South Carolina about 3 to 5x that of ancient Rome. And even that's nothing compared to the Caribbean.
1. Rome is commonly characterized as a slave holding society. I think it is fair to say that it was based on slavery as getting new slaves was a big enough concern that it was willing to wage wars over it. It is hard to get estimates but something like 15% percent might have been slaves which is pretty huge. Of course saying it was only based on slavery would be too far.
2.
Cities can not sustain themselves but need the existence of villages that would sell them the food.
In the late medieval period farmers absolute would sell the surplus for money on the market. We also see also traveling merchants that would go from village to village to offer wares.
> Sell it to their neighbor, who is also a farmer and grows all the same things?
Some people in a village did not have land but were craftsmen like the iconic blacksmith.
An yes it was a development and early medieval period ages the serf was probably just happy to have slightly more to eat. It didn't all happen over night. Villages started very self-sufficient. Basically producing everything they needed themselves while we see much more diversification of labor later on.
3. I made a comment about the US South as well. An yes, history is not linear. There are just general tendencies.
Again, a medieval economy is not an industrial one. In the 1800s, there was plenty of urban demand for food that rural farmers could cash in on, but in medieval western Europe we're looking at roughly a 97%/3% rural/urban divide. With that kind of imbalance the average rural farmer would not have the opportunity to sell off a significant amount of excess crop. The opportunities for an individual serf to profit off of increased productivity simply weren't there.
By the late medieval period, sure, there was somewhat more robust intercity trade. But that's approaching 1000 years after the fall of the western Roman empire, which is stretching it if you want to claim cause and effect.
Slavery still exists today and I would even go as far as to say it is still widespread (random examples: in Chinese concentration camps/work camps, Chinese prisoners on fishing vessels, sex slaves globally, worker slaves in the Middle East but also certain parts of latin America for example).
Fun fact, there are more slaves today than any other time in history, simply by virtue of there being more people; that doesn't lessen each's suffering however.
> The proportion of enslaved people in mid 1700s South Carolina about 3 to 5x that of ancient Rome. And even that's nothing compared to the Caribbean.
You are picking a very specific area and comparing it to the entire Roman empire? The proportion of the population that was enslaved was significantly higher in Italy than in the rest of the empire (and it was about on the same level as in the Southern States by 1860, around 30-35%).
I can't find reliable figures but it was significantly higher in Sicily and Southern Italy and probably as high if not higher than in South Carolina.
> Sell it to their neighbor, who is also a farmer and grows all the same things?
No but there was still extensive trade on the regional level. Not by modern standards of course since surpluses were very low (but not by Roman standards since productivity had likely increased significantly throughout large swaths of the former Roman empire due to technological progress). e.g. the production of wool which was exported to the low countries made up a non insignificant fraction of the English economy.
> significant cash crop economy in medieval Europe.
I think people often tend to compare Northern and Western Europe during the middle ages with the Mediterranean centered Roman empire for some reasons. I'm not sure there was an extensive crash crop economy was particularly more extensive in Northern Gaul, Germany or Britain during the Roman period (probably the opposite since the population sizes seem to have been much higher in those regions during the middle ages).
The plantation/latifundia based economy in Southern Italy had collapsed of course but I'm not sure that the production of main cash crops wine/olives was necessarily much lower overall by the high middle ages even in Southern Europe (though of course it varied by exact period and region).
>To the best of my knowledge, there was not a significant cash crop economy in medieval Europe.
There was a fair bit of specialization and cash-cropping in Rome, though - it's unfair to assume that Rome and the medieval period are the same here, when the key difference is Rome, which 1) acted as basically a giant trade union, economically, and 2) Rome was built around the mediterranean, which obviously made shipping easier than in the middle of Europe.
There were vastly more slaves in the late Republic and early Empire than the mid or late empire, due to conquest. Slaves undercutting free workers was a factor in the fall of the Republic, but it had little to do with the fall of the Empire. Proto-serfdom had already begun by the Empire's fall, so by your argument it should have gotten stronger, not weaker.
I would argue that the fall of the republic was the first nail in the coffin, and like you said, was caused by slave concentration in few patrician's hands (according to the Gracci brothers at least). The slave concentration around rome, and the slave owner concentration at the end didn't help the empire either.
And please don't draw parallels, you shouldn't, the society now is very different.
[edit] for clarification, the last sentence is a general 'you', I'm not talking about my parent who made an overall good point.
I'm not sure why you're focusing on that one aspect when there so many others for the Roman decline. And it's not like slavery disappeared with the Roman empire.
Because economics are the deciding factor. It is what enables sustaining a higher population, investing in technological progress and of course military might.
The form of society that is more efficient will always win out in the end. Same as companies that can produce goods more efficiently under free market capitalism will always dominate.
You're making a lot of unsupported claims about free market capitalism which really isn't a factor when we're discussing 2000 year old empires. I don't think you can make the argument that the dark ages ushered in a free market, so I don't know how you're connecting these things.
It's a strange take that hyper-focuses on slavery and the economy when slavery was being used by western nations well into the 1800s.
I am not saying there was any free market capitalism in feudalism. I am trying to explain to you the basic economic principle that those that can produce something more efficiently will tend to dominate. I used the example of corporations under capitalism as an example that I hope you would be more familiar with.
If I need to use 90% of my population just to produce enough food to sustain them, I can only use 10% for other things. The society that only needs 50% of the workforce to be in agriculture can easily entertain for example a vastly bigger military even with the same population.
Economics is what wins war. Economics is what allows technological progress.
Yes, slavery existed but the question is what the dominant form of ding agriculture.
I don't understand what time periods you're comparing here. Your explanations don't follow with any sort of historical precedent. You're making assumptions that there were such a thing as a standing army during the middle ages - ironically enough it was Rome with its slaves that had one of those - and that somehow there were less serfs than slaves. The majority of people in Medieval Europe were still peasant farmers.
I feel like you're talking about economic abstractions without understanding the actual historical context.
I am not making any assumption about there being big standing armies. I am just trying to explain to you the basic principle that the economy is the deciding factor that governs everything else. I really just try to explain basic economic stuff.
History doesn't go perfectly linearly. There is always exceptions for every rule. You need to understand the broad stroke and main driving forces before going into the small.
The bigger picture is: Slave holding society -> feudalism -> capitalism
Not everywhere in the world and sometimes steps get skipped but that is the general tendency observed.
Edit: Removed a unnecessary sentence that was not very polite. Sorry about that.
I have a degree in history, I am well aware of the broad strokes, but you need to be able to align your theory with the historical fact. I'm not seeing the connections.
Your "bigger picture" doesn't make sense, as there have been capitalist societies with slave holding, and it's not just an "exception" - you're clearly thinking of things from a western context, and it was the west itself that had this exception. I don't know anywhere in the world that neatly aligns with your progression.
You're trying to explain history via the economy but in ways that don't align with the historical context. I can accept this is your personal belief, but I don't find it compelling.
Capitalist societies are capitalist. I don't get what point you try to make with saying they also have slavery. As a historian you should know the difference between defining features and what is secondary.
Modern slavery is a pretty different phenomenon to antique slave holding anyway.
It is fact that the vast majority of the world is capitalist today, no?
Yes, you can argue they are not purely this or that or whatever but I don't see what purpose that would serve other than muddle the conversation.
It is also historical fact, that the first countries that went through an industrialization where feudalistic, no? England, Germany, France so on.
So how is the progression I showed you not trivially true?
Yes it is eurocentric and the development in Asia was very different and yada, yda. Fair point but the industrialization started in Europe and that was no accident.
I am not even sure what you are actually disagreeing with.
> Capitalist societies are capitalist. I don't get what point you try to make with saying they also have slavery.
You literally said:
> Slave holding society -> feudalism -> capitalism
You're saying that slave holding societies stop holding slaves, become feudal and become capitalist. I'm saying they didn't. Slavery didn't stop through that progression. Your underlying argument is wrong.
Your argument that "The Roman empire was based on slavery and had to die so that humanity could progress." doesn't make any sense in that slavery didn't stop. Your two points, that Rome was based upon slavery, and that it had to die, seem totally unrelated to that.
This point: "That allowed producing more food with less workforce so many people were free to do other things and bigger cities could develop which in turn would set the foundation for making the industrial revolution possible." is also incorrect as that was not a result of Rome's fall. Europe was still massively agrarian for a millennia after, so that doesn't have any connection with Rome either.
You're drawing strained connections between disconnected facts and trying to wrap it all in some sort of logical and obvious progression that doesn't exist.
It's clear that no one is going to change your mind on this subject even though many have tried, so that's my final word on the matter.
I never wrote anything about stopping slavery. That is purely your interpretation. Please try to give more a charitable reading to what another person might be saying instead of going to the most extreme that seems easy to debunk.
Especially silly as I was specifically talking about agriculture. Yes, most of my food was not produced by slaves. Some might but that would be the exception.
It is sad that we couldn't talk about my actual points.
Can you expand on the idea that slave labour is "vastly less efficient"? Is it just a motivation thing?
And is there any good evidence/sources for this? Surely both groups generally performed pretty extreme levels of backbreaking labour. I can't exactly imagine a slave slacking off while literally being whipped.
Also, even if feudalism made us more efficient at food production as you say* - did it not also make societies less effective at producing great works of infrastructure (roads being a good example) than imperial Rome? One just needs to compare the dark ages/low middle ages to the Roman era to see the stark contrast.
Isn't the entire narrative basically: Roman prosperity -> bad times -> rediscovery of classic values (renaissance) -> parity with the Romans 1000 years later?
Genuine questions, not trying to be combative. My history just might not be very good
* Also I'd be interested to find out if there were more famines during pax romana or in the period after the fall of the western empire..
> The important part is incentives to work harder. Slaves only have the incentives to avoid the whip. They do not own what they produce. They need to be closely supervised and micromanaged. In contrast many forms of serfdom allowed to the serfs to keep some of the stuff they produced so they had incentives to work more efficiently.
Serfs often were provided a bit of land of their own that they could cultivate for themselves.
Note that many people point out rightfully that where were many forms of serfdom and some where closer so slavery while others were more free. Also the development of big cities only really happened towards the end of the medieval period so it was a longer process and not like immediate benefit.
> Isn't the entire narrative basically: Roman prosperity -> bad times -> rediscovery of classic values (renaissance) -> parity with the Romans 1000 years later?
Yes that is the narrative created by renaissance people to explain whey they are better than the people in the medieval period. It is basically propaganda that has survived till this day.
The truth is things got much worse before they got better. The whole inquisition, witch hunts, religious fundamentalism, yeah that happened AFTER the medieval period. That is modernity. It was this transition period that saw lots of war and plagues and much uncertainty. So it is natural that people longed for a romanticized golden age that they project their ideas on.
The dark ages were originally called dark in the sense that there are less written sources from this time period. They are "dark" in the sense that historians know less about them time, like blind spots. They are not dark because times where horrible. That is a modern interpretation.
The term "dark ages" was used to refer to how we (i.e. people in the present/historians) didn't have a lot of info about that period. As in, something dark is something you can't see into very well. The ages indeed weren't dark themselves though, that's a misunderstanding of the term and that misconception is exactly why historians try to avoid the term nowadays.
Roads were primarily built for military use, but once they were built anyone travelling on foot would benefit from them, which meant had real economic impacts. That said, boats can carry far more goods than pack mules far faster, and don't eat a ton of fodder every day. There's a reason all the big old cities are on rivers. It's also why the Roman empire was primarily on the Mediterranean.
This is a huge mischaracterization. Most people in the roman empire were free. Yes, they had slaves, but their economy was not based in slavery. In fact, part of the reforms of Diocletian was to transform everyone into serfs, aka, proto-Feudalism. They walked backwards, not forward.
A silly comment. Slavery persisted well into early modern times. Spanish colonies in the New World depended on it. It persists still in some parts of the world.
> The Roman empire was based on slavery
Something only a recent college grad who's ignorant of history would ever say.
The Romans managed to accomplish very little in 1,000 years considering the extent of their empire. The Greeks contributed much more than the Romans in a shorter time frame and with much less land, power etc. The reason Romans are romanticized is they are the ones who brought civilization to Norther Europe. (more or less. Or, at least, these is what Europeans themselves thought.). These Europeans then created the scientific and industrial revolutions (almost 1,000 years after the fall of Rome, I should note.) Rome also spread Christianity to Europe and maintained control over the Christian religion in Europe via the Pope. So it makes sense that people romanticize Rome because they see it as the predecessor of Europe. Even though Rome itslef is actually not that great, even if we accept that it spread civilization to Europe.
> The Romans managed to accomplish very little in 1,000 years considering the extent of their empire.
Yes, apart from the aqueducts, the sanitation, the roads, the wine, public health, public baths, public order, cheese, medication, law, education and entertainment the Romans accomplished very little.
You are saying that sarcastically but that actually is very little. Compare the advancements from the 1,000 year prior, even just by the Greeks in Mathematics (Pythagoras, Euclid, Diophantus etc.) science (Aristotle), philosophy (Plato, many others) technology (Archimedes, killed by a Roman soldier) and astronomy. None of the things you mention are really hard problems. The fact is that the Romans were anti-intellectual and only cared about building which is not that hard. Also the Romans did not invent cheese or wine. Compare also with the Babylonians. Compare also the advancements made from 1200 in Europe.
Ok. But it is sarcastic in the Monty Python skit as well, and the argument is being made to the same effect. The same low quality Monty Python joke was in a previous Rome thread I posted in: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38765525
> The Roman empire was based on slavery and had to die so that humanity could progress.
Making a statement with confidence doesn’t make it true. You might want to provide substance for this statement as the rest of your comment is based on it.
Then the end of slavery in the Empire and and the start of serfdom, more efficient than slavery, after de Diocletian reforms killed the Empire. That's contradictory. And slavery was still a thing after those reforms, as other comments say.
Diocletian reforms, the corruption, civil wars and the inability of defend itself eroded and destroyed all the structures that made the Republic great all those are the reasons that made the Empire fall.
The Republic was gone for a few hundred years before the Empire fell in Western Europe (and the Eastern part of the Roman Empire continued for a thousand years more).
This is a bizarro statement than any historian would laugh at.
Slavery, in lots of different forms, flourished for nearly a millennium and a half throughout the world after the fall of the Western Roman Empire (including, quite conspicuously, in the Eastern Roman Empire for nearly another thousand years...) It's very strange to me that you consider slavery responsible for the downfall of Rome given how it was so prevalent everywhere for so long after.
In Southern Europe, if you consider serfs different from slaves (they were, but only to a small extent).
Slavery is extremely economically efficient in reality, especially if you have the power to force the slaves into utter servitude, like they did in the US South. The south, and the USA as a whole, would never have been as rich if they didn't have slavery at the right time. It was important enough that h he confederacy was willing to fight a war over it: they knew, and they were proven right, that losing slavery would plunge them into poverty, as it did.
Of course, this is not a defense of slavery: in all its forms, it is a disgusting, disturbing, inhuman institution that must always be fought against and dismantled. But this can only ever be done by the will of the people, against the economic interests of the slave masters. An unregulated free market will always seek to reintroduce slavery (just like it will converge to monopolies or at least oligopolies and many other undesirable traits).
>The south, and the USA as a whole, would never have been as rich if they didn't have slavery at the right time. It was important enough that h he confederacy was willing to fight a war over it: they knew, and they were proven right, that losing slavery would plunge them into poverty, as it did.
If the South was so enriched by slavery, why did they have such a lack of guns and industry with which to build them? And why could they only buy less than a tenth of the guns that the North bought?
The answer is that they never industrialized because if you force slaves to work expensive machines, then those machines will be sabotaged. Slavery cripples your ability to mechanize.
If slavery really were better for the economy, then the South could have won the war even despite their lack of numbers - if the South had armed every single soldier with a breach-loading rifle (they mostly just had smoothbores, mostly muzzle-loading) then the North simply wouldn't have been able to push the offensive and would probably have been losing ground. The South's strategic goals were easier than the North's - the North needed to annex the south (or re-annex, semantics) whereas the South only needed a stalemate. The South mobilized first, so if anything they should have had more guns than the North.
You're quite correct that slavery is wildly profitable for the slave-owner, so they had more than enough capital to industrialize, so why didn't they?
>In Southern Europe, if you consider serfs different from slaves (they were, but only to a small extent).
The ethnicity is important here: if a serf runs away, there's no obvious inherent indicator they're a serf, making it easy to make a new life nearby (e.g. a few towns away). If a black slave runs away in the Antebellum South, then other villages will assume he's a runaway slave until proven otherwise - that runaway will have to escape the entire South. The serf's greater ability to escape if he's treated too poorly gave him bargaining power that limited the abuse of feudal lords.
> The answer is that they never industrialized because if you force slaves to work expensive machines, then those machines will be sabotaged. Slavery cripples your ability to mechanize.
I think this highlights some differences between Roman slavery and slavery in America (and many other states). While many Roman slaves were engaged in menial labour some of them were trusted enough (and presumably comfortable enough) to be in positions of responsibility in nearly every facet of the Roman economy.
Freed slaves could go on to have successful careers, sometimes rising to high positions in Roman society, something that it is hard to imagine happening in the American south.
Racism probably played a part in that, considering that many Roman slaves were Greek or Italian, while Southern slaves were black and blacks continue to face discrimination a century and a half after the end of slavery.
Slavery in the US made sense for a limited time but at some point it would have hold the US back economically. It would have lacked enough free workforce for the industrialization and so would have fallen vastly behind compared to other countries.
Slavery is very profitable for the slave holder but not for the society as a whole.
Like if you take Nazi Germany. Many companies got rich by being provided essentially free slave labor that they could free work to death. But does it really make sense to have educated people work themselves to an early grave doing menial inefficient labor that needed to be closely supervised? Could they not have provided much more to the economy if they had been free? The practice is as sustainable as eating your own flesh.
Nazi Germany could keep going as long as the war machine kept going and there were countries to occupy but it wouldn't have been a very sustainable society in the long run.
Yes capitalist have an individual interest in slave labor and in forming monopolies. But in doing so they also also create conditions for the undoing of the very society that made them rich. That is exactly the point. Slavery is amazing for the slave owner but not for everyone else.
Regarding how many people in the Roman Empire were slaves, and what percentage of the population that was, this passage[1] from the oft-hn-referenced acoup.blog on the demographics of the ancient world is relevant:
```
Once again in Roman Italy our situation is perhaps a touch better, although not particularly good. Because we have better demographic data for the rest of the free population and a better grasp on the mechanics of Roman agriculture, we can do something a bit better than blind guessing here (though blind guessing there has been in abundance), but not much better. Walter Scheidel walked through much of this math, guesstimating the urban enslaved population under Augustus (r. 31BC-14AD) at around 600,000 (based on an estimated breakdown of Roman social classes and estimates of how many enslaved persons each elite household might have) and another c. 600,000 in the countryside (based on rather more confident agricultural modeling showing the figure can’t be much higher than this without pushing out all of the small farmers and tenants we know from our sources there were) for a total of 1.2m probably representing the height of the enslaved population in Italy, coming as it does at the explosive conclusion of Rome’s long streak of rapid expansion in warfare.12 For an Italy under August between perhaps 5.7m and 7.0m that would imply an enslaved population of very roughly 15-20%, with a bit of wiggle room on both sides.13 This, we can be quite sure, is a significant increase from the earlier period so the figure for 225 BC and the Middle Republic must be lower, perhaps very roughly around 10%. Again, those figures are very rough, but I think Scheidel14 does a good job showing that something much higher, say, 30+% simply doesn’t make much sense given our evidence.
That actually is a useful conclusion, by the by, the full import of which I think has not been fully observed: while Rome has a reputation as the slaveholding society – and it certainly was a slaveholding society, make no mistake – those rates are probably rather lower than what we see in Greece, suggestive of an Italy countryside in particular that had more freeholding citizen small farmers than a comparable Greek polis.
```
Serfs were by and large slaves. The only major difference was that they were tied to a specific piece of land and couldn’t be sold off separately. Other than that, feudal lords could do with them as they wished.
Besides slavery was practiced in Europe for long after Rome, especially by the Vikings who would raid the serfs and take them as slaves. The Byzantine empire that survived the fall of Rome practiced slavery until its fall a thousand years later so your thesis doesn’t make much sense.
Even that difference wasn't always respected; in Russia there was essentially no difference between a serf and a slave. From the "Serfdom in Russia" Wikipedia page:
> By the eighteenth century, the practice of selling serfs without land had become commonplace.
There is a huge difference between serfs and slaves. Both are unfree by modern standards but that doesn't mean one wasn't a big progress over the other.
As I said the big difference is that serfs could also keep part of what they produce. They have incentives to work harder while slaves do not have any.
Feudal lords couldn't just do with them as they wanted. Yes, they were tied to specific piece of land but in return also got the protection of the lord in times of war.
Slavery was replaced as the dominant form for doing agriculture. Slavery still exists to this day but I don't see how this is relevant. We are talking broad stroke tendencies over a very long, long time. The more efficient forms of productions will always win out in the end. It shouldn't really be controversial that slave labor is not very efficient.
Serfs often had fewer rights than Roman slaves. Sure, they often couldn't be sold and moved around, but they also had no way of winning their freedom, their children were automatically slaves as well, there were no legal repercussions of any kind for lords that treated their serfs badly, there were no legal obligations to leave any kind of food for serfs etc. Roman slaves were protected by national laws to a much, much higher extent.
Additionally, feuds between neighboring lords, which were extremely commonplace in much of Medieval Europe, often involved deliberate attacks on serfs, with the sole purpose of killing them off. This was also mostly unheard of in Rome, and would have led to legal punishments against the slave killers if it could be proven.
Of course, this started gradually changing, and the exact conditions for serfs varied greatly between regions. But by-and-large, Medieval Europe was much worse off then many areas of the Roman Empire.
And in regards to efficiency, this all makes no sense. The Roman Empire was vastly more economically efficient than medieval Europe, particularly when it came to food production. The kinds of armies the Roman Empire could field (which is mostly limited by feeding them) were not seen again in Europe until near the modern era. The Roman Army ranged from ~300,000 soldiers in the time of Tiberius, to more than 600,000 in the time of Constantine. By comparison, with the exception of Charlemagne (who still raised at most 100,000 troops once, and could hardly sustain this), medieval Europe had tiny armies - William the Conqieror conquered England with 14,000 troops, for one example of the scale.
European farms during the middle ages were far more efficient than European farms during Roman times. Egyptian farms during Roman times were more efficient than both.
Do you have a source for that? The sources I can find like Varo, Cato, and Columella’s table of farm labor inputs versus pre-industrial British and European records show that they are comparable and Roman yield was often significantly higher thanks to well organized labor and very productive regions like Etruria.
The serfs you’re thinking of came much later thanks to populist land reforms, largely after the black plague decimated the labor pool and gave them huge leverage for the first time - a thousand years later. Until then, serfs were slaves with no other protections. They didn’t get to keep anything. They and everything they had belonged to their feudal lords. Slaves on the other hand got the protection of Rome and even had opportunities to rise to freemen, unlike serfs most of whom were tied to the land for life.
I don't think slavery was ever the dominant form for doing agriculture, except in some weird outliers such as Sparta. Because the vast majority of people were involved in agriculture in pre-modern societies. If almost everyone is a slave, keeping the slaves in check must be the primary job for most free people. Otherwise the slaves will revolt and overthrow the system. And if your society is little more than an oppressive machine designed to keep the slaves in check, you can't expect much long-term success.
> There is a huge difference between serfs and slaves.
Bullshit. Also, when you say "Yes, they were tied to specific piece of land but in return also got the protection of the lord in times of war", that was generally true of chattel slaves as well - owners like to protect what they see as their property, after all.
> Formal conversion to serf status and the later ban on the sale of serfs without land did not stop the trade in household slaves; this trade merely changed its name. The private owners of the serfs regarded the law as a mere formality. Instead of "sale of a peasant" the papers would advertise "servant for hire" or similar.
> By the eighteenth century, the practice of selling serfs without land had become commonplace. Owners had absolute control over their serfs' lives, and could buy, sell and trade them at will, giving them as much power over serfs as Americans had over chattel slaves, though owners did not always choose to exercise their powers over serfs to the fullest extent.
The Russian Empire was one of the most underdeveloped and economically impoverished forces in Europe. So yeah, my point.
People here focus on the aspect of freedom which isn't really that important. That is a more modern idea that we see when capitalism develops and there is an actual free workforce.
The point again is economic incentives. Slaves have the incentives to avoid the whip and otherwise work as slowly as possible. Most forms of serfdom allowed working part of the land for yourselves and getting to keep some of which you produce. So you have an interest in being efficient in your work.
> The Russian Empire was one of the most underdeveloped and economically impoverished forces in Europe.
The Russian Empire was considered a "Great Power" for nearly 400 years. Sure, the lives of the average citizen sucked just like that of slaves, but the lords in Russia were able to harness their labor for nearly unfathomable levels of wealth and domination.
The idea that serfs somehow worked harder because "they got to keep some of what they produced" is just pure fantasy. Serfs had to work hard because a lot of the time they were on the verge of starvation.
The Russian Empire was far behind Western Europe in terms of economic development. People still used the wooden plow in the beginning of the 20th century. Something like 80 or 90 percent of the population still lived in villages.
I not really sure what point you are making. I mean no one is going argue that the Russian model of serfdom was a good idea?
> The idea that serfs somehow worked harder because "they got to keep some of what they produced" is just pure fantasy. Serfs had to work hard because a lot of the time they were on the verge of starvation.
Slaves are fed regardless of much or little they produce so you are saying serfs they had a pretty big incentive to work harder. Well case in point.
Turns out modern technology/medicine, cleanliness standards, and avoidance of the illness of the highest at risk had a big effect in making sure it didn't take us out. One 100 years before we had a very similar pandemic that didn't end the world, but caused a large number of deaths.
The term snakeoil salesman and yellow journalism is from far pre-internet days. If you thought the internet was going to be some magical where everyone told the truth you were already completely disconnected from reality.
All the internet does is guide us to our little reality tunnels of the untruth that we enjoy best.
With the magic of social media everybody can be a snakeoil salesman now. And will. Apparently everybody is just a snakeoil salesman waiting for the opportunity to push their dreams and politics.
So now we have a million-strong chorus of snakeoil salesmen 24-7.
The pandemic 100 years ago killed children, the pandemic today didn't, that makes them night and day. The pandemic we had now wouldn't be very noticeable 100 years ago since it mostly killed old people and there weren't that many old people around.
Imagine if Covid was as lethal to everyone as it was to 70 year olds, then you had the plague 100 years ago.
What ended it? Decade or quarter century - how did it subside, and why?
Can't help but draw parallels with the covid-19 pandemic -- most people you'll talk to will refer to it in the past tense, even though folks continue to get sick with it. We've stopped most monitoring and data collection, and it most definitely disappeared from the media. The one remaining reliable source of information is the wastewater analysis, which tends to indicate the virus is more or less as present in the population now as it's been in the past few years.
My conclusion to all this was kind of a sad lightbulb moment -- all the past pandemics, they didn't magically end. People just got tired, it became too expensive or politically inconvenient, we collectively turned away and pretended "it went away". The quarter-century timeframe on the Antonine plague looks starkly realistic in this light.