The Economics of Greco-Roman Slavery

This paper investigates the economic aspects of slavery in the Ancient Greco-Roman world. Existing evidence reveals significant variation in the relative cost of slaves compared to unskilled wages: it appears that at different times and places, a typical slave could be purchased for prices equivalent to wages paid from 150 to 1000 days of unskilled labor. To explain this great disparity, we develop a principal-agent model that predicts the return on slaves relative to wages, which varies as a function of the prevalence of slavery in the labor force. This model implies that slavery may have increased aggregate labor productivity by reallocating workers from less productive to more productive regions within the Greco-Roman world.

2010

This paper discusses the location of slav ery in the Roman economy. It deals with the size and distribution of the slave population and t he economics of slave labor and offers a chronological sketch of the development of Roman sl very. © Walter Scheidel. scheidel@stanford.edu

In slave societies, slaves form a fundamental, if not the fundamental, unit of labor. In slave societies such as the American South and ancient Rome, slaves engaged in a wide range of economic activity, from serving as labor on massive agricultural plantations, to serving as workers in manufacturing, to personal body-slaves. As such, the study and examination of slavery and institutions of slavery has focused on slavery as primarily an economic institution, and the keeping of slaves as economic activity. In this paper, I propose a different analysis. Rather than examining slavery as an institution brought about and propagated by economic factors, I will argue that slavery in the ancient Roman world was primarily a social and cultural institution. I will argue that while slavery had its economic advantages, it likewise had economic disadvantages when compared to an alternate system of labor, namely wage-laborers. It is my contention that in the Roman Empire, slavery existed as a social institution, one that was driven by factors of culture, society, and politics, rather than economics. To this end, I will examine the existence of the alternatives to slavery in the ancient world and compare these systems against systems of slavery present in the Roman Republic and Empire, and the American South. Economic analysis and comparison of slave society in the American South and ancient Rome will be primarily based on statistical and archaeological evidence and models derived from both time periods.

Historia, 2010

Legal Roots: The International Journal of Roman Law, 2014, 3, 231-66.

Ancient History Bulletin, 25, 2011, 73-132

Mare Nostrum, 2019

Following a recent wave of literature arguing for significant growth in the ancient Greek economy, several groundbreaking books have sought to explain this phenomenon through the lens of New Institutional Economics (NIE). The undeniable prevalence of slavery throughout ancient Greek history, however, has not been substantially integrated into these new analyses. This essay intends to address this problem, by elucidating some of the ways in which slavery contributed to the economic efflorescence of Greece's late archaic and classical period (600-300 BC) within an institutionally focused approach. Examining specifically the state of Athens, this study contends that not only did the system of slavery import a vast amount of labour from other areas of the Mediterranean into the Athenian polity, but it also directed labour towards economically productive aims that were otherwise limited by Athens' societal framework. The use of slaves in milling operations provides a key and often overlooked example, which will here be used as a case study.

This dissertation argues that the slave trade can be seen as providing a critical framework for understanding the economic and cultural developments of a time of rapid and dramatic changes within the cultures and economies of what had been the Roman Empire. To make this case, it will be demonstrated that neither the ascendance of Christianity nor the barbarian invasions nor even the collapse of the Western Roman Empire had changed the fundamental role of slavery in the centuries after Constantine. While slavery was vital to all the economies and societies of the period, it will be argued, a large-scale slave trade was necessary for the continued prosperity of the most developed economic regions as internal sources for slaves were insufficient to meet demand. By demonstrating the economic necessity, a crucial driving mechanism for long-distance systems of exchange within the Mediterranean world after the collapse of the western Roman fiscal system and its economy of bulk-exchange will be provided. Changes in the slave trade during the seventh century will be shown as being one of the key forces in the disintegration of Mediterranean cultural unity. New patterns would ultimately emerge that would lead to the beginning of the medieval trading cycle. These ideas are demonstrated by re-reading Arabic, Greek, and Latin sources and searching for the connections between them, by re-examining archaeological, epigraphic, and numismatic data and placing them in context, and by using analogous evidence and arguments from other periods and using them to investigate possibilities. Together, these allow for an innovative and bold reappraisal of the slave-systems and trade in a critical period that has not been previously argued. Prior scholarship has not attempted to address either the ubiquity of slavery or the extent of the slave trade in the period nor has anyone examined the slave-trading systems of the long seventh century itself by bringing together materials from the whole of the post-Roman world into a single coherent account. By doing so, this dissertation breaks new ground while creating an original synthesis and reconciliation between the interpretations of the economics of the end of the Roman Empire and the formation of the medieval world.

Wiley Blackwell, 2022

Slavery was foundational to Greek and Roman societies, affecting nearly all of their economic, social, political, and cultural practices. Greek and Roman Slaveries offers a rich collection of literary, epigraphic, papyrological, and archaeological sources, including many unfamiliar ones. This sourcebook ranges chronologically from the archaic period to late antiquity, covering the whole of the Mediterranean, the Near East, and temperate Europe. Readers will find an interactive and user-friendly engagement with past scholarship and new research agendas that focuses particularly on the agency of ancient slaves, the processes in which slavery was inscribed, the changing history of slavery in antiquity, and the comparative study of ancient slaveries. Perfect for undergraduate and graduate students taking courses on ancient slavery, as well as courses on slavery more generally, this sourcebook’s questions, cross-references, and bibliographies encourage an analytical and interactive approach to the various economic, social, and political processes and contexts in which slavery was employed while acknowledging the agency of enslaved persons.

The first section of "The Transformative Impact of the Slave Trade on the Roman World, 580 - 720"; This dissertation argues that the slave trade can be seen as providing a critical framework for understanding the economic and cultural developments of a time of rapid and dramatic changes within the cultures and economies of what had been the Roman Empire. To make this case, it will be demonstrated that neither the ascendance of Christianity nor the barbarian invasions nor even the collapse of the Western Roman Empire had changed the fundamental role of slavery in the centuries after Constantine. While slavery was vital to all the economies and societies of the period, it will be argued, a large-scale slave trade was necessary for the continued prosperity of the most developed economic regions as internal sources for slaves were insufficient to meet demand. By demonstrating the economic necessity, a crucial driving mechanism for long-distance systems of exchange within the Mediterranean world after the collapse of the western Roman fiscal system and its economy of bulk-exchange will be provided. Changes in the slave trade during the seventh century will be shown as being one of the key forces in the disintegration of Mediterranean cultural unity. New patterns would ultimately emerge that would lead to the beginning of the medieval trading cycle. These ideas are demonstrated by re-reading Arabic, Greek, and Latin sources and searching for the connections between them, by re-examining archaeological, epigraphic, and numismatic data and placing them in context, and by using analogous evidence and arguments from other periods and using them to investigate possibilities. Together, these allow for an innovative and bold reappraisal of the slave-systems and trade in a critical period that has not been previously argued. Prior scholarship has not attempted to address either the ubiquity of slavery or the extent of the slave trade in the period nor has anyone examined the slave-trading systems of the long seventh century itself by bringing together materials from the whole of the post-Roman world into a single coherent account. By doing so, this dissertation breaks new ground while creating an original synthesis and reconciliation between the interpretations of the economics of the end of the Roman Empire and the formation of the medieval world.