Dwarkesh

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1,722 appearances 5 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2025 last heard 25 Nov

Dwarkesh’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 1.

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Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Rome actually fell: plagues, slavery, & ice age — Kyle Harper · 24 Apr 2025 podcast

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All right, back to Kyle.

Let's turn to another one of your books, the one about slavery in the Roman world.

I did not realize before I read that one how central—I mean, how much Rome was a slave society.

I guess that just isn't a salient thing in a sort of conventional understanding of Rome.

Yeah, but why don't you paint us a picture of how much slavery was involved in the Roman world?

As you're pointing towards like from the supply side, all the Roman conquests lead to all the surplus labor that they can make use of.

And on the demand side, these cash crops.

Yeah, exactly.

One of the things I find interesting is in the age of colonization, we're used to thinking about slavery in terms of race but also like maybe like religion and other things which more obviously demarcate free and slave populations.

Right.

In the Roman world, it doesn't seem that that's clearly the case.

Yet, there's no abolition movement the way that emerges out of England in the 19th century or something, or maybe even before that.

And the reason that's mysterious is like, look, if you're literally descended from slaves, if you're like, my grandfather was a slave, but then we were freed, and they're basically just like you, you would think that there would be more of a sense of like, not everybody would be an abolitionist, but at least some people would be writing about abolition and something.

Yeah.

And you got like Christianity and so forth burgeoning and they didn't seem to have a problem with it.

Like why is there no abolition movement despite the sort of like heterogeneous nature of the slave population?

I hope your next book about the last animal discusses the potential parallels with factory farming.

I don't know if you mentioned what numbers you said, but I think it was like 10 to 20 percent of the population under the Roman Empire was enslaved or whatever the number is there.

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