Dwarkesh

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.

But given that larger size of population.

a slave population, it's surprising to me that there's so few slave revolutions, not only in Rome, but even throughout history.

Like, there's Spartacus in 71 B.C., then there's the Haitian Revolution, I forget when, but, like, probably late 18th.

Yeah, I was 17.

Yeah, okay.

You know, if, like, 20% of the population is enslaved, like, how is this a sustainable... You know, if you're, like, running a farm and there's, like, 4,000 slaves and then, like, the next farmer over also and, like...

Why aren't there more slave rebellions?