Kyle Harper

Well, I mean of like the greater Greek world or like individual city-states like Athens.

I mean we think of Athens as being like –

a couple hundred thousand people, like not massive.

Yeah, yeah, there's probably something to that, that like there's just not the critical mass of educated people, of like sheer cognitive power to like keep it going, yeah.

Right.

I mean, slavery, you know, tragically is a really important institution throughout history.

We sometimes tend to think of it as like a distinctly modern phenomenon, but that actually misses—

the deeper picture and in fact it obscures the importance of modern slavery because modern slavery is uniquely important and it's uniquely tied up with certain kinds of market exchange and certain kinds of production, certain kinds of racial ideologies.

There's like things about modern slavery that's really important to understand.

Those are different but not just because slavery is there.

Like slavery has this longer history and slavery is more important in some societies than others.

And we want to try and understand that to ask why and then what implications does that have for understanding those societies.

Rome is one of those societies.

Slavery is really –

a prominent institution in Rome from the late Republic.

As the Romans conquer other parts of the Mediterranean, they start taking captives as slaves en masse, and they build an economy that really relies on slave labor in important sectors of the economy.

So plantations where commodities like wine, olive oil...

are produced for market exchange that allow landowners to amass enormous amounts of wealth.

So slavery becomes this really important institution that's entangled in the development of the Roman economy from

you know, maybe the third or second century BCE.