Kyle Harper

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.

And then with ups and downs and really important changes along the way for centuries and centuries.

I'm very big proponent of the idea that you have to have both, right?

You have to have a source of slaves.

And after the conquest stops,

the Romans figure out other sources of slaves.

And if anything, the demand is equally or perhaps even more important, because if there's not a mechanism, if there's not institutions that let you turn this kind of exploitation into cash flow, the institution's not going to go very far.

And so it really is the institutions, the presence of markets where you can

You can take labor and turn it into profit.