Kyle Harper

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.

That's the most important element.

Yeah.

It's –

It's sort of like disturbing in a way, isn't it?

That humans have the ability to convince themselves that it's okay to own other human beings as property through a variety of different kinds of ideological justifications.

And you see even in the ancient world, there's different models

that people use to say that slavery is okay.

I mean, Aristotle develops a theory of natural slavery that actually some people deserve to be slaves by their very nature and that it's actually good for them to be in bondage.

What's really interesting though is that that doesn't actually ever seem to be like the dominant ideology.

The Roman ideology of slavery

is not racialized.

It's not like the Romans think that the Greeks or the Germans are like, you know, some fundamentally separate kind of human that justifies their exploitation.