Kyle Harper

And not all of these people would have been like plantation, you know, workers who were lashed every day and, you know, worked to the physical bone.

A lot of them are nurses and textile, you know, workers and maids and tutors and workers.

all sorts of things that are sort of quasi embedded in households as well, where there's always this weird psychological dimension too.

I mean,

And part of the strangeness of slavery is how it's deeply embedded in domestic institutions as well.

And so there's ideologies in which the paterfamilias is sort of the father and the master that sort of brainwashes – tries to brainwash people against resistance.

But it's this – like the important thing to recognize is it's just like a pervasive system that tries to colonize people's minds and pervasively tries to keep them from resisting.

It's definitely an argument that's been made.

Aldo Schiavone, who's an Italian historian, has argued that it's kind of a...

There's like a neo-Marxist tradition that argues this.

It's an interesting argument.

I don't buy it at all.

But, you know, the good version of that argument would just be that the Roman Empire is using, in fact, slaves and many of the most forward elements of the economy, too.

We tend to—

I think because we think – we know slavery is bad and we think progress and economic growth and innovation is good.

We tend to think that those things don't go together.

But in reality, it's like the most economically advanced sectors of the Roman economy that have the most –

a high degree of organization, productivity that tends to employ slaves.

And so in the Roman world, like you could make the argument that if the labor in those sectors had been free, there would have been more opportunities for positive feedback loops.

The way the argument is usually made is just that the Romans got rich without really thinking about –