How Prosperous were the Romans?

[Kosmo]

The study is made about unskilled males and it is very possible that the social position of this category will be different in widely different societies especially because in the case of romans existed a massive group below them, the slaves, that probably pushed the price for unskilled labor very low. I also doubt that unskilled wage earning laborers were a numerically significant group in roman society so their fate does not tell us much about the economic level of the empire.

 

Certainly, unskilled workers constitute the bulk of the working population of any pre-industrial society. So their wages would provide information regarding overall productivity. Slavery didn't reduce the wages of unskilled workers directly, they would only do that if the existence of slavery inflated the supply of unskilled labor relative to skilled labor, if slavery didn't exist (i.e. if many slaves wouldn't become unskilled laborers), but that's improbable as the vast majority of workers were unskilled workers.

 

The bulk of the population was rural (maybe 80% or more) and I don't believe peasants can be called unskilled workers especially because they were rarely wage workers in preindustrial societies. They can more easily be described as tenants, small landowners, people with rights on community lands, long term skilled employees and a myriad other relations that created a very complicated rural system of land and labor relations before capitalism. Probably the only unskilled workers employed in farming were those used for occasional, larger projects or for seasonal work like harvest when the usual resources of labor were insufficient.

The study exemplifies unskilled workers as " i.e. farm labourers, camel and mule drivers, water carriers, and sewer cleaners". With the exception of the farm laborers I mentioned above the other categories don't look large enough to have an impact.

Slavery can reduce the price of labor because removes choice (for example many freeman could refuse to do a work like sewer cleaning pushing the wage up but a slave can be forced to do it) and because they can be kept at a subsistence minimum. Of course this must be correlated with the price of slaves and the ability to control them.

 

The bulk of farm laborers were unskilled workers, because they didn't have much human capital invested. What is human capital? A skilled worker may know how to read, a unskilled don't. Human capital is the capital invested in education and courses. Workers would be skilled or not depending on their human capital invested. If they are wage laborers or tenants or small landholders, it doesn't matter according to this definition. They are workers as long as they are a part of the workforce, they don't need to be a part of the labor market.

 

The article you posted is a very good narrative overview of roman economy, but with not enough data to prove the statements made.

 

 

Reading did not had much to do with the practical professional skills that were transmitted through generations or apprenticeship. A peasant needed and had the skills to grow plants, raise livestock, do home industry etc. Even if they did not get a diploma they had some informal education. The level of skill of peasants has always been (and still is in areas where agriculture is not industrialized) a key factor in rural output. Not anybody can be a succesful peasant, one needs an investment in human capital for that, otherwise he can be used only for digging ditches or picking fruit.

 

The graph that shows romans had 10 times the number of shipwrecks than the Mediterranean at the hight of the Italian merchant republics is shocking. Either they were the worst sailors ever or we have no idea on the scale of shipping they did.

[Guaporense]

Reading did not had much to do with the practical professional skills that were transmitted through generations or apprenticeship. A peasant needed and had the skills to grow plants, raise livestock, do home industry etc. Even if they did not get a diploma they had some informal education. The level of skill of peasants has always been (and still is in areas where agriculture is not industrialized) a key factor in rural output. Not anybody can be a succesful peasant, one needs an investment in human capital for that, otherwise he can be used only for digging ditches or picking fruit.

 

That's true. Not all knowledge is based on formal education. It is not correct to classify all workers without formal education as unskilled laborers.

 

The graph that shows romans had 10 times the number of shipwrecks than the Mediterranean at the hight of the Italian merchant republics is shocking. Either they were the worst sailors ever or we have no idea on the scale of shipping they did.

 

Ancient Roman cities were much bigger than mediterranean cities of the 12-13th centuries. The largest mediterranean cities of the middle ages had 100,000 inhabitants, Venice and Genoa, while in the first century Rome had 1 million, Alexandria, Antioch and Cartage each had around a half a million. The 5 largest cities in the Roman Empire in 100 CE had around the same aggregate size as the 4-5 largest cities in the world in 1700 CE.

 

According to this site: http://www.tulane.edu/~august/H303/handouts/Population.htm

The populations of the largest cities in the early Roman Empire were these:

 

Rome - 1,000,000

Alexandria - 500,000-750,000

Carthage - 350,000-500,000

Antioch - 350,000-500,000

Ephesus - 350,000-500,000

 

total: 2,550,000-3,250,000

 

average: 2,900,000

 

While according to Chandler's "4000 years of urban growth", the population of the largest cities in the world in 1700 CE were:

 

Istanbul - 700,000

Edo - 688,000

Beijing - 650,000

London - 550,000

Paris - 530,000

 

total: 3,118,000

 

Keith Hopkins said that in his article on the political economy of the roman empire, that the cost of transport by sea was 50-60 times cheaper than by land during ancient times. So these huge cities had to be feed on grain carried by sea, since transporting the food by land over hundreds of miles would be unfeasible. Huge merchant fleets kept those cities alive. Literary accounts said that some merchant ships carried over 100,000 amphorae, that would mean ships of 4-5 thousand tons of more. Larger than many merchant ships of the early 19th century.

 

It would be only natural that commercial activity in the mediterranean would be 10 times greater than during the middle ages. The size of the urban economy (i.e. the economy that doesn't depend only on subsistence production, but also production for the market) in the Roman empire was very large if compared to other pre-industrial societies.

Edited April 3, 2011 by Guaporense

[Guaporense]

This is a graph on the shipwreck data with the lead pollution data, the two are very strongly correlated. The lead pollution data was extracted from a lake in Italy. Levels of lead pollution indicate levels of lead production as ancient smelting resulted in the emission of a part of lead production. Lead was a by-product of silver production and therefore indicate levels of silver production. Since silver was the standards money of the time, silver supply reflects the overall demand for money and hence reflects the level of commercial activity:

 

source: Ian Morris, Social Development, page 46, on IanMorris.com.

 

Also I have gathered the shipwreck data broken by 20 year periods instead of 100 year periods:

 

from Quantifying the Roman Economy, page 221

 

Shows a bit greater resolution.

Edited April 5, 2011 by Guaporense

[grimcrazy]

I think the shipwreck data is originally from the 1980s. Wasn't there a problem that medieval ships used barrel containers and early Roman ships carried a lot of pottery amphoras as cargo?

 

So early Roman shipwrecks are a lot easier to find and date?

[Virgil61]

As an interesting exercise to compare alongside the other data posted here is a graph on coin hoards & warfare in the Republic from an article (pdf) Scheidel co-authored. I think there was a thread on this a year or two ago.