LITMIR.BIZ

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in Gibbon’s words ‘the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous’.³¹

      For some two centuries, the tranquil magnificence of the urban civilization of the Roman Empire concealed the underlying limits and strains of the productive basis on which it rested. For, unlike the feudal economy which succeeded it, the slave mode of production of Antiquity possessed no natural, internal mechanism of self-reproduction, because its labour-force could never be homeostatically stabilized within the system. Traditionally, the supply of slaves largely depended on foreign conquests, since prisoners of war probably always provided the main source of servile labour in Antiquity. The Republic had sacked the whole Mediterranean for its manpower, to install the Roman imperial system. The Principate halted further expansion, in the three available remaining sectors of possible advance, Germany, Dacia and Mesopotamia. With the final closure of the imperial frontiers after Trajan, the well of war captives inevitably dried up. The commercial slave-trade could not make up for the shortages that resulted, since it had always itself been largely parasitic on military operations for its stocks. The barbarian periphery along the Empire continued to provide slaves, bought by dealers at the frontiers, but not in sufficient numbers to solve the supply problem in conditions of peace. The result was that prices started to climb sharply upwards; by the 1st and 2nd centuries A.D., they were 8 to 10 times the levels of the 2nd and 1st centuries B.C.³² This steep rise in costs increasingly exposed the contradictions and risks of slave labour for its proprietors. For each adult slave represented a perishable capital investment for the slave-owner, which had to be written off in toto at death, so that the renewal of forced labour (unlike wage-labour) demanded a heavy preliminary outlay in what had become an increasingly tight market. For, as Marx pointed out, ‘the capital paid for the purchase of a slave does not belong to the capital by means of which profit, surplus-labour, is extracted from him. On the contrary, it is capital which the slave-owner has parted with, it is a deduction from the capital which he has available for actual production.’³³ In addition, of course, the maintenance of slave offspring was an unproductive financial charge on the owner, which inevitably tended to be minimized or neglected. Agricultural slaves were housed in barrack-like ergastula, in conditions approximating to those of rural prisons. Female slaves were few, being generally unprofitable to owners because there was a lack of ready employment for them, beyond domestic tasks.³⁴ Hence the sexual composition of the rural slave-population was always drastically lopsided, and was compounded by the virtual absence of conjugality within it. The result must have been a customarily low rate of reproduction, which would have diminished the size of the labour-force from generation to generation.³⁵ To counteract this fall, slave-breeding seems to have been increasingly practised by landowners in the later Principate, who granted premia to women-slaves for child-bearing.³⁶ Although there is little evidence as to the scale of slave-breeding in the Empire, it may have been this resort which for a time mitigated the crisis in the whole mode of production after the closure of the frontiers: but it could not provide a long-term solution to it. Nor, meanwhile, was the rural free population increasing, to compensate for losses in the slave sector. Imperial anxieties about the demographic situation in the countryside were revealed as early as Trajan, who instituted public loans to landowners for the upkeep of local orphans, an omen of shortages to come.

      Nor could the dwindling volume of labour be compensated by increases in its productivity. Slave agriculture in the late Republic and early Empire was more rational and profitable to landowners than any other form of exploitation of the soil, partly because slaves could be utilized full-time, where tenants were unproductive for considerable stretches of the year.³⁷ Cato and Columella carefully enumerate all the different indoor and out of season tasks to which they could be set when there were no fields to be tilled or crops to be gathered. Slave artisans were just as proficient as free craftsmen, since they tended to determine the general level of skills in any trade by their employment in it. On the other hand, not only did the efficiency of the latifundia depend on the quality of their vilicus bailiffs (always the weak link in the fundus), but supervision of slave-labourers was notoriously difficult in the more extensive cereal crops.³⁸ Above all, however, certain inherent limits of slave productivity could never be overcome. The slave mode of production was by no means devoid of technical progress; as we have seen, its extensive ascent in the West was marked by some significant agricultural innovations, in particular the introduction of the rotary mill and the screw press. But its dynamic was a very restricted one, since it rested essentially on the annexation of labour rather than the exploitation of land or the accumulation of capital; thus unlike either the feudal or capitalist modes of production which were to succeed it, the slave mode of production possessed very little objective impetus for technological advance, since its labour-additive type of growth constituted a structural field ultimately resistant to technical innovations, although not initially exclusive of them. Thus, while it is not wholly accurate to say that Alexandrine technology remained the unchanging basis of work-processes in the Roman Empire, or that no labour-saving devices of any kind were ever introduced in the four centuries of its existence, the boundaries of the Roman agrarian economy were soon reached, and rigidly fixed.

      The insuperable social obstacles to further technical progress – and the fundamental limits of the slave mode of production – were, in fact, strikingly illustrated by the fate of the two major inventions which were recorded under the Principate: the water-mill (Palestine at the turn of the 1st century A.D.) and the reaping machine (Gaul in the 1st century A.D.). The immense potential of the water-mill – basic to later feudal agriculture – is evident enough: for it represented the first applied use of inorganic power in economic production: as Marx commented, with its appearance, ‘the Roman Empire handed down the elementary form of all machinery in the water-wheel’.³⁹ The Empire, however, made no general use of the invention itself. It was in practice ignored under the Principate; in the later Empire, its incidence was somewhat more frequent, but it never seems to have become a normal instrument of Ancient agriculture. Likewise, the wheeled harvester introduced to accelerate reaping in the rainy climate of the North, was never adopted on any scale outside Gaul.⁴⁰ Here, the lack of interest was a reflection of a wider failure to alter the methods of Mediterranean dry-soil agriculture – with its scratch-plough and two-field system – on the heavy, moist lands of Northern Europe, which needed new instruments of labour to be fully exploited. Both cases amply demonstrate that mere technique itself is never a prime mover of economic change: inventions by individuals can remain isolated for centuries, so long as the social relations have not emerged which alone can set them to work as a collective technology. The slave mode of production had little space or time for the mill or the harvester: Roman agriculture as a whole remained innocent of them to the end. Significantly, the only major treatises of applied invention or technique to have survived from the Roman Empire were military or architectural – designed essentially for its complex of weaponry and fortifications, and its repertoire of civic ornamentation.

      There was no urban salvation for the malady of the countryside, however. The Principate presided over an unprecedented range of city-building in the Mediterranean. But the quantitative expansion in the number of large and medium towns in the first two centuries of the Empire was never accompanied by any qualitative modification of the structure of overall production within it. Neither industry nor trade could ever accumulate capital or experience growth beyond the strict limits set by the economy of classical Antiquity as a whole. The regionalization of manufactures, because of transport costs, thwarted any industrial concentration and development of a more advanced division of labour in manufactures. A population overwhelmingly composed of subsistence peasants, slave-labourers and urban paupers narrowed consumer markets down to a very slender scale. Apart from the tax-farms and public contracts of the Republican epoch (whose role declined greatly in the Principate, after the Augustan fiscal reforms), no commercial companies ever developed, and funded debts did not exist: the credit system remained rudimentary. The propertied classes maintained their traditional disdain for trade. Merchants were a despised category, frequently recruited from freedmen. For manumission of administrative and domestic slaves remained a widespread practice, regularly thinning the higher ranks of the urban slave population; while the contraction of external supplies must have gradually diminished the stock of servile artisans in the cities. The economic vitality of the towns was always limited and derivative: its course reflected rather than offset

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