Both "The Chapter Ends," allegedly part of Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History, and "The Star Plunderer," which was definitely incorporated into Anderson's Technic History, refer to Sol City and the First Empire even though, as the Technic History developed, its Imperial capital came to be called Archopolis, not Sol City. In both cases, Anderson projected an empire with slaves into the future although the concepts later diverged. In the Technic History, slaves came to be rationalized as convicted criminals coerced to do useful work or to provide personal services whereas, in "The Chapter Ends," slaves were clearly, like those in the Roman Empire, prisoners from conquered territories forced into life-long servitude:
"...here the slaves had lived and worked and sometimes wept..."
-Poul Anderson, "The Chapter Ends" IN Anderson, The Complete Psychotechnic League (Riverdale, NY, July 2018, pp. 195-215 AT pp. 209-210.
Different future histories: different concepts.
14 comments:
Slavery fills about the same function (in a macroeconomic sense) as wage labor. Again in a macroeconomic sense, both have disadvantages and advantages. Wage labor is safer, for example.
Wage laborers can buy the products that they and others make whereas slaves just produce for their owner's consumption.
Paul: well, no.
Slaves have to eat and have clothing and so forth; and apart from domestic service and prestige display, it's generally not worth the cost and bother of supervision unless they're producing goods for -sale-.
Certainly -large scale- chattel slavery, where it's a significant proportion of the labor force, requires a monetized market economy, generally speaking.
Throughout most of the period when chattel slavery was widespread, productivity was low enough that most of a slave's labor-time was spent growing their own food and making their own clothes and building their own housing and doing general maintenance.
That was true on most plantations even in the antebellum South in the US -- and that was a quite advanced economy with railroads, steam water transport, telegraphs and so forth.
Slavery and wage labor are alternative modes of running a commercial economy.
Things like European serfdom were developed in much more weakly developed economies, closer to subsistence, where supervised production was not generally worth the trouble. They were 'tributary' arrangements imposed on economies characterized by
small-scale household production.
When economies became more advanced and monetized, serfdom either generally decayed (most of Western Europe) or was 'pushed' towards something closer to slavery (much of Eastern Europe).
In fact, medieval western/northern Europe, the 'hearthlands' of European feudalism, was the first large area in human history to actually completely abolish chattel slavery, as opposed to the many where it existed but wasn't very socially important.
(The next was Japan -- Shogun Toyotomi Hideyoshi abolished it there in 1590.)
Paul: I'd add that wage laborers were, generally speaking, rarely able to buy more than the essentials until historically quite recently.
If you look at Cato the Elder's agricultural management treatise ("De Agri Cultura") you'll find that the rations he recommends for rural slave workers are actually higher than those Italian farmworkers in Apulia received in the 19th century.
And Cato the Elder was a notoriously brutal skinflint.
For that matter, periodic malnutrition was common among about half the population of -Britain- until the 1940's -- hence the 5-inch increase in average heights since then among the lower classes.
In 1914, the sons of members of the House of Lords were, on average, 4-5 inches taller than the children of the poor in England when they each turned 19; they thought it was hereditary, but it was actually mostly differences in nutrition, with differential disease environments as a secondary cause.
And that was in one of the most advanced and prosperous countries on earth, the home of the Industrial Revolution, -and- after a long period of increasing real wages and increased consumption of imported foodstuffs. Also one where there hadn't been actual starve-to-death famines since the 1600's (that's England, I'm referring to, of course.)
Side note: 'serfdom' in eastern Europe was often, by the 18th century, quite close to actual chattel slavery, with serfs expected to spend up to 6 days a week working on the lord's land -- that was because of increased agricultural exports there, mostly, which made 'estate farming' profitable.
In Russia, serfs were functionally slaves: they could be sold separately from land and put to work at anything their master wanted. You'd see advertisements for various types of laborer to be sold in Russian newspapers of the time, and visitors commonly reported 'serfs' used as wagers in card games and so forth.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And that makes Alexander II's achievement in managing to abolish serfdom/slavery by 1861 all the more amazing if it had become so deeply rooted in Russia! He COULDN'T just abolish it by unilateral ukase--he had to argue, bargain, offer compromises, etc., to do that.
Your other comments about slavery were also very interesting!
Merry Christmas! Sean
Wow, thanks.
Famine gradually died out in various parts of Western Europe at different times, with an intermediate stage of periodic "dearth" -- food shortages marked by sharply increased prices and increased mortality.
Not strictly death by starvation, but deaths caused by malnutrition weakening the immune system, especially among the very young, the very old, and other vulnerable groups.
In England, the last real famines were in the late 1500's.
After that, transport costs dropped enough and the economy became 'marketized' enough that food automatically and effectively flowed from areas of low prices to those of higher prices fast enough that supply evened out over the whole country. And a sustained rise in food prices produced agricultural improvements that heightened productivity, so that even during the Napoleonic Wars there was enough, if only just. It helped that by the early 1600's England, uniquely, didn't have a 'peasant' class any more, being socially divided into large landowners, capitalist tenant farmers, and landless laborers.
"Dearths" in England gradually diminished over the course of the 17th century, barring a sharp uptick in the Civil War period.
It helped that until the 1750's, England as a whole was usually a surplus food producer.
Lowland Scotland followed the same trajectory with remarkable speed after the Union of the Crowns in 1707 -- the Highlands were different, in some respects more like Ireland. But integration was far enough advanced by the 1840's that the potato blight didn't produce actual starvation there.
The lowlands went from rather agriculturally backward by English standards in the early 1700's to being more modern than the English countryside by 1800, compressing changes that had taken 300 years and more in England in to less than 100 years.
The Netherlands were somewhat earlier because of their earlier commercial revolution; by the 1600's, they were importing grain and their own farmers were specializing in truck and dairy.
Other countries followed more patchily -- France in the 18th century, though "Dearths" persisted there until the end of the Napoleonic period. Sweden had its last killing famine in the 1860's.
Famine (except the wartime variety) then gradually retreated east and south.
Roman note: during the "high Empire", basically from Augustus to Marcus Aurelius, the Mediterranean Basin showed the same pattern of fairly uniform grain prices as England did by the 1600's -- but over a vastly larger area.
That is, grain prices everywhere from what's now Portugal to what's now Syria-Lebanon-Israel-Egypt were pretty much the same: they were those in the city of Rome, minus transport costs between that place and Rome.
Local harvests produced local fluctuations, but they damped out -- high prices in any given location sucked in supplies from elsewhere.
The financial system was sophisticated enough, information flowed rapidly enough, and transport was good enough that scarcities produced fairly immediate inflows.
That's an astonishing accomplishment for that early in history; nothing similar happened there until the late 19th century.
The Roman peace helped, a fairly uniform money system helped, and the Roman governmental-social system helped by encouraging widespread investment in things like harbors and roads and municipal granaries.
Roman harbors were often bigger and better-equipped in 150 CE than any in the same area would be again until the 1880's, and other things were in parallel -- frex, nearly all cities kept substantial grain reserves in storage at all times, rotating it through so that at any given point there would be at least several months supply on hand.
Wages (in terms of how many hours to buy a given parcel of foods) also tended to equalize in the Roman Mediterranean. Food prices were lower in Egypt (a major grain exporter) but so were wages, roughly in proportion. Big urban areas had a slight advantage in terms of 'real' wages, just about enough to keep people moving to them despite their demographic disadvantages (higher death rates, particularly for children).
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Fascinating comments, both about famines/dearths in early modern/modern Europe and the economy of the high Empire. Even if the peoples living in those eras had not worked out, intellectually, the basic principles of free enterprise economics (as Adam Smith was to do), they were reasoning, acting, and reacting to events along those lines.
Merry Christmas! Sean
Sean: the thing about market pricing signals and comparative advantage is that they operate on you whether you're conscious of them or not.
That is to say, they're not like a municipal parking regulation. They're more like gravity or the inverse square law.
Incidentally, the deal Artorius describes Josephus making in ch. 4 is a compact exposition of the role that an intermediary plays in an aggregating exchange, and why people are willing to pay for that.
Sean: though to be fair, the Romans were fully aware that removing burdens from and obstacles to exchange was mutually beneficial, and that the Pax Romana did so on a large scale.
In 150 CE, you could buy ornamental stone for a fancy floor for your house that originated in a quarry in Bithhynia (modern Turkey) or Egypt in Londinium, in Britannia.
It was going to be a -long, long- time before that was possible again!
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree, people in Roman times were fully capable of using pricing/market signals that benefited themselves AND others. No need to bother with long exploded stuff about the labor theory of value or "labor power."
Merry Christmas! Sean
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