Greetings Economists,
Mark Jones criticizes Carrol Cox about ancient economies,
Mark,
"This is a cavalier dismissal of how actual slave societies functioned.
Ancient Rome was a slave society."...
"...altho there were few factories such as the famous one at Nevers
in Gaul, producing so-called Samian ware in large amounts (productioon
levels of 100,000 units per month were reported)."...
"...Construction firms employed slave labour in these tasks."...
"...The extensive scale of pottery production required power credit
instutitons and an efficient banking system; leading Roman families were
deeply involved in financing the trade and giving it capital depth."...
Doyle
Marks remarks need to have certain observations made, for example, Mark uses
the word "firm" to describe something that did contruction work in the
ancient period, but the word firm itself is not what Romans would have used,
and it is unclear they would have understood a business as a firm. For
example see
http://www.csun.edu/~ms44278/ancient.htm
"The literate people of antiquity despised "labor" in any form. The law was
an honored profession-- it was virtually the only profession, aside from
war, which was presumed to be a necessity of citizenship for virtually all
men. Farming and income from land ownership were likewise acceptable, but
"Trade" was generally viewed as servile and demeaning, incompatible with
one's dignity (an attitude which lingered to the present century in both
Germany and England). Artisans and self-employed individuals got middling
levels of respect, but it was felt that only the lowest class of person
would stoop to laboring for others for wages. People who needed employment
could sell themselves into slavery, with the eventual hope of manumission
and becoming a client of an affluent patron; it was a common practice in
Roman times. "
source:
Mike Shupp
Department of Anthropology
California State University, Northridge
18111 Nordhoff Street
Northridge, California 91330
e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Doyle
Hence the conceptual basis for thinking about how a business works is not
present in the Roman concept of something that did work as Mark uses the
word firm. That is the typical capitalist understanding of work.
Mike Shupp,
Peru maintained itself as both slave state and welfare state. The blessings
of imperial rule presumably included protection against famine from
storehouses near each community, kept high on the hillsides so the peasants
working the fields would be reminded of the Inca's beneficence.5 Ordinary
Indians were effectively slaves of the Inca; they could be relocated at his
whim, their movement and daily life was regulated by the state, which took
two thirds of their crops, required them to give labor and military service,
and also taxed them to make garments for soldiers.
On the other hand, in a state without money, as Prescott muses, one could
hardly become poor by dissolute living or market speculation. And the state
was generous to those reduced to poverty by age or misfortune-- so much so
that Europeans were horrified to discover that the ill and infirm were not
dependent on their children and other kin; this was held ruinous to the
Christian notions of charity and filial affection. (Prescott 1847 : I 65)
Doyle
Secondly Mark relies upon statistics reports in ancient times but these are
notorious for their lack of planning in the sense of financial effects of
borrowing and accounting practices that we would be able to understand now.
So that the anecdotal nature of the figures, the lack of accountability to
standards etc is elided in quoting as Mark does above. And understanding of
the purpose of making money through a business is absent from the Roman
concept. See this commentary upon tribute in ancient worlds by Shupp,
Mike Shupp,
How was this all paid for? Our books are wont to refer to a rather bloodless
entity known as "the tributary mode of production", a certain form of state
finance rather like taxation, which nominally left the payers independent.
Let us restore the abstraction to life with other names: Danegeld, Ransom,
Extortion.
Of our early civilizations, only the earliest Sumerians did not exact
tribute from an empire. This was merely because they had failed to think of
the idea. They had of course looted and demanded reparations from each other
as city-states warring for supremacy, but for some reason victors drew back
from the notion of installing their own rulers in defeated cities. This
changed with Sargon of Akkad, who put his own family members into
governorships and chief priest positions in conquered lands about 2400 BC;
afterward the Mesopotamians built conventional empires as avidly as anyone
else.
The Egyptians collected tribute from time to time, but Pharaohs liked to
have things in their own hands. Tribute requires an entity capable of
paying. This lets out mobile barbarians, as a rule and requires at least
sedentary peoples. Surrounded by less-civilized peoples, it was more
convenient for the Egyptians to simply seize what they wanted. The policy
provoked some twelve centuries of conflict with their Nubian and Ethiopian
neighbors. The Chinese seem to have adopted similar practices under the
Hsia, Shang and Chou dynasties.
The most "innovative" tribute system was that of the Incas, who copied it
from elsewhere in South America: whole villages were built near the imperial
capitals to house artisans carried off from the provinces to work full time
to create luxury goods for their rulers. Young girls were taken into
"convents" to weave tapestries and make other goods for the mausoleum
temples of deceased Inca rulers; many became short term "wives" of the Inca
or his officials, returning to their communities upon retirement, where they
were supported in luxury. Each peasant family was expected to labor one day
in three for their rulers and one day in three for the benefit of the
temples; they were to provide additional labor or military service each
year, and to make garments for the army.
The Incas attempted autarky. To the extent practical, communities were
self-sufficient or reliant on supplies from imperial stocks. Luxury goods
flowed upward from producers to the rulers of the state who distributed them
to lesser nobility and foreign leaders. Markets were unknown, and trade
across state boundaries limited. Effectively, tribute was the whole of the
economy. (Earle and D'Altroy 1982)
The harshest tribute system was probably that of the Romans in the late
Republican period. Since the state workforce was no larger than that needed
for a single city until Imperial times, the tax system was "Thatcher-ized".
The Romans called for bids each year, and farmed out the provinces beyond
Italy to groups of equestrians who promised to return the most to the
treasury. How these "businessmen" obtained the money was seldom examined.
On top of this extortion, the provinces had to bear the cost of their
administration. Every Roman sent to govern a province, Cicero quipped, had
to earn three fortunes: the first to reward the senators who had elected him
to the post, the second to bribe jurors at his inevitable trial for
malfeasance, and the third for himself. On paper, Rome did not resort to war
except at the decision of the Senate, but the assorted governors,
proconsuls, procurators, and their underlings scattered across the Empire
did not hesitate to "rectify" boundaries at the expense of weaker neighbors,
nor to fight and enslave tribes across the borders-- invariably described as
"bandits" and "trouble makers"-- who chose inexplicably to dwell where
silver mines and lush vineyards which ought to belong to Romans had been
established. Julius Caesar's cold-blooded seizure of independent Gaul was a
deliberate and long continued violation of Roman law, but except in scale,
it was not unprecedented.
Doyle
Thirdly Mark says that leading Roman families were deeply involved in trade,
yet this ignores that that is exactly the limitation of how trade was done.
The families organized and controlled trade. The financial system had
little to do with organizing that. Rather, the families and the way a
family functioned was what made the trade system work. These heavily
structured any sort of understanding of what business was in ancient times.
thanks,
Doyle
