Controlling workers: slavery and labour management

Detail

Slavery as a normal institution

• Slavery was deeply rooted in the Mediterranean and the Near East long before Rome. It was not seen as strange or wrong.
• Christianity did not end it. Even after Christianity became the state religion, the Church did not seriously attack slavery as an institution.
• Roman Italy from about the 2nd century BCE to the 4th century CE was a full slave society — one of the few in world history. [2]
• The supply came from war. Long wars of conquest in Spain and the eastern Mediterranean in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE sent a flood of captives into Italy, who were put to work growing olives and grapes — the crops behind much of the wealth of the late Republic and the early empire. [2]

But slaves were not the bulk of imperial labour

• The big picture matters. Heavy slave use may be true for Republican Italy, not for the whole empire.
• Under Augustus, Italy had about 3 million slaves out of a population of 7.5 million.

• That ratio does not hold for Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor or North Africa.

• Slaves were an investment, like cattle or tools. Buying one cost money up front, so owners did hard sums before buying.

• A Roman writer advised against using slaves where:
• large numbers of hands were needed for a short time (harvests), or
• health risk was high (malarial land) — a dead slave was lost capital.

• This was cold economics, not kindness.

• Peace cut the slave supply. By the first century the wars of conquest had mostly stopped, so fewer captives came in. Employers reacted in two ways:

• Slave breeding — raising slaves at home.

• Cheaper wage labour — a wage worker can be sent away when work ends; a slave must be fed all year round.

• Result: free wage labour built Rome's public works, and slaves slowly disappeared from farming in later centuries, at least in the eastern provinces.

• Slaves and freedmen as managers. Owners used slaves and freedmen (slaves who had been set free) as business managers, sometimes handing them capital to run a business. So a slave could hold real economic power while still being property.

The Pedanius Secundus episode

• Pedanius Secundus, the City Prefect of Rome, was murdered by one of his own slaves.
• Old Roman custom said every slave under his roof must be executed — a collective punishment.
• Crowds rioted in the streets to stop it. Ordinary people felt more pity than the elite did.
• The emperor Nero had to line the execution route with troops to push the sentence through.
• Source for the story: the historian Tacitus. Lesson for the exam: public feeling could be softer than elite law.

Labour management — the agricultural writers

• Columella (first century CE, from southern Spain / Roman Baetica) wrote a manual on farming.
• His surviving work is De re rustica, in 12 books, plus De arboribus ("On Trees"), a piece of an earlier work. He wrote it hoping to make Romans love farming and simple country life. [3]
• Keep spare tools — twice what you need. His reason is pure accounting: "the loss in slave labour-time exceeds the cost of such items." Idle workers cost more than spare spades.
• Supervision is everything — for free and slave workers alike.

• Squads of ten. Break the workforce into small gangs so a supervisor can spot who is slacking.

• Pliny the Elder condemned slave gangs as the worst way to produce anything.

• Gang slaves were chained by the feet.

• Pliny's Natural History Book XVIII is the farming book — crop rotation, farm management, crop names. [4]

• Cato, Varro and Columella all assumed a slave workforce was economically good. On big estates a bailiff (often himself a slave) ran everything, with slaves in gangs given fixed jobs. [2]

• Latifundia (very large Roman estates worked by many slaves or peasants) grew from land confiscated from conquered communities from the early 2nd century BCE. By the 3rd century CE they had largely replaced the small farm in Italy and the provinces. On the estate stood the villa; slaves were counted together with the cattle and farm tools as movable property. [2]

The tightest control of all — Alexandria

• The frankincense factories (officinae) of Alexandria had the strictest system known.
• Controls on workers leaving:
• Aprons sealed shut.
• Masks or close-mesh nets put on their heads.

• Full strip-search before anyone walked out.

• Reason: frankincense was tiny, light and very costly — easy to steal.

Coercion of free workers

• Free does not mean unforced. Much late-Roman labour control fell on free people.
• Early third century — an edict deals with Egyptian peasants deserting their villages to escape farm work.
• Law of 398 CE — allows branding of workers, so runaways could be recognised and returned.
• Fake debt contracts — employers wrote work agreements as debt contracts, so leaving the job became a crime of unpaid debt.
• A contemporary line: "thousands surrender themselves to work in servitude, though they are free."
• Debt bondage — the poor took loans to survive and then worked off the debt, sometimes for life.
• Augustine's letters show parents selling their children into 25-year servitude.
• Jewish revolt of 66 CE — rebels burned the moneylenders' bond papers first, to win mass support. Debt was that hated.

Not all labour was coerced

• The emperor Anastasius built the frontier city of Dara in under three weeks, by attracting workers from all over the east with high wages — proof that a free labour market existed and worked fast.
• Papyri (documents written on papyrus, mostly from Egypt) show wage labour was widespread in the eastern Mediterranean by the sixth century.

Prelims Hooks

• Under Augustus, Italy had about 3 million slaves in a population of 7.5 million.
• Pedanius Secundus was City Prefect; Nero lined the execution route with troops after riots; the source is Tacitus.
• Columella came from southern Spain; his surviving manual is De re rustica in 12 books. [3]
• Columella's rule: keep a reserve stock of tools twice the need; organise workers in squads of ten.
• Pliny the Elder called slave gangs the worst method of production; gang slaves were chained by the feet. His farming material is Natural History Book XVIII. [4]
• Frankincense officinae of Alexandria: sealed aprons, head nets/masks, strip-search on exit.
• A law of 398 CE allowed branding of workers so runaways could be identified.
• Anastasius built Dara in under three weeks using high wages, not force.
• Latifundia began with land confiscated from conquered communities in the early 2nd century BCE and had replaced the small farm by the 3rd century CE. [2]
• In the Jewish revolt of 66 CE, rebels burned moneylenders' bonds.

Mains Points

• "Slave economy" is too simple a label for the empire. Numbers were high in Republican Italy, but across three continents wage labour, tenants and debt-bonded free workers mattered more. Use the cost-of-feeding-year-round argument to explain why employers shifted to wages once war captives dried up.
• Coercion moved from status to contract. As chattel slavery shrank, control of free labour grew — desertion edicts, branding (398 CE), debt contracts, child sale. The line between slave and free blurred from the free side downward, pointing towards later serfdom and the colonate.
• Management technique, not just brutality. Columella's spare-tools rule, close supervision and squads of ten show a Roman idea of productivity and supervision costs. Compare with modern factory discipline; note Pliny's view that chained gangs were economically bad, not just cruel.
• Religion and social reform. Christianity as state religion changed rituals and elites but left slavery intact — useful for any answer on whether religion drives social change or adapts to existing structures.