Social effects of "industrial" ancient rome

[Maburo]

There have been over the years several posts talking about ramifications of what if Hero of Alexandria had seen that the main idea behind his Aeolipile could be applied to production. Analysis on this forum then tends to either focus on the technical feasibility of Romans actually being able to produce steam engines with the materials they had access too, or on their easy path to total world domination.

I instead want to focus on how this would affect Roman social and economic structures.

Who would own these steam engines? The state? Patritians?
What sectors of the economy would probably be the first to benefit from steam engines? Agriculture? Mining? Transport? Manufacturing?
Would whoever owns the steam engines just try and continue to do whatever the roman economy was doing, but more efficiently, or a class of people emerge that would start using these machines for the mass production of commodities, and therefore seek new markets to for said commodities?
What consequences would steam engines have on slavery? Would steam engines replace slave labour, or at least, reduce the demand for slaves? What social consequences could this have? If demand for slaves is reduced, what would happen to all the former slaves?

 

[CaptainCalvert]

I recall that evidence of very large water powered mills (so not charming rural water mills but huge industrial scale ones) was uncovered a few years back in Rome which were linked to the need to provide flour for the very large population.
This suggests that the imagination, organisational and technological capacity existed to provide services beyond what craft scale and human powered industry could provide.
The absence of greater use of what we'd consider industrial scale operations says that either existing processes were good enough or that the flour mills were pushing the technology and systems to their limits. If either of these hold true, then steam power wouldn't make a difference.
There is also the issue of fuel. While water based industry merely needs the rain to fall, a steam powered one also needs fuel. Providing enough fuel for cooking, heating local industries in acity as large as Rome must already have been a challenge (finding forests or accessible coal, extracting, preparing and transporting it). Adding in additional demand for fuel for steam power may have been a step too far.
A final consideration is that it took a while for steam power to have much application - early on it was very inefficient, required considerable development in manufacturing and materials to cope with pressures. Would the very practical Romans be willing to adopt experimental technology at an early stage without compelling reasons?

In short, the scale of industry required to justify development of steam in ancient times may well have made it impractical.

 

[Flavius Iulius Maiorianus]

I recall that evidence of very large water powered mills (so not charming rural water mills but huge industrial scale ones) was uncovered a few years back in Rome which were linked to the need to provide flour for the very large population.
This suggests that the imagination, organisational and technological capacity existed to provide services beyond what craft scale and human powered industry could provide.
The absence of greater use of what we'd consider industrial scale operations says that either existing processes were good enough or that the flour mills were pushing the technology and systems to their limits. If either of these hold true, then steam power wouldn't make a difference.
There is also the issue of fuel. While water based industry merely needs the rain to fall, a steam powered one also needs fuel. Providing enough fuel for cooking, heating local industries in acity as large as Rome must already have been a challenge (finding forests or accessible coal, extracting, preparing and transporting it). Adding in additional demand for fuel for steam power may have been a step too far.
A final consideration is that it took a while for steam power to have much application - early on it was very inefficient, required considerable development in manufacturing and materials to cope with pressures. Would the very practical Romans be willing to adopt experimental technology at an early stage without compelling reasons?

In short, the scale of industry required to justify development of steam in ancient times may well have made it impractical.

I would generally agree, but I would like to say that those watermills were not the absolute limit of Roman technology; Indeed, they were able to apply water power to great effect in the Spanish mines, mechanizing the process to a great extent. For example, they used water to aid in extracting the ore, but also for processing it. Over the course of a few centuries the Romans washed away an entire mountain from their water-powered mining. Lead pollution levels from their mining were so vast that it took until the 18th century for it to reach similar levels. I think the failure of the Roman Empire to industrialize can be chalked up to several factors:

1. Lack of a pressing need. Britain industrialized right around the real start of their conquest of India and the eviction of the French and any other European rivals from the area. This gave them massive access to Indian cotton and silks, and this massive amount of raw materials helped to fuel their textile industry.
2. Relatively expensive coal. Coal was very abundant in Britain, and the deforestation of the island meant that coal was widely used as a cheap source of energy. This also fed into the first reason; The British needed a way to pump out their coal mines, so using a coal-powered steam pump made sense. The Romans didn't have the same need or abundance of coal.
3. Technical ability. The Romans just didn't have good enough metallurgy to produce a functioning steam engine, and they had multiple other challenges to overcome as well, such as a lack of rubber. Related to this point was the lack of a scientific revolution and the printing press. Now, the Romans were not unscientific as many claim, but their science was not on the level of early modern European science. Also related to this is a lack of patent laws; Without a way to protect new inventions, there wasn't as much of a drive to innovate, though again, the Romans did produce a number of inventions and innovations.

Now, I believe that none of these are insurmountable. I believe a Roman industrial revolution is possible. It would require some major PoDs, but I don't think it's ASB. Here are some things that people like to say stopped an industrial revolution that are incorrect:

1. Lack of innovation. This is blatantly false. Under the Romans waterwheels spread all throughout Europe. There were advances in agricultural production. Old inventions were put to new uses. And there were plenty of highly impressive gadgets that had economic potential that wasn't fully realized. Roman science was also quite advanced for the time, possibly the most advanced in the world until the scientific revolution.
2. Slavery. The idea goes that because there were slaves, the Romans didn't innovate and couldn't have had a capitalistic economy required for industrialization. The idea that slavery stops labor-saving inventions is an unfounded myth. The cotton gin revitalized slavery in the United States by making labor much more efficient. And we can see that despite having slaves, the Romans also mechanized their mines in Spain. You can look at the Barbegal mill complex for further proof. And the peak of slavery was in the late republic; By the time of the Principate slaves as a share of the workforce were declining, and free labor was very common. Slaves didn't dominate the workforce in the Principate like they did in the late republic. In addition, Roman slavery was different in a lot of ways from American slavery.
3. Lack of elite interest in either science and technology or profits and trade. Neither of these are true. Roman elites demonstrated plenty of interest in science, to the point of watching public lectures in the streets and talking about it at dinner parties. And they certainly wished to make a profit; Several agricultural writings attest to the desire to make estates as profitable as possible. Roman elites also financed trade quite often.
4. Lack of economic sophistication. This might be true to some extent, but the Romans did have quite an advanced banking system for the time that wasn't too far off from 18th century London or Amsterdam, and was likely more sophisticated than French banks in the 18th century. They might have even had early joint stock companies. Likewise, the idea that the vast majority of the population were a bunch of starving peasants barely above subsistance level is quite wrong. There is evidence of rural Romans eating meat, investing in their land, producing crops specifically for the market, lending money to each other, going into cities for work, using coins regularly, and even having spices all the way from India. There is much evidence for rural villages prospering well into late antiquity, which many houses having multiple stories and having fully tiled roofs, a rarity in medieval western Europe.

So, going back to the OP's question, I would say that if the Roman Empire managed to industrialize, it would likely be Senators and Equestrians, along with the state and the emperor, owning most factories and such at first. The state would probably apply it to mining, while Senators would use industrial technology on their own estates. The pottery and glass industries would be even bigger than they were in real life, which is saying something. Depending on when this happens, the Romans might start to mass produce silk, cutting out the Persian middleman between them and China and flooding Persian and Indian markets with cheap, mass produced silks. However, I don't think Roman weaponry would become massively more effective. Even though steam power would be invented, gunpowder is hardly an obvious thing to invent.

 

[Krishna123]

The real secret is that you don’t need steam to industrialise Rome just the organisation of already realised or reachable technologies and models of social organisation….
Or something like that…

 

[Grey Wolf]

Well, how did it come in Britain? Wasn't the first MAJOR use to pump out lower levels of mines so that they could be worked? You could certainly see that being attractive to the Romans. As for the fuel aspect, we are talking about the Roman EMPIRE, so this doesn't have to be Italy, it can be in France, or in Britain, where there are coal seams near the surface, and these drift mines can then lead on to the idea of deeper coal mines for the fuel itself, in a sort of ouroboros fashion!

Once you have that up and running, then applying it to mills in places where the water is not enough, or where the flow is not constant year-round would make sense. For example, 19th century Cardiff had a giant mill in the middle of the city, but there was no water to power it, it was entirely steam-powered. The same basic idea could lead to opening up more areas for exploitation and settlement.

Once you have a stationary engine, i.e. working pumps, then you can harness this for other uses, such as a cable-railway. Wagons on rails go back a long time in history, so mechanising this to get them out faster, from deeper, more often etc would make sense.

 

[Hearkener]

Now, the Romans were not unscientific as many claim, but their science was not on the level of early modern European science.

The Romans didn't have science - they had a culture of scholarship, which is not at all the same as a developed scientific method.

I recommend this essay by Classical historian Bret Deveraux on the topic of why an industrial revolution in the Roman Empire was not actually feazible: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/

TL;DR: the inventions that enabled the IR weren't present; had they existed, the Romans would have had no use for them at any rate.

 

[Flavius Iulius Maiorianus]

The Romans didn't have science - they had a culture of scholarship, which is not at all the same as a developed scientific method.

I recommend this essay by Classical historian Bret Deveraux on the topic of why an industrial revolution in the Roman Empire was not actually feazible: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/

TL;DR: the inventions that enabled the IR weren't present; had they existed, the Romans would have had no use for them at any rate.

I would recommend Richard Carrier's book The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire regarding this topic.

Nevertheless, scholars still ask why the Romans did not hit upon the cornerstone of a true industrial revolution: industrial steam power. I suspect circumstances mattered more than ideology. Coal mining was introduced in Roman Britain only around 100 AD. Coal was then used to fuel hypocausts and forges, and heavily employed in the army, which is yet another example of a new industry launched and exploited by the Romans. But the late discovery and exploitation of coal may explain why the Romans never developed the steam engine. (...) The Romans had thus achieved all of the skills and component parts for constructing a steam engine--not only had they invented a simple steam turbine but, as Green observes, they had developed precision machinery to a remarkable level, and were using in other functions all the parts needed for a steam engine (Carrier 228-229).

Carrier goes on to speculate that because most Roman science was taking place around the Mediterranean, far from any cheap coal supplies, anyone who could have invented a steam engine didn't have easy access to cheap fuel. Because steam power was first used to pump out coal mines, any steam engine would essentially have free fuel. Because the Romans started exploiting coal only a century before their real decline began, they didn't yet have a need to drain coal mines in the same way. He speculates that had the Pax Romana continued for another century or two, such a pump may have been invented.

 

[Hearkener]

I would recommend Richard Carrier's book The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire regarding this topic.

Carrier's methodology and conclusions in this field have proven controversial and unconvincing to most ancient historians,[4][5][6] and he and his theories are often identified as fringe.[7][8] [...] in Cristian Tolsa's review of the book, he notes that Carrier's view of science as essentially unaltered since Aristotle is a reductionist view that is inaccurate of the time period and that the book has "serious anachronisms".[53] He also observes that Carrier fails to demonstrate the supposed stagnation of science from the Roman period to the modern period, but mainly assumes such is the case and relies on focusing on the advances made by pagans as enough to show that science really would have continued to grow indefinitely.[53]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Carrier, acc. 13.01.2024 19:24 CET

Carrier is a pundit. He's more concerned with making a modern political point than with actually doing historical work, at least in this field.

The Romans were a deeply spritualistic, traditionalist and superstitious culture (just like everybody else at the time), who believed that feeding chicken and cutting other animals open would reveal to them the future. They had no social or political institutions to actually investigate their beliefs, nor to improve their technological base. Philosophy, even natural philosophy, is not the same thing as scientific inquiry.

And of course the idea that Christianity is an inherently anti-intellectual entity has been so thoroughly crushed in modern historiography that it's barely worth mentioning.

 

[Flavius Iulius Maiorianus]

Carrier is a pundit. He's more concerned with making a modern political point than with actually doing historical work, at least in this field.

The Romans were a deeply spritualistic, traditionalist and superstitious culture (just like everybody else at the time), who believed that feeding chicken and cutting other animals open would reveal to them the future. They had no social or political institutions to actually investigate their beliefs, nor to improve their technological base. Philosophy, even natural philosophy, is not the same thing as scientific inquiry.

And of course the idea that Christianity is an inherently anti-intellectual entity has been so thoroughly crushed in modern historiography that it's barely worth mentioning.

Of course I find his view that Christianity is anti-intellectual to be wrong, but at the same time, the idea that the Romans did not seek to advance technology is equally dated.
file:///C:/Users/Ben/Downloads/Machines_power_and_the_ancient_economy.pdf

 

[Mildtryth]

Of course I find his view that Christianity is anti-intellectual to be wrong, but at the same time, the idea that the Romans did not seek to advance technology is equally dated.
file:///C:/Users/Ben/Downloads/Machines_power_and_the_ancient_economy.pdf

We can't access your personal files, you know. You'd do better either uploading that file somewhere and posting the link here or directing us to wherever you found that file.

 

[Flavius Iulius Maiorianus]

We can't access your personal files, you know. You'd do better either uploading that file somewhere and posting the link here or directing us to wherever you found that file.

Okay. You can read it here:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236157666_Machines_Power_and_the_Ancient_Economy

 

[omnidirectional]

Maybe Christianity takes on a more proto-Marxist bent as it recruits among unhappy industrial laborers.

 

[joyjoyjoy]

What about making this revolution start in Roman Britain?

 

[Evil Crusader]

To come back somewhat to OP's question, I believe societal changes would have to happen before the bulk of industrializing starts, for example to introduce a needed different backdrop, away from the dense urban scenarios of the apogee and into the proto-manorialism of the later Empire, hopefully encouraging experiment with new production methods as opposed to overhauling the old ones for slight gains, with a somewhat earlier extension of Roman citizenship.
There also would need to be better communication systems, to circulate necessary inventions, and institutions for intellectual property, eroding traditional elites' power.

 

[Pempelune]

Of course I find his view that Christianity is anti-intellectual to be wrong, but at the same time, the idea that the Romans did not seek to advance technology is equally dated.

I'm ever more skeptical of the notion that you need the scientific process to start an industrial revolution. Science is not necessary for most technological progress, which is obvious since there was much technological progress before the scientific method really took off. And the challenges of steam power aren't ones that you need science to solve, you don't need great understanding of thermodynamics or fluid mechanics to make a steam engine, the challenges are mostly of engineering and the Romans were able engineers.

 

[Flavius Iulius Maiorianus]

I'm ever more skeptical of the notion that you need the scientific process to start an industrial revolution. Science is not necessary for most technological progress, which is obvious since there was much technological progress before the scientific method really took off. And the challenges of steam power aren't ones that you need science to solve, you don't need great understanding of thermodynamics or fluid mechanics to make a steam engine, the challenges are mostly of engineering and the Romans were able engineers.

That is also true. I feel like economic and technological factors more than anything led to the industrial revolution.

 

[DJ03]

the idea that the Romans did not seek to advance technology is equally dated.

that's not what @Hearkener said, though

 

[Hearkener]

Of course I find his view that Christianity is anti-intellectual to be wrong, but at the same time, the idea that the Romans did not seek to advance technology is equally dated.

"Seeking to advance technology" still isn't science. Chimpanzees and crows do this as well, and both species are highly receptive for technological solutions to problems, yet we'd be hard pressed to call that scientific inquiry. The scientific method is actually a very specific system of thought that only arose during the European enlightenment.

Obviously the Romans had a developed culture of scholarship, inherited from the Greeks, Egyptians and Akkadians. But this scholarship was largely devoid of a systematized basis and relied more on compiling data the scholar considered relevant, to then be united on what felt intuitively right to them. Hence we have solid works like Euclidian geometry, which, while incomplete and partially wrong, do stand the test of time, and nonsense like Tacitus Germania.

 

[Maburo]

So, going back to the OP's question, I would say that if the Roman Empire managed to industrialize, it would likely be Senators and Equestrians, along with the state and the emperor, owning most factories and such at first. The state would probably apply it to mining, while Senators would use industrial technology on their own estates.

Thank you for your answer! Do you reckon youd mostly have slaves working with the machines under the state and senators, or would a new proto-proletariatish class emerge?

The pottery and glass industries would be even bigger than they were in real life, which is saying something. Depending on when this happens, the Romans might start to mass produce silk, cutting out the Persian middleman between them and China and flooding Persian and Indian markets with cheap, mass produced silks. However, I don't think Roman weaponry would become massively more effective. Even though steam power would be invented, gunpowder is hardly an obvious thing to invent.

Yeah I agree that I dont think weaponry would be the most effected, though I am interested in what mass produced silks would mean for Persia and India

 

[Flavius Iulius Maiorianus]

Thank you for your answer! Do you reckon youd mostly have slaves working with the machines under the state and senators, or would a new proto-proletariatish class emerge?

Yeah I agree that I dont think weaponry would be the most effected, though I am interested in what mass produced silks would mean for Persia and India

I think there would be some slaves mixed with a lot of free workers. In OTL Roman slavery, while far from benign, was more open than American slavery, and more conducive to a labor market.

Mass produced silks are bad news for China, since Rome could just flood Persia and India with silks that are much cheaper than Chinese versions. The sheer volume of silk an industrial Rome could produce would make it commonplace, and seriously drive down prices. Even if Chinese silk remains superior in quality, they will have a very niche market.

Edit: There are a few military advantages Rome would gain from industrialization. First off, their population and thus manpower would massively increase until sufficient development drives birth rates down. Second, an industrial revolution would likely mean improved metallurgy, which means better armor and weapons. Industrialization would also probably eventually bring faster transportation and communication than their opponents. They would also have far more money to throw at a given war than any hypothetical pre industrial opponent (I don't see anyone else industrializing for at least a century).