Could Rome Have Had an Industrial Revolution?

Roman Economic Prosperity

For decades, historians were deeply skeptical of the potential of the ancient world to generate sustained economic growth. Influenced by Moses Finlay and Karl Polanyi, historians saw the ancient and modern worlds as separated by a cultural and economic chasm. Prior to the Industrial Revolution-era leaping of this chasm, individuals supposedly lacked “economic rationality,” did not seek opportunities to maximize profit, and were disinclined to use new technology for economic purposes.

Jongman’s chapter provides evidence of intensified coal production, pollution, building construction, and animal consumption. I’ve reproduced one of his figures. It depicts the rapid increase in pottery shards from Netturo (approximately 50 km south of Rome) in these centuries.

But at even the Roman empire at its peak in the reign of Marcus Aurelius does not appear to have been on the verge of modern economic growth. Rome lacked some of the crucial characteristics of Britain on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. There was no culture of invention and discovery, no large population of skilled tinkerers or machine builders, and no evidence of labor scarcity that might have driven the invention of labor-saving inventions.

The Roman Counter-Factual

Craft’s point is that the timing of Industrial Revolution was partly random and, in the absence of repeated experiments, we will never have precise causal estimates of the impact of any single factor that distinguished 18th century England, from France, Qing China, or indeed ancient Rome. All that we can say is that the balance of probabilities was such so as to make an economic breakthrough much more likely in 18th century Europe than in China or the ancient world.

Likely is not certain, however. And unlikely is not impossible or inconceivable. At the very least, the new archeological evidence should prompt us to upgrade our assessments of ancient ingenuity and prosperity. So perhaps a Roman Industrial Revolution was not inconceivable? If we accept this, Dale provides an intriguing alternative path for Roman economic development.

Historians have long argued that the ubiquity of the chattel slavery was an insurmountable barrier to the adoption of labor-saving technology. In response to this argument, Dale locates her Roman Industrial Revolution in the early and mid-2nd century BCE, before the large-scale influx of slaves from the conquests of Greece, Carthage, and Gaul. The Middle Republic provides a window in which, she argues, it is plausible to imagine a machine-based culture taking root. In the world Dale envisions, an industrialized Roman empire then follows a British-style path towards a constitutional monarchy (under Augustus).

The technological development path, she describes, sees the Romans push ahead in medicine and biology. In this scenario, Rome benefits from a technology trajectory that takes place in the absence of Christianity with its prohibition on dissecting human bodies. A point of tension in the novel is the Roman occupier’s sanguine building of an abortion clinic in Jerusalem, simply because this is what Romans have at home; they do not — and did not — consider abortion wrong. Here I want to ask: What do these reflections tell us about the possibilities of economic growth in the premodern world?

Three Different Views About the Origins of Modern Economic Growth

Consider some prominent views about what caused the British Industrial Revolution. At the risk of grossly simplifying matters we can put them into three bins.

First, there those who tend to think that market expansion is sufficient for sustained economic growth. Call them group 1. They will be inclined to favorably quote Adam Smith from his lectures on jurisprudence that “Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice”. Many libertarian-learning economists are in this category but few active economic historians.

Third, there are those who argue that ultimately only innovation can explain the transition to modern economic growth. This is the position of the majority of economic historians. Label them group 3. However, this third group is divided between those who seek to explain the increase in innovation in purely economic terms (3a) and those who see this as an impossible task and argue that the answer has to be sought elsewhere, perhaps in something that can be broadly defined as culture (3b).

Mapping Modern Views to the Roman Counter-Factual

Similarly, members of group 2 should recognize that the Roman empire was a coherent, capitalist, “world system”. Rome had its colonies; the core had a periphery to exploit. Recent archaeological evidence, for instance, suggests that the Roman economy was much more closely integrated with the Indian Ocean trade than we previously thought. The Roman “world” system was based around the Mediterranean economy rather than the Atlantic world, but there seems little intrinsic reason why it should have been less successful than the early modern world system in generating economic growth.

Advocates of the third position are likely to be more skeptical of a Roman Industrial Revolution. Nonetheless, those persuaded by Bob Allen’s high wage theory of the British Industrial Revolution should be at least intrigued by Dale’s alternative Roman history. Had wages been high and energy, and capital relatively cheap, would the Romans have put their engineering mindsets to the invention of steam engines and the equivalent of the spinning jenny? If factor prices were crucial to British industrialization, then could there have been a Roman industrial revolution under similar conditions?

Similarly, I am not aware of evidence of the kind of rhetorical change in attitudes towards commerce in the Rome world that McCloskey documents in the 17th century Dutch Republic or 18th century England — no new-found respect for traders and merchants, over and above soldiers and adventurers, and no evidence of lessening distain for commerce or business. If these cultural attitudes were the binding constraint in late medieval and early modern Europe, then they were equally binding in antiquity. I’ve speculated in an earlier post on the ways in which slavery and other Roman institutions reinforced a cultural ethos that was hostile to trade-based economic betterment (here). But I would be eager to read counter evidence. Perhaps specialists do know of evidence of a change in Roman attitudes to commerce during this period?

All of this suggests that a better understanding of why sustained or modern economic growth did not occur during earlier “efflorescences” can help us better understand which factors were important in the explaining the transition that did take place after 1800.

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