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Kosmo

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Posts posted by Kosmo

  2. M?tley Crue

    in Arena

    Posted

    At the risk of admitting myself to be a failure . . . are you OK, Viggen? You seem to be speaking in tongues.

     

    Is this something to do with why I can no longer use words with accented letters, like Rhone-Alps, and Provence.

     

    Oh, does Provence have an accent? That's news! :P

     

    Only in proven?al ! :P

  15. Abandoning Rome as capital city

    in Imperium Romanorum

    Posted

    Even if the East was richer Byzantium was located in the rather poor area of Thracia and by the time of Constantine much of the Balkan region has been already raided by barbarians. Much is also made by Constantinople controlling the access to the Black Sea but by this time the goths had overtaken the Bosporan kingdom and the other cities and states on the northern shore and their ships were attacking the roman coasts and shipping. The Black Sea was a dead end and the Balkans a war zone so the capital was moved in an exposed area with little resources.

    The richest areas in the East were Egypt, Syria and Asia Minor so if the wealth of a region was the deciding factor for establishing a capital then a logical choice would have been in or between this provinces, that's why a Syrian capital would have made sense for an Eastern Empire.

    My guess is that romans did not need to move the capital where the wealth was because they were perfectly able to extract and transport resources where they needed them. The capitals were chosen closer to the borders to allow supervision of the armies (and implicit of enemies), so Byzantium and Nicomedia are in the middle of the road connecting the Danube and the Persian frontiers. In the West emperors ruled from Northern Italy and North Eastern Gaul from where they could control the Upper Danube and the Rhine limes and never took residence in the wealthiest regions like Africa, South and East Spain or Sicily.

  21. Abandoning Rome as capital city

    in Imperium Romanorum

    Posted

    Rome had the perfect location in the middle of the empire and it has lost her place as a capital for political reasons. After Pons Malvius Rome was not even the capital of Italy, northern cities like Milan, Ravenna and Pavia being preferred over her. When several capitals were chosen I don't think that the one for the East had necessarily to be at Byzantium or in the Hellespont area. Why not in the area of Greater Syria like Antioch or Cesarea?

  22. How Prosperous were the Romans?

    in Imperium Romanorum

    Posted

    The study is made about unskilled males and it is very possible that the social position of this category will be different in widely different societies especially because in the case of romans existed a massive group below them, the slaves, that probably pushed the price for unskilled labor very low. I also doubt that unskilled wage earning laborers were a numerically significant group in roman society so their fate does not tell us much about the economic level of the empire.

     

    Certainly, unskilled workers constitute the bulk of the working population of any pre-industrial society. So their wages would provide information regarding overall productivity. Slavery didn't reduce the wages of unskilled workers directly, they would only do that if the existence of slavery inflated the supply of unskilled labor relative to skilled labor, if slavery didn't exist (i.e. if many slaves wouldn't become unskilled laborers), but that's improbable as the vast majority of workers were unskilled workers.

     

    The bulk of the population was rural (maybe 80% or more) and I don't believe peasants can be called unskilled workers especially because they were rarely wage workers in preindustrial societies. They can more easily be described as tenants, small landowners, people with rights on community lands, long term skilled employees and a myriad other relations that created a very complicated rural system of land and labor relations before capitalism. Probably the only unskilled workers employed in farming were those used for occasional, larger projects or for seasonal work like harvest when the usual resources of labor were insufficient.

    The study exemplifies unskilled workers as " i.e. farm labourers, camel and mule drivers, water carriers, and sewer cleaners". With the exception of the farm laborers I mentioned above the other categories don't look large enough to have an impact.

    Slavery can reduce the price of labor because removes choice (for example many freeman could refuse to do a work like sewer cleaning pushing the wage up but a slave can be forced to do it) and because they can be kept at a subsistence minimum. Of course this must be correlated with the price of slaves and the ability to control them.

     

    The bulk of farm laborers were unskilled workers, because they didn't have much human capital invested. What is human capital? A skilled worker may know how to read, a unskilled don't. Human capital is the capital invested in education and courses. Workers would be skilled or not depending on their human capital invested. If they are wage laborers or tenants or small landholders, it doesn't matter according to this definition. They are workers as long as they are a part of the workforce, they don't need to be a part of the labor market.

     

    The article you posted is a very good narrative overview of roman economy, but with not enough data to prove the statements made.

     

     

    Reading did not had much to do with the practical professional skills that were transmitted through generations or apprenticeship. A peasant needed and had the skills to grow plants, raise livestock, do home industry etc. Even if they did not get a diploma they had some informal education. The level of skill of peasants has always been (and still is in areas where agriculture is not industrialized) a key factor in rural output. Not anybody can be a succesful peasant, one needs an investment in human capital for that, otherwise he can be used only for digging ditches or picking fruit.

     

    The graph that shows romans had 10 times the number of shipwrecks than the Mediterranean at the hight of the Italian merchant republics is shocking. Either they were the worst sailors ever or we have no idea on the scale of shipping they did.

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