Was Preindustrial Europe Poor?

Knowerofall said:

I don’t call slave societies economically well-developed. And Western European nations were more prosperous in the high and late Middle Ages than when they were under Roman rule.

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I don't know about this. Roman slaves often times had greater economic and social mobility than a typical European peasant farmer. European peasants probably didn't get the same rights as Roman slaves up until the French revolution.

Teslatron said:

Roman slaves often times had greater economic and social mobility than a typical European peasant farmer

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I've heard that claim before. It's misleading. Certainly some slaves had good lives. Especially those with skills, such as say accounting, teaching, mosaic worker etc. For the majority of roman slaves, life was "nasty and brutal and short" Plus, peasant farmers had some rights, slaves had none.

The average age recorded at death of slaves in Rome was 17.2 years for males, 17.9 for females.

------The slaves (especially the foreigners) had higher mortality rates and lower birth rates than natives and were sometimes even subjected to mass expulsions.[32] The average recorded age at death for the slaves of the city of Rome was extraordinarily low: seventeen and a half years (17.2 for males; 17.9 for females)-----

Oldandeasilycofused said:

I've heard that claim before. It's misleading. Certainly some slaves had good lives. Especially those with skills, such as say accounting, teaching, mosaic worker etc. For the majority of roman slaves, life was "nasty and brutal and short" Plus, peasant farmers had some rights, slaves had none.

The average age recorded at death of slaves in Rome was 17.2 years for males, 17.9 for females.

------The slaves (especially the foreigners) had higher mortality rates and lower birth rates than natives and were sometimes even subjected to mass expulsions.[32] The average recorded age at death for the slaves of the city of Rome was extraordinarily low: seventeen and a half years (17.2 for males; 17.9 for females)-----

Slavery in ancient Rome - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

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Please take this estimate in Wikipedia with a huge grain of salt. I would venture to guess it is almost entirely bogus old 1970s source that is just a wild claim of the author. Unless you want to claim that Rome faced child armies in battle.
First of all, unlike for example American version of slavery, slaves in Rome became enslaved during different times in their lives, almost always as adults or teens, - most were captured as soldiers, children, or became slaves as punishment, etc. In fact, child slavery in Rome was not that prevalent until Pax Romana, when they couldn't actively get adult slaves from captured barbarians.
Are there any modern sources claiming this 17 year life expectancy for Roman slaves?

Teslatron said:

Are there any modern sources claiming this 17 year life expectancy for Roman slaves?

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I don't know. I found it a surprising claim too, but sounds about right as a raw figure. . Life expectancies given of most large groups of people do not usually take infant mortality into account, nor death from disease and accident (no antibiotics)

I would hazard a guess that the life of a child slave working in mines would be lower than say a domestic slave in Rome. I don't want to stray too far beyond the point; That the claim that slaves often had greater economic freedom than medieval peasants. I'm not convinced. I'm assuming the claim refers to the fact that slaves could sometimes retain part of money they earned and could sometimes buy their freedom. That was a custom, not a right as far as I know.

I would need to see some figures about the numbers of slaves and what they actually did. EG what overall percentage of slaves which worked in occupations in which earning money and buying freedom was a realistic goal.

So, it seems that claim about flexibility was truer of slaves in Rome than across the empire. Also it seems a huge difference in life expectancy.

The mean average life span of a free Roman citizen was between 30-35. Of course there would be exceptions, especially within the affluent and wealthy.

an average age of death at 17 doesn't make any economic sense
their labor had to recoup their buying price and maintenance cost before turning a profit
Slaves were a valuable commodity , all the Roman slaves were traded in the roman world from specialized merchants
or raised from infancy in the household ,
this was rather expensive having to be fed for years before being useful

sparky said:

an average age of death at 17 doesn't make any economic sense

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I just finished saying that's a raw figure. IE the mean. Things such as infant mortality and the deaths of child slaves in the mines, reduces the average. I also think there may have been a significant difference between slaves in Rome vs the rest of the empire.

sparky said:

Slaves were a valuable commodity

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We like to think so, I'm not sure a single figure is all that helpful.


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The prices which were paid for slaves during the first three centuries varied, as before, according to the age, condition, training ,physical attractiveness, etc. of each slave. The asking prices differed within each country according to the conditions prevailing in the various localities. An attempt to compare the prices prevalent in different parts of the Empire is therefore precarious, at best, in its results.

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He illustrates this point by giving the prices of slaves in different locations in the same time period and prices in subsequent years:

At Rome in the period of Augustus 500 drachmas appears in Horace as a price applicable to a cheap and worthless slave. A clever home-born slave, qualified as a reader through knowledge of Greek, might be obtained for 2000 denarii. In Egypt somewhat later a male slave cost 1000 silver drachmas. Another price paid in 5 B.C. was 1200 drachmas. For the second half of the first century A.D. three moderate prices paid for slaves are available which may be accepted as approximate indications of the custormary price level prevailing at Rome: a boy, good at imitation, purchased for 300 denarii, a slave .... of bad moral repute quoted at 600 denarii as a low price; and a male bought for 1200 denarii. In comparision with these prices stand the following from Egypt for the same period: a .... of about 8 years bought for 640 silver drachmas; sale in A.D. 85-86 of an oikogenes, presumably a very young child, at 10 talents, 3000 drachmas copper (==140 silver drachmas)...

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He goes on for another two pages but I think you get the point. This is as callous as it sounds but people viewed slaves as hetereogenous goods and thus they differed in price due geographic location, place of origin, looks, etc.

sparky said:

an average age of death at 17 doesn't make any economic sense

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I just finished saying that's a raw figure. IE the mean not the median. Thing such as infant mortality and the deaths of child slaves in the mines, reduces the average.

sparky said:

Slaves were a valuable commodity

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We like to think, so but they weren't all that valuable, taken as a whole.

Oldandeasilycofused said:

I don't know. I found it a surprising claim too, but sounds about right as a raw figure. . Life expectancies given of most large groups of people do not usually take infant mortality into account, nor death from disease and accident (no antibiotics)

I would hazard a guess that the life of a child slave working in mines would be lower than say a domestic slave in Rome. I don't want to stray too far beyond the point; That the claim that slaves often had greater economic freedom than medieval peasants. I'm not convinced. I'm assuming the claim refers to the fact that slaves could sometimes retain part of money they earned and could sometimes buy their freedom. That was a custom, not a right as far as I know.

I would need to see some figures about the numbers of slaves and what they actually did. EG what overall percentage of slaves which worked in occupations in which earning money and buying freedom was a realistic goal.

So, it seems that claim about flexibility was truer of slaves in Rome than across the empire. Also it seems a huge difference in life expectancy.

The mean average life span of a free Roman citizen was between 30-35. Of course there would be exceptions, especially within the affluent and wealthy.

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You are confusing average age and life expectancy. The average age is very low because of the high infant mortality. Typical life expectancy wasn't much lower than today.

Dan Howard said:

Typical life expectancy wasn't much lower than today.

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I'd love to see your sources for that startling claim.

Oldandeasilycofused said:

I'd love to see your sources for that startling claim.

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Taken altogether, life span in ancient Rome probably wasn’t much different from today. It may have been slightly less “because you don’t have this invasive medicine at end of life that prolongs life a little bit, but not dramatically different”, Scheidel says. “You can have extremely low average life expectancy, because of, say, pregnant women, and children who die, and still have people to live to 80 and 90 at the same time. They are just less numerous at the end of the day because all of this attrition kicks in.”

I actually looked up the original source of the average age at death claim. It comes from an analysis of gravestones with recorded ages of death. The same source notes that this is not a useful guide for calculating actual life expectancy, as comparative analysis with tombstones from Lyon in a period where we have other demographic evidence shows that they did not give accurate numbers - the tendency to record age at death varied across age groups. Young, unmarried women were significantly more likely to have their age commemorated on their tombs. The problem here is not that historians made things up in the 1970s, it's more the careless misrepresentation of what those sources actually say, which is sadly common on Wikipedia.

If Harper (the author cited in the footnote) thought this was not a good guide to life expectancy, why was he talking about it? Well, he compared the average ages calculated for freeborn people and for freed slaves with those for people who died as slaves. They are all very low - freeborn men have about 22 years and freed slaves about 25 years. The inference Harper draws from this is not that slaves actually had a life expectancy so low, but that a large proportion of slaves who made it to middle age were granted their freedom.

Dan Howard said:

Do we really live longer than our ancestors?

The wonders of modern medicine and nutrition make it easy to believe we enjoy longer lives than at any time in human history, but we may not be that special after all.

www.bbc.com

Taken altogether, life span in ancient Rome probably wasn’t much different from today. It may have been slightly less “because you don’t have this invasive medicine at end of life that prolongs life a little bit, but not dramatically different”, Scheidel says. “You can have extremely low average life expectancy, because of, say, pregnant women, and children who die, and still have people to live to 80 and 90 at the same time. They are just less numerous at the end of the day because all of this attrition kicks in.”

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The biological aging process was the same as today, thus the longest lived Roman citizen was said to have lived to 112 years, a few years less in age to the oldest living men today. Difference was that due to lack of knowledge of how disiases were transmistted and lack of refrigeration for food and in general lack of vaccinations and modern concept of hygienization, the deaths from infections illnesses were much much higher. Average live expectancy in Greece might have reached close to 40 years in the Classical Period, very high for pre-modern standards.

From: Economic Growth in Ancient Greece on JSTOR

We have the following data:



So, there was a pretty impressive increase in life expectancy in Ancient Greece, roughly from 900 BC to 400 BC. However, the most impressive piece of evidence is the level of material consumption in Classical Greece as shown by the size of the houses:



As Morris describes the evolution of housing quality in Ancient Greece:



The distribution of ground-floor area points out to a highly egalitarian level of consumption across households:



The level of inequality among citizens in Ancient Greece was similar to countries like Denmark, Norway and Sweden today. So, Classical Greece was a democratic, egalitarian, middle class society that enjoyed high level of prosperity whose fruits were enjoyed by the bulk of its population which typically resided in larger houses than Americans today. There is no evidence that a middle class societies like those existed in the Middle Ages until the flowering of the city states of Northern Italy in the Renaissance, and even then I do not expect that the general population was as prosperous as it was in Classical Greece.

In the Roman Empire the general level of prosperity was lower than the average for Classical Greece, but, for the central regions of the empire like Italy, Western Asia Minor, and Greece, archeological sites suggest that the level of prosperity per capita was similar to Classical Greece, but with more inequality and more slavery.

Oldandeasilycofused said:

He goes on for another two pages but I think you get the point. This is as callous as it sounds but people viewed slaves as hetereogenous goods and thus they differed in price due geographic location, place of origin, looks, etc.

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From those prices we may posit a guess that Romans who were buying child slaves at least expected for them to live for a few decades on average. Of course this is an assumption, but at the same time it would be weird if slaves were expected to earn more than Roman soldiers for example. This whole child mortality business skews results way too much in pre-modern age. I would expect Roman slaves, Roman average citizens, and medieval farmers to have roughly the same life expectancy. It is not like peasant subsistence farmers in Europe had access to medicine or knowledge of diseases any better than the Romans, and their lives were just as riddled with food insecurity and plagues.

Teslatron said:

I would expect Roman slaves, Roman average citizens, and medieval farmers to have roughly the same life expectancy. It is not like peasant subsistence farmers in Europe had access to medicine or knowledge of diseases any better than the Romans, and their lives were just as riddled with food insecurity and plagues.

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Life expectancy at the time of Pompeii around 80 AD compared to, let's say, the high middle ages, the 12-13th centuries, has several differences that might make overall life expectancy lower and higher.

1. Urbanization: the Roman world was much more urbanized than the Medieval world, mortality in cities was much higher than in the countryside, even though the Romans have impressive urban sanitation systems most historians think that this sanitation infrastructure did not reduce mortality very much.

2. Trade: the Roman world was much more integrated in long-distance trade networks than the medieval world, diseases travel through these networks, raising mortality.

3. The Romans had certainly better standards of hygiene than in the Middle Ages, in particular Roman cities compared to Medieval cities. But the proportion of the medieval population living in cities was smaller in the middle ages (see (1)).

4. In terms of nutrition, during the Pax Romana the relatively high level of prosperity meant that famines were not typical, as they were in the high middle ages and the early modern period, when mass famines hapenned every decade or so. Archeologists analyzed the food people in Pompeii ate, and they found they had a rather rich and varied diet, certainly better than medieval diets.

(1) and (2) suggest higher medieval life expectancy, (3) and (4) suggest higher Roman life expectancy.

Guaporense said:

Life expectancy at the time of Pompeii around 80 AD compared to, let's say, the high middle ages, the 12-13th centuries, has several differences that might make overall life expectancy lower and higher.

1. Urbanization: the Roman world was much more urbanized than the Medieval world, mortality in cities was much higher than in the countryside, even though the Romans have impressive urban sanitation systems most historians think that this sanitation infrastructure did not reduce mortality very much.

2. Trade: the Roman world was much more integrated in long-distance trade networks than the medieval world, diseases travel through these networks, raising mortality.

3. The Romans had certianly better standards of hygiene than in the Middle Ages.

4. In terms of nutrition, during the Pax Romana the high level of prosperity meant that famines were not typical, as they were in the high middle ages and the early modern period, when mass famines hapenned every decade or so. Archeologists analyzed the food people in Pompeii ate, and they found they had a rather rich and varied diet, certainly better than medieval diets.

(1) and (2) suggest higher medieval life expectancy, (3) and (4) suggest higher Roman life expectancy.

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At the end of the day, it is roughly a wash. In reality, there has been no appreciative gains in life expectancy on a broad scale until the advent of modern medicine and broad understanding of things like the germ theory of disease. Without concrete data, the approximations are off by +-5 to 10 years anyway, so everything falls within margin of error. All these historians making completely wild claims based on very questionable data notwithstanding. Majority of people throughout the ages were just ignorant poor dregs struggling to survive and lived and died in suffering and misery only managing life through the evolutionary resilience and robustness of the human body itself. The only appreciable increases in life expectancy happened when civilizations/societies were established.