[lbo-talk] Slaves and their instruments - was/ poor underpaid CEOs

[andie nachgeborenen]

I don't know about beasts, and I'm not really a
classicist or a historian of technology, but it is my
impression that the Roman Republic and Empire were
comparatively fairly technologically progressive, and
surely Rome was a slave system. Likewise Joseph
Needham wrote and edited a multivolume treatise on
Science and Civilisation in China, the point if which
was to map and document the great extent scientific
and technological progress in China through the 16th
century or so, and China too was a slave system. So I
am not sure that this hypothesis holds water. Btw the
revisionist view of European medieval feudalism
(characterized by serfdom more than slavery, that I
got in college a quarter century ago from Lynne White
was that the middle ages were far from technologically
innovative than had been previous thought. Short view
is that cheap labor doesn't mean technological
primitivism. After the Black Death, 1349-80, of
course, labor was scarce, very scarce in Europe and
Asia.

 
> 
> At 03:48 PM 12/14/2006, Jerry Monaco wrote:
> 
> >_But my basic question was more along the lines of
> "Why should we
> >accept that this kind of degradation of tools and
> beasts is the
> >general tendency of all slave systems?"_
> 
> "You know how it is, come for the animal porn,
> stay for the cultural analysis." -- Michael Berube
> 
> Bitch | Lab
> http://blog.pulpculture.org  
> 
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