Slaves In Roman Economy

How did slaves affect the daily Roman economy?

According to Kamm, A., & Graham, A. (2014), Rome required power supplied by the physical effort of human beings to build the powerful cities economically and militarily, so most of the people from the conquered lands became citizens or were sold as slaves. Slavery in the ancient world and in Rome was a fundamentally concerned to both the economy and even the social fabric of the nation. While it was commonly found throughout the Mediterranean region, and the Hellenistic regions in the east, it was not nearly so fundamentally concerned to others as it was to the prevailing of Rome, Scheidel, W. (1997). Prior to that, as the Romans strengthen their preponderant influence of Italy and Sicily followed

As attested by Kamm, A., & Graham, A. (2014), the Roman act of conquering of Carthage, Macedonia and Greece in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC made different in some way, what was once a great ease and comfort and privilege for the ruling elite into having superior strength, influence, or authority factor driving both social and economic policies for the Republic as a whole. The arrival of a large number of slaves during this time period first was a sign of great wealth and power, but later make unstable an already fragile Roman class system. As stated by Scheidel, W. (1997), farms originally ran by small business families during the whole period of Italy were soon eaten greedily up and restore to a former place by large number of slave running plantations owned by the aristocratic elite. Cheaply slave labor replaced work for the common man and the roles of those not employed increased massively to epidemic proportions. These problems had a great unstable effect on the social system which had a direct role in the bequest of the

Two of them concern supply: slavery must be institutionally acceptable and slaves must be effectively available. The third and ultimately most important one is that there must be demand for slave labor because alternative sources of labor are – or are considered to be – insufficient or otherwise inadequate. The third variable subsumes several preconditions that are commonly regarded as separate but are actually components of demand: significant asset inequality (creating demand for non-family labor), accumulation of capital (allowing the acquisition of slaves) or military power (allowing their capture), the existence of markets (allowing the sale of the products of slave labor), constraints on the free labor supply, and employers’ tastes.26 While the three basic preconditions must be met to facilitate slave labor, a large-scale system such as the one that existed in the Roman Empire depends on an additional condition to be viable in the long term. Slaves must, on average, produce enough to justify the capital input associated with their purchase and maintenance. This condition, which does not strictly speaking require slave labor to be more profitable than free labor, applies for the simple reason that in a system where millions of slaves were kept for centuries, it is not credible to view slavery primarily as a mean of surplus consumption: although not all slaves had to earn their keep, and although the