Slave Economy - the transport technologies

this is the next in my series of videos explaining historical materialism and modes of production and this one I'm talking about slave economy now in my previous videos I explained how the latter stages of clan society led to the beginnings of patriarchy and the beginnings of capture of people and slavery arises in clan societies through war captives can either be killed or they can be ransomed or put to work but in Clan societies without developed commodity production the potential scale of the institution of slavery is limited by the consumption needs of the household holding the slave for slavery to be used on a large scale for to become the dominating and determining element in the economic system the crops the slaves produce have got to be sold and that in turn means there must be a market of consumers and typically that means an urban population there must be a means of transport to move the product from the farms to distant consumers and the must develop a market in slaves themselves so you have certain critical thresholds the establishment of a slave economy depends on a certain density of population because without that there are no towns and it depends on a certain level of technology and particularly the technology of transport because without that without technologies of transport you get no developed commodity markets so I'm going to be focusing in this video on the technical conditions that are required for slavery technology constrains the social relations of people can enter into if we use Marxist terminology the forces of production determined the possible relations of production and the key point about the slave economy is that it's a muscle Powerman economy a slave economy is mainly driven by human and animal muscles with the main exception being selling transport now my friend Greg Michaelson sent me this interesting photo of a slave operated pump in a mine in Spain there were it's an elaborate mining industry in the period of slave production but it all worked by unaided human labour and the big problem in any mine is drainage and we know that in the early stages of countless industrialization designing pumps to get water out of mines provide the impetus for the development of the steam engine but in the slave days the sages walked on a treadmill and a chain of buckets on the circumference of the wheel then raised the water now how much energy can you get from a human being according to Rousseau a man of average size working on the lever such as an or whether it's a lever of an oar or a capstan or turning a mill a hand operated mill can apply a force around 80 Newtons in steady work and if you multiply that by the speed at which they can typically move the lever whether it's an oar a capstan a crank on a wheel the sustained output that people can produce is P 1600 watts at a sprinting level you can briefly produce more but if you're thinking about how much energy output a person can produce over the course of a full day it's 60 to 80 watts which doesn't sound very much and this just isn't viable for long distance cargo-carrying you can row across a river carrying loads you can row to a nearby island carrying some cargo but you can't sail from one end of the Mediterranean or you can't row from one end of the Mediterranean to another and have room in the boat for substantial cargo in addition to all the rowers who are needed to power it and in addition to the food that the rowers are going to eat in moving that transport now since you're relying on muscle power and we're talking about a system producing commodities and we're talking about moving crops to market the other method they had available or ox carts that monks is surprisingly strong it can apply 600 to 800 Newton's force substantially more than the horse can and it's sustained power output is around half a kilowatt that's actually less than one notional horsepower a notional horse by about 740 kilowatts horses contacts is sustained of horse power for very long but to do that it's only viable if you've got good roads and slave civilizations did build good roads but the costs is still very high it only makes bulk transport of crops viable up to about 50 kilometers we know that the cost of transporting grain 30 kilometers from the port of Ostia to the city of Rome per ton of grain or mow Dias of grain nor Tobia was the same as it costs to sail the full 3,000 kilometers from Egypt to Ostia so muscle powered Land Transport is very expensive the thing which made the slave economy of the ancient world viable was the squaring sailing ship unaided human labor can't transport large loads economically for long distances for that you need a nonhuman source of power and classical slavery depend on to men's means of transport the Mediterranean squaring sailing ship and the oxcart and the mediterranean sea floor is littered with shipwrecks of these types of ships covering period of maybe 2,000 years that they were in use of the slave economy and the classical slave economy is a shoreline economy a coastal economy the Roman Empire didn't penetrate far into continental land masses insofar as it did it was in Gaul but there there's a set of big rivers which can be used for transport it was unable to penetrate into the mass of what's now Eastern Europe and Russia unable to penetrate far into Africa everything depended on the economy of shipping things around and actually a key phase in that which is only realized recently was that there was a transition between the square-rigged sailing vessel which had been known to the Egyptians and what's known as the Latino egg which is a triangular sail a triangular sail can be used to sell to windward as to say you don't just have to sail with the wind behind you you can beat against a prevailing wind and by using reefs than to say pieces of rope attached to the sail it's possible to take one of these square sails and pull up one corner of it and produce one of these triangular sails so it's now reckoned that the Roman Greek single mast or two must sailing ships probably could be configured as a 13 rake and sail against the wind if you look at the next big slave economy historically the Indian Ocean slave economy that definitely depended on latina cows again it depended on Seabourn transport networks when one transport networks with slight differences in that it the sailing depended on the the seasonal variation of the masoom monsoon winds which allows selling in one direction in one season and the other direction in another now I said sailing to windward you can also sail with the wind to your site and in a square rigged ship if it's sails are oriented at 45 degrees which you can do by adjusting the stays can generate a net force forward now this is a diagram by Benjamin Franklin explaining how the sailing ships of his day like this operated and these were the basis of the Atlantic slave economy they use mainly square sail sailing ships because they're able to take advantage of the trade winds and this set up a possible trading pattern such that they could sail on a reach beam beam reach to Africa pick up slaves sail before the wind to the West Indies or the United States or what's now the United States and then sail before the wind back to Europe and that triangular pattern was the basis of the oceanic slave economies of the 17th and 18th century so what I'm saying is that slave economies are deeply connected to modes of transport they can only arise where there is an efficient means of transport to transport goods and transport slaves and to transport them long distances and that's because slave economy is a commodity producing economy with the objective of selling the product of slave estates on a market now this gives rise to what some North us will call mercantile capital within the slave economy and you get companies formed trading in slaves in the assembly in the nineteenth century that's obvious but you also had things similar to company forms or joint venture forms existing in the other slave economies and how is it that this mercantile economy mecan't out capital can exist in the midst of the slave economy well it's basically because at that point in time the only powered machines of any significance were sailing ships and the sailing ship is a large complex machine it's an element of constant capital only those who are relatively wealthy can afford to buy and operate these ships and they are therefore able to in the midst of a generally slave economy have an island of capitalist exploitation using a system of machinery to exploit the wage labored sailors to carry out the transport process and rather than seeing mrs. McCann tile capital it would be more accurate to see it as a capitalist transport industry in the midst of a muscle powered slave economy the video series is as a backup to a book of mine that's coming out in the autumn of 2019 called how the world works since it's being published by a left-wing publisher and I agreed to waive royalties on it my only way of getting any money back for the effort put in is through my patreon account so if you value it I would encourage you to give me a small donation for it

Channel: Paul Cockshott

Views: 2,644

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: slavery, sailing, slave-trade

Id: ic-VIssclio

Length: 14min 39sec (879 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 25 2019