Talk Description: A paradox of sorts emerges in recent study of the ancient economy: we regularly note slavery's centrality to Roman society; however, debates over economic growth assign slave labor little role, preferring explanations based instead upon institutional, monetary, or even environmental parameters. The preference makes Rome somewhat idiosyncratic in the wider optic of economic history, and I set about addressing the gap by modelling the profitability of Roman slavery. I discuss concepts of net present value and the extraction ratio and apply them to the Roman evidence. The resulting model suggests Roman masters found greater profits from slaveholding than from many alternatives, probably including land. I close by stressing some broader implications of this observation for the role of labor vis-a-vis other factors in driving Roman economic development.

Biography: Seth Bernard is Professor of Ancient History and Material Culture at the University of Toronto, where he has taught since 2014. He has been a Rome Prize Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and a Fulbright Fellow at the American School of Athens and was recently Visiting Professor at the University of Rome Sapienza. He specializes in social and economic history and has written monographs on Rome's Republican building industry and on historical thought in early Italy and recently edited books on the Middle Republic and on ancient moral economy. He is also an active field archaeologist and co-directs excavations at the ancient city of Falerii Novi in Italy.

This talk will not be available on zoom and will not be recorded.