Transcript
Chapter 1: The scale of Roman production
This nail was forged in the Roman legionary fort at Inchtuthil, just below the Scottish Highlands. Buried in a pit when the fort was abandoned, it was discovered in 1960 with nearly a million other nails — a testament to Roman mass production. Although most Roman craftsmen worked in small workshops, the size of the empire encouraged the large-scale manufacture and distribution of certain goods. The technology involved remained pre-industrial, and few ancient enterprises approached the scale of a modern corporation. But factories, trademarks, and brand competition were all aspects of the Roman economy.
Chapter 2: State-run imperial enterprise
The largest commercial enterprises in the Roman world were associated with the imperial government. In late antiquity, the arms and armor of the legions were produced in 35 state-run factories. Some of these facilities made both shields and weapons; others specialized in breastplates, arrows, horse armor, or ballistae. Though staffed by civilian craftsmen, they were overseen by minor bureaucrats. The emperors also owned a vast network of quarries, some worked by condemned prisoners under military surveillance. Marble and granite columns, cut to standard lengths, were sent by the hundreds to Rome and other major cities. So were sarcophagi and copies of famous statues. To avoid damage in transit, sculptures were usually shipped with their details only roughed out; some sarcophagi have been found with the faces of their occupants still unfinished. Many other imperial enterprises achieved impressive economies of scale.
Chapter 3: Aristocratic economic empires
From the reign of Septimius Severus onward, Rome’s famous grain dole — which fed 200,000 people — was distributed as bread from state-run bakeries. To process the grain, the emperors built a network of mills powered by the aqueducts and overflow from the baths. The wealthiest Roman aristocrats had economic empires of their own, staffed by skilled slaves and freedmen. The late republican mogul Crassus famously organized brigades of enslaved firemen, builders, and artisans. To supply Rome’s boundless appetite for building materials, families with estates near the capital produced bricks and tiles in standard sizes, stamped with the date and place of manufacture. Some clay pits employed several hundred workers, and produced bricks by the tens of thousands. Their products were shipped as far as North Africa.
Chapter 4: Resource processing and trade
In the western provinces, wealthy landowners with properties on the Mediterranean coast established salting facilities to take advantage of seasonal fish migrations. Besides salted fish, they produced garum, the famous fermented fish sauce. A factory at Troia, in what is now Portugal, had no fewer than 19 huge processing tanks, with a total capacity of more than 600 cubic meters — enough to salt tens of thousands of fish at once. In North Africa and southern Spain, aristocrats developed olive plantations to produce oil for export. Worked by a combination of slave and free labor, these estates sometimes featured factory-like structures with batteries of presses and cavernous storerooms. Rome’s Monte Testaccio — discussed in one of my older videos — is made up of more than 50 million oil amphorae from Spain.
Chapter 5: Industrial ceramic pottery
Although elite families dominated the production of raw materials, some of the Roman Empire’s most famous brands were created by craftsmen of humbler origins. During the reign of Augustus, Italian terra sigillata — a red, glossy, mold-made pottery sold from Britain to India — was produced on an industrial scale in and around the Tuscan city of Arezzo. Stamps pressed into the clay before firing allow us to identify several dozen workshops. The largest employed at least 60 craftsmen, all probably highly-trained slaves. A few owners opened branch workshops in Gaul. Over the course of the first century, Gaul became the primary center of terra sigillata production. Excavations at La Graufesenque, in what is now southern France, have revealed kilns in which up to 35,000 vessels could be fired simultaneously — a level of production that would not be equaled until the nineteenth century.
Chapter 6: Glassware and craftsmanship
Glass-blowing, invented somewhere in the eastern Roman provinces during the first century BC, spread rapidly through the empire. Though never on the scale of ceramic production, more glass was made in the early imperial era than at any time before the fifteenth century. A craftsman named Ennion, probably working in the city of Sidon, produced signed pieces of decorated mold-blow glass that circulated throughout the provinces as luxury objects. About fifty of his vessels still exist, found at sites from Spain to Israel. Ennion’s success inspired a series of imitators, who tried to copy the forms and replicate the success of his glassware.
Chapter 7: Sponsorship and history
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In the era before clocks, how do you suppose the workmen at the factories and quarries knew when to arise? What roused them from slumber? What was their commute like? Did they have time cards? What was the penalty for chronic tardiness?
I suppose slaves were kept in slave quarters and that took care of all such problems. But were free men working in the factories, too?
Did the bosses commute to work in chariots?
I wonder how all that was structured...all the myriad details of modern life we just take for granted. Of course, the first commercially successful factory time clock to punch workers in and out is only 140 years old.