This is the first half of the second part of our three part (I, IIa, IIb, IIIa, IIIb) look at Paradox Interactive’s Hellenistic-era grand strategy game Imperator: Rome. I had hoped to do this part in a single post, but my book writing schedule intervened and so it became necessary to split it up. Last time we looked at how Imperator models diplomacy and warfare and in particular how it examines the question of why Rome emerged as the sole Mediterranean power. We found that Imperator‘s decision to simulate ancient diplomacy as an even more ruthless and intense form of interstate anarchy largely accords with the evidence, but that Imperator‘s model or how military power was structured and raised applies at best imperfectly to many of the great powers of this period.
In this part, we turn to how Imperator approaches ancient societies and economies. We’ll split this into two parts: this week we’ll look at how Imperator approaches ancient people through mechanics representing population in discrete units of population called pops. In particular, we’re interested in how well these systems reflect the actual social structures of ancient societies – the degree to which they map on to real legal and economic statuses – and how well they represent economic structures – the degree to which they simulate ancient economic activity with some fidelity.
In both cases, Imperator is presenting a ‘theory of history,’ a vision of how the past was that it attempts to express through its game mechanics.
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A Game About Pops?
Imperator is not, I’d argue, a game about pops, rather it is a game interested in simulating ancient economic systems, particularly urbanism and pops are the tool it uses to do this.1 Nevertheless, while Imperator is mostly not interested in pops for their own sake – as we’ll see, even in ‘democratic’ states, pops play basically no role in politics – pops are the foundation of Imperator‘s economic system. Put bluntly, pops are the basic unit of production, producing most of the game’s key resources (tax revenue, manpower, levy-capacity, trade goods, trade route capacity, research).
So we need to talk about pops.
Pops represent discrete units of population in game. Unlike Victoria, the game does not keep track of precise population, rather each pop represents a somewhat simplified large block of population, with a single social class, religion and culture. A single territory, then, contains a number of pops, with rural territories generally in the high single or low double-digits, while very large cities can crest into several hundred pops.
The most important fact about a pop is their social class: Imperator splits pops into five social classes, which determines what they can produce. At the top are ‘Nobles‘ who produce a large amount of research and trade route capacity. Below them are ‘Citizens,’ who produce a mix of research, trade routes and manpower, but at a lower level than more specialized pops. Below them are ‘Freemen,’ who produce the most manpower and a small amount of tax revenue. Below them are ‘Slaves‘ who produce by far the most tax revenue and also produce local trade goods. Finally, parallel to ‘Freemen’ there are ‘Tribesmen‘ who produce a smidge more taxes and a bit less manpower. The quirk with tribesmen pops, who represent a mix of hill folk, pre-urban and non-agrarian peoples, is that they have high base happiness, but their happiness goes down as the ‘civilization’ level of a province (increased by buildings and technology) goes up, presumably reflecting these folks being pushed ever further to the margins by expanding cities and their agrarian economic networks.2 Consequently, they’re useful for non-state peoples, but become pretty useless pretty fast for state polities like Rome or Carthage.
Pops promote and demote over time based on an individual territory’s ‘desired ratio’ which is in turn influenced by buildings, so cities or rural territories can be, to a degree, specialized into certain kinds of communities (e.g. the ‘forum’ building encourages more freeman, while the ‘library’ encourages nobles); they’ll also migrate to achieve those balances. Each state also limits how high a given culture of pop can promote, with the state’s primary culture always being able to go all the way up to nobles, but other cultures by default being restricted to freeman and below. For pops of non-primary culture, the player can either wait for assimilation (pops slowly gravitate towards the primary culture) or integrate that non-primary culture, enabling them to promote up higher at the cost of lower happiness for other integrated or primary culture pops (who don’t want to share their privileges) and stopping assimilation for integrated cultures.
The main problem with this setup is that these societies, particularly the major states, drew the line between ‘full members’ of the political community – what the ‘citizen’ pop is meant to represent – and everyone else very differently and understood the obligations of those full members very differently as well. Imperator, for the sake of making the game mangeable and preserving the Paradox approach whereby all polities are playable, tries to flatten this into a single social class system (which cuts across, but is not limited to, ethnicity), but the result ends up being a relatively weak representation of any one system, nor does it serve as a strong reflection of something about all of them.
Notionally, the ‘noble’ pops represent the upper elite, including both the ‘imperial elite’ (like the Roman Senate or a royal court) but also local elites, what in a later period we’d call the curiales or curial class. And while not a perfect representation, having them produce ‘research points’ which go into technologies that make the government more effective is at least a gesture to the role these figures play as rulers and administrators. ‘Nobles’ is a bit of an awkward term, as in most cases these are not members of a hereditary nobility, but rather, in the Roman sense, nobiles, local notables rather than nobles, but the terminology fudge is an acceptable break to allow the player to understand what these fellows do.
Instead, most of the problems here reside in the break between ‘freemen’ and ‘citizen’ pops. Notionally, ‘citizens’ represent true full members of the community, while ‘freemen’ represent the free, non-citizen poor: freemen generate a substantial amount of taxes and the best manpower-per-pop, whereas citizens act like miniature versions of nobles (generating a small amount of research and trade capacity) and also generate a small amount of (military) manpower, but no revenue.3 So citizens serve less and don’t pay taxes, but take part in governance and administration (which is what ‘research’ seems to really reflect, as the ‘technologies’ are mostly governing innovations).
And that’s not really quite how any of these states were organized.
In the Roman Republic, it is difficult to see who large numbers of ‘Roman-culture’ freemen would even represent. ‘Roman,’ after all, was a legal status, fundamentally tied to citizenship: a non-citizen Roman was a contradiction in terms. One might argue that the poorest Romans, the capite censi might count, given how their votes were discounted in the comitia centuriata, but of course those Romans were so discounted because they were too poor to serve, and so ought to offer no manpower at all and in any case, there are far too few of them to reflect the numbers of freemen pops you’d expect in Imperator. Instead the ‘freemen’ class might represent the socii, but here we have a problem in terms of the resources they generate. Historically, the socii paid no taxes to Rome, but did generate manpower, while Roman citizens did pay taxes (unlike citizen pops in Imperator), but on a per capita basis served more than the socii, because Roman armies only had a slim socii majority, but the population of Roman Italy was far more heavily slanted towards non-citizen socii.
The system works even less well for Carthage. As far as we can tell, Carthage’s citizen body was effectively closed and largely endogamus (that is, marrying within itself), so Carthage’s citizen class ought to be essentially limited to the city of Carthage itself, with perhaps very small numbers limited to only a handful of colonies. While citizen pops generate manpower in Imperator, one of the defining things about Carthaginian citizens after the Battle of the Crimissus (340) is that they don’t seem to have served in the army, save for a handful of officers. The only time we see meaningful numbers of Carthaginian citizen troops are situations like the Battle of Zama (202) or the Third Punic War (149-146), where the city of Carthage itself was threatened.
However, the culture system that Imperator has means that any pop of the ‘Punic’ culture – one of the most widespread cultures at game’s start – can promote into citizenship. Assimilation will in turn generate even more ‘Punic’ culture pops over time as Carthage expands. Imperator is not really prepared to simulate a non-ethnic closed citizen body in this way, in part I suspect because it is such an obviously losing strategy. But it is also, for political reasons, how nearly every citizen polity in antiquity was organized – the Romans, with their expansive citizenship were the unusual ones.
Meanwhile, representing the economics of this system is also, as a game system, difficult: the idea of supporting a population that isn’t producing most of the tax revenue (that’s what tributary populations are for) or manpower makes no strategic sense – but of course it makes quite a lot of political sense for those citizens if they find themselves ruling an empire. In this sense, the Carthaginian citizen body is actually better represented by the ‘noble’ pop types, producing ‘research’ (read: administration) and very little else, but pushing the desired ratio for ‘noble’ pops in Carthage proper so high isn’t really practical.
Instead, like many of Imperator‘s mechanics, the system makes the most sense transposed onto the Hellenistic kingdoms, with their ethnic hierarchies. The tie between primary/accepted culture and access to the higher pop levels, at least, makes immediate sense, as these were states – particularly the Ptolemies and the Seleucids – with a fairly clearly defined ethnic ruling class, constructed on the basis of ethnos (‘ethnic group’) or patris (‘fatherland, homeland’), with the Macedonians (which, as a legal status, included most native Greek speakers as well) on the top and subject peoples subordinated to them.
But beyond that, many of the elements of the system break down. Critically, this is a system designed to simulate Rome’s expansive, assimilationist citizenship system and subsequent cultural Romanization, but while many people in the East learned Greek and adopted Greek cultural patterns, legal Macedonian identity was generally closed with just a handful of exceptions. Sometimes, as in the case of the Ptolemaic class of ‘Persians’ (who were, in fact, not Persians but Hellenized Egyptians), a ‘middle’ subordinate class was created for Hellenized locals, but frequently not. But they only rarely became ‘Macedonians.’ On the flipside, the way the culture system is set up in Imperator, Greeks (split into many smaller sub-groups under the larger heading of ‘Hellenistic cultures’) aren’t ‘Macedonian’ and so are, in the successor states, generally blocked from promoting into being citizen-level pops or higher. But in fact we know that a great many of the ‘Macedonians’ we see in colonial foundations in the Seleucid and Ptolemaic kingdoms were not cultural ‘Macedonians,’ but rather Greek-speakers drawn broadly from the Aegean world who became legally Macedonian in their new homes.
But perhaps most critically, if what the citizen pop represents are these Macedonian settlers who – unlike the local subject peoples – have full membership in the political community (in this case, as subjects of a king), this is the key military manpower base of these kingdoms. Rather than providing a functionally negligible part of Seleucid and Ptolemaic manpower, they should supply an indispensable portion of it! There may never have been many more than 200,000 ‘Macedonians’ in Ptolemaic Egypt and perhaps a similar number in the Seleucid Empire, compared to perhaps 4 million native Egyptians and c. 15-20 million native subjects of the Seleucid Empire, respectively, but Greeks and Macedonians provided about half of Antiochus III’s army at Raphia, and about 45% of his army at Magnesia and probably two-thirds of the Ptolemaic army at Raphia, despite it incorporating a massive native Egyptian phalanx for the first time.
In short, the Hellenistic kingdoms were extremely reliant on the manpower of those ‘citizens’ in order to maintain control over everyone else: the citizen ‘Macedonians’ were about the only population in any Hellenistic kingdom that was utilized militarily at anything like its peak capacity (whereas the Romans are doing this with everyone in Italy, which is why they can steamroll so hard), something that is simply not reflected well in the game’s systems (though the Seleucids do get a penalty to assimilation to push a play-style of trying to manage a culturally diverse kingdom).
In practice, this is an aspect of the game where I think I understand what the developers were going for, but cannot help but conclude that in order to actually capture these various ethnic-legal systems of political belonging and non-belonging, the game needed to have multiple bespoke systems (perhaps with a ‘reform’ system to try to switch between them) rather than trying to have one combined system that represents all of them, using the culture-integration element of the system to try to capture regimes with different degrees of openness. But I am also well aware that developing that many parallel, state-specific systems simply wasn’t in the cards in terms of scope.
Nevertheless, as much as this system feels like a bit of a ‘kludge,’ it is clearly trying to express an awareness of these factors, in particular of the way that ethnic identity was tied closely to legal status in many of these states. It is a lot better than what most games set in this period (or a lot of popular culture) manage to do, and I have a lot of grace for any game that is willing to try to simulate complex, multi-ethnic ancient communities.
But of course, we’ve left one pop-type out in all of this, so now it’s time to talk about…
Slavery and Warfare in Imperator
The final pop-type in Imperator, of course, are slaves. And I want to note at the outset that I appreciate Imperator‘s courage in tackling ancient slavery: a lot of games set in antiquity either largely whitewash the topic or simply leave it out. By contrast, Imperator is trying not only to acknowledge the existence of this institution, but to understand its economic and social role. However, I think in the process of trying to make those roles legible to the player and to have them produce interesting and clear strategic choices, Imperator ends up presenting a rather too binary vision of ancient labor and production.
Every polity in Imperator, state or non-state has slaves. That is, as a straight description of the ancient Mediterranean, not an unfair characterization, as so far as we can tell, every ancient Mediterranean polity of any substantial size in this period did practice at least some form of slavery – though not all in the same ways or to the same extent. In Imperator, slave pops can be generated in two ways: existing freemen and tribesman pops that demote, which happens slowly as a result of the territory they’re in being below its ‘desired ratio’ for enslaved pops. In theory this might represent something like individuals falling into debt-slavery, except that a lot of civic communities went out of their way to abolish debt slavery (at least for citizens) long before the game begins. The Roman practice of debt slavery, for instance, called nexum was abolished in the late 300s, while debt slavery in Athens seems to have been abolished for citizens as part of Solon’s reforms as part of the seisachtheia (‘the shaking off of burdens,’ a word I have a ton of fun saying every year in my ancient history survey) in 594.
There were other ways for the poor and desperate to fall into slavery: in most of these societies, a family with children they could not afford to raise could abandon or sell those children into slavery. However, it is more than a bit odd that Imperator structures this as a ‘pull’ factor – when the number of slaves in a territory is insufficient, the game pulls (otherwise stable?) freeman households down to fill the gap. It almost suggests that the game imagines that all of the free persons in antiquity are fundamentally reliant on slavery to remain free (such that a shortage of slaves would imperil their economic stability) – and we’ll come back to that ‘model’ of the ancient economy in a moment. But just to leave a note here: no, a ‘shortage’ of enslaved labor would not imperil the stability of small freeholders. It might actually be good for them, as it would mean more demand for their labor.
But Imperator mints new enslaved pops another way: through warfare, because warfare in Imperator generates slaves. Any time an army takes control of a territory (nearly instantly for unfortified territories and cities), a portion of the pops present are either enslaved or killed. Enslaved pops keep their culture and religion, but are, of course, enslaved and then relocated (instantly and for free) to the polity that captured the territory. They’re not moved at random: the game prefers first to place them in the main capital, and then smaller provincial capitals and finally smaller cities. That is, as we’ll see, a key method by which the capitals of big imperial states in this game grow into huge urban centers: as the empire expands, the capital receives stead and substantial influxes of new population, reshaping the demographics of the game map over time.
And this was absolutely a major part of ancient warfare, so much so that Greek has a technical term for the enslavement of war captives, andrapodizein (ἀνδραποδίζειν) which enters English as the rare word ‘andrapodize.’4 Mass enslavement was sometimes an end into itself in ancient warfare but just as frequently was a tool of terror to compel broader submission. War captives on the battlefield were generally enslaved after capture (though it was sometimes possible for them to be ransomed as well), while armies would generally enslave the civilian populace they encountered as they moved.5
This was an ugly process (involving, among other things, large scale sexual violence), but was generally considered a ‘normal’ part of war by ancient societies. As Xenophon has Cyrus say, “For it is the nomos [law/custom] among all men for all time that when a city is taken in war, the persons [somata, lit: ‘bodies’] of those in the city and their property belong to the captors. It will be no injustice to keep what you have, but if you let them keep anything, it is generosity not to take it” (Xen. Cyrop. 7.5.73). The Romans differed little in this: to leave anything to the defeated was kindness to be lauded, but not a moral necessity.
Imperator forces the player to think about this destructiveness, because different approaches to warfare produce different results. In particular, a territory may be occupied either directly, by moving a military unit over it, or indirectly, by capturing the province capital or a nearby fort. Consequently, a player can either maximize the brutality of their wars, by occupying each territory individually (possibly several times as the fortunes of war shift), killing and enslaving pops each time or minimize it (within the frame of ancient warfare’s already high minimum brutality), by focusing on administrative centers and leaving the rural population largely intact (territory control shifts caused by the capture of a fort or local capital don’t cause the same enslaving effects).
That in turn is a strategic choice too: warfare enslavement is ‘negative sum,’ as a significant portion of the pops involved are always killed, reducing the value of territory that the player may be about to annex anyway. That actually leads the player into a fairly brutal strategic calculation, because enslavement in war is also the most efficient way to rapidly grow the population of the player’s polity’s core region and capital, which for reasons discussed below, the player will want to do – but doing so means both longer, slower wars but also fewer pops as a result of conquest overall. The fact that this is a choice the player has to make (alongside choices when capturing major cities about how brutally to sack them) directs the player’s attention, at least a little, to the brutality of warfare in this period.
It isn’t by any means perfect, but it is present in the game and various events also draw the player’s attention to the human suffering created by the practice of slavery and warfare. Of course, this creates a tension: the player is confronted, occasionally, with the suffering that the game’s warfare causes, but at the same time this is a game about conquest which expects the player to largely adopt the value-structural of the historical societies being simulated: that war was, if not good, at least normal and that conquest was a valid activity for states. But for a historical simulation, as opposed to a true fantasy game, it seems difficult to do otherwise: unlike EUIV or Victoria III, there is no abolition movement in this period to highlight, no alternative model to conquest and hegemony for state building.
On the whole then, as a representation of the interaction of warfare and slavery in antiquity, Imperator‘s model has something to say which largely accords with the evidence. But what about the economic and social role of slavery?
A Slave Mode of Production?
Imperator is designed mechanically so that nearly all polities will trend towards a situation where slave pops are the most numerous kind. For state polities, the ‘desired ratio’ for slave pops is 66% in rural settlements and 20% in cities; non-state polities have the same city ratio but only 44% in rural settlements (to make more room for their tribesmen pops). Most states start well below those desired ratios, particularly in their rural territories, but the systems for pop promotion and demotion are going to steadily move them in that direction, leading slaves to be the largest pop-group. Even without warfare, which can generate enslaved pops in sufficient numbers to put capital cities well above their ‘desired ratio’ for slave pops.
It is worth noting how strong those default desired ratios are in influencing the population mix of a polity in Imperator over time. As we’re going to save, the slice of the population of an ancient state held in slavery seems to have varied considerably: even discounting clear outliers like Sparta, some Greek poleis might have been close to 50% enslaved, while some parts of the Roman world were likely just below 10%. However in Imperator, the rural desired ratios are effectively static and the majority of territories will remain rural over the game’s run. The player has more ability to control the desired ratios in cities, where they are influenced by buildings, though at the same time those buildings can also increase rather than decrease the desired ratio of slave pops. Consequently, while the actual economies of the ancient Mediterranean ranged significantly in how heavily they employed enslaved labor, Imperator‘s single set of systems means that over time basically all polities will get pulled to the same basic ratio of enslaved pops and thus have economic systems that broadly resemble each other.
Mechanically, slave pops do two things in Imperator: they are by far the most efficient pop for producing tax revenue (roughly double a tribesman and triple a freeman pop) and they govern the production of trade goods. The way this works is that each territory produces a single trade good (iron, surplus grain, horses, spices, etc.) and automatically produces one unit of that good, which is then pooled at the province level. Large populations of slaves, however, can produce multiple units of those goods for export, if the number of pops passes a threshold (base 15 in rural settlements, 20 in urban), so a city with 1-19 slave pops produces one unit of its good, 20-39 produces two, 40-59 produces three, and so on. Should the player want to generate meaningful commerce revenue, the way to do it is to select cities with valuable trade goods and use the ‘slave mill’ building to drive up the desired ratio of slaves: a high population city of this sort can produce many surplus goods for export and will also produce a lot of tax revenue.
Trade goods, in turn, are quite important. Every level of trade-good surplus in a province gives a base bonus, but perhaps more importantly, the first level of surplus in the capital gives an empire-wide bonus, making it very important to stack trade surplus in the capital (something we will return to next week). At the same time, each import or export deal generates trade revenue: out-of-country exports generate 100% of their trade value in revenue, imports 35% and domestic trade routes (from one of your provinces to another) just 20%. As a result, producing lots of trade good surpluses that can be traded with other states is a key source of revenue, often rivaling tax income (and massively exceeding the third category, tribute form vassals, in almost all cases).
That means that state income is substantially a product of tax revenue, which is produced mostly by slaves, and trade income, which is produced entirely by slaves. As a result, for most polities, slaves are going to come to represent anywhere from roughly 35 to 50% of the total number of pops, and produce upwards of three-quarters of the revenue. The player thus cannot move away from slavery even if they wanted to: the game systems make it so that a state without slavery would have almost no revenue and no trade goods at all.
Now, does that reflect a theory of history? Well, yes: it is a rather blunt application of Marx’s theory of a sequence of ‘systems ‘modes of production,’ in which the ancient world was slotted as the ‘slave mode of production.’ To greatly simplify, in this vision, what makes the ancient economy distinct from other subsequent forms was its substantial reliance on slavery (as opposed to dependent tenants or wage laborers) as the main system by which labor beyond subsistence was organized, with the elite extracting effectively 100% rents off of the slaves they owned. The enslaved population, it was posited, was mostly generated by warfare and thus warfare was also fundamental to the system. Under this vision, while some free small farmers exist, they primarily work only for subsistence and are minimally engaged in markets, while most of the surplus, including agricultural goods for trade and non-agricultural goods, were produced by slaves.
This is, in a heavily moderated form, something of the vision of Moses Finley in The Ancient Economy (1973) – a book which in part was presenting a vision of the ancient economy which could fit with a somewhat modified version of the Marxist ‘modes of production.’6 Finley argued that the ancient economy was relatively more ‘primitive’ than the previous generation of scholars had been willing to acknowledge, governing by the pursuit of status and elite ideology rather than profit motives or market forces, that most households were minimally tied to markets, that trade was mostly limited to elite luxuries and in any case small in scale and scope, and that the role of slavery in ancient economic systems was large and decisive.
And of course long-time readers of the blog may already remember this fellow and so know what happens next: the ‘revenge of the archaeologists.’ Finley had built his model of the ancient economy out of the textual evidence (written by elites) – he was a philologist (a language expert) by training – buttressed by the work of ideologically similar social scientists, most notably Karl Polanyi (1886-1964). He had broadly discounted the ability of archaeological information to really alter the debate, once quipping that, “we are too often victims of that great curse of archaeology, the indestructibility of pots” when arguing that pottery data was over-interpreted.7 What I term the ‘revenge of the archaeologists’ is the process by which modern archaeology proceeded to spend the next half-century burying quite a lot Finley’s ideas under a mountain of pot sherds, demonstrating many of the things that his model says shouldn’t exist in the ancient economy – large-scale trade in bulk commodities like grain, the production of consumer goods for non-elites at commercial scale, sophisticated financial systems, ‘producer’ cities structured around production rather than rent extraction, smaller-scale for-market production, and meaningful technological progress – did, in fact, exist.
None of which is to say that the societies of the ancient Mediterranean weren’t ‘slave societies.’ They absolutely were slave societies and the fact of slavery permeated (and deformed) most of their social institutions, cultural values and customs. But the idea that ancient production was dominated, everywhere and in all cases, by slavery is an outmoded one. Instead, ancient production was a lot more complex and there was quite a lot more variation that Imperator‘s model suggests.
Estimating how many people in the ancient Mediterranean were enslaved is very difficult, as our sources give us very little reliable information and our normal methods do not work: ancient censuses do not count the non-free, military mobilizations do not help us estimate a population that did not serve militarily and population density studies cannot distinguish between enslaved farmers and free ones. Nevertheless, based on what meager evidence we do have, the percentage of the population held in slavery was likely never so high across the whole Mediterranean as Imperator‘s systems might suggest.
Our best evidence is for Roman Italy, where we have good archaeological evidence, a reasonable amount of evidence for the influx of enslaved captives (and particularly the scale of it, reported in our sources) and of course the Roman census figures to estimate a baseline population. Here our evidence and modeling generally suggests an enslaved population at the beginning of the period Imperator focuses on (the late fourth century) might have been as low as 10%, rising over the course of the third, second and first centuries as a result of Roman conquests to roughly 15-20% of the population of Italy – a total enslaved population of perhaps 1.2m people (out of 5.7 to 7m persons in Italy total).8 We would generally assume that the enslaved population by the first century would be the highest in Italy of almost anywhere, given that Rome was the beneficiary at that point of three centuries of spectacular conquests, and so the usual estimate for the Roman Empire as a whole, covering essentially the whole of the Mediterranean basin, is generally around 10% (with fairly large error bars).9 There were pockets that seem to have been much higher: estimates for the enslaved population of Athens range from 30-50%, while we’ve already discussed the unique brutality of Sparta’s slave society.10
Now that is, by any standard, a lot of slavery and it is absolutely fair to describe the societies of the Hellenistic Mediterranean as ‘slave societies.’ But this is not an economy where slavery is the primary mode of labor employment; instead, slavery existed alongside various forms of tenancy, freeholding farmers and a small but meaningful number of wage laborers. And while the ideal of the self-sufficient freeholding farmer remains powerful in Greek and Roman culture (especially in elite discourse), it’s clear that actual small freeholding farmers did have meaningful market interactions – far more than Finley would allow, albeit far less than modern households.11 Which is to say, not all of the trade goods moving around in antiquity were the product of large estates. And, of course, on top of that, not all large estates ran entirely on slaves: tenants (who might, depending on the cultural context, be entirely free or substantially dependent (read: serfs)) might also provide the labor for large market-oriented estates, something we see fairly clearly in the letters of Pliny the Younger.
If it seems like enslaved workers end up more visible in our sources than these tenants and freeholders, despite most likely being outnumbered by them in most places, remember that our sources are written almost exclusively by the relatively small number of men who held vast numbers of slaves and relied upon them for their luxury: typical smallholding households with more free laborers than enslaved ones do not generally write to us (though I should note that it is certainly the case in antiquity that even quite ‘humble’ smallholder households often had enslaved workers).
That in turn distorts how Imperator imagines state revenues are generated. In practice, the largest portion of state revenues were effectively land taxes, sometimes in the form of a direct wealth tax (like Rome’s tributum) or in the form of rents (such as rents on ‘royal lands’ in the Seleucid Empire) or in the form of tribute from subject states whose revenues in turn derived from land taxes (as with Carthaginian North Africa). Outside of Classical Sparta, the vast majority of laborers working those lands to provide those revenues were free persons.
In short, then, Imperator presents an economic model in which the free peasant population (freemen pops) are mostly engaged in pure subsistence, generating little surplus and no goods for trade (and thus producing primarily manpower), while the bulk of economic activity was accomplished by vast numbers of enslaved workers whose labor made it possible for the citizen class to live in relative leisure. This is a historical vision of the structure of the ancient economy, but it is largely an outdated one, complicated out of existence one pot sherd at a time by the growing archaeological evidence that the ancient economy was more dynamic than this. Slavery was an important part of the economy, but in most of the ancient Mediterranean, it represented a significant and substantial minority of production.
Ancient Economies
More broadly, because this vision insists that slavery was essential for all forms of the ancient economy, it is unprepared to account for differences in systems of production. And that in turn dovetails with Imperator‘s broader pop-system’s inability to represent different class structures as well.
The foundation of the economy of Roman Italy by the third century appears quite clearly to have been a very large class of freeholding farmers who held citizen rights in their communities and served in the army; the Roman freeholders also provided the Roman Republic with most of its revenue through the tributum. By contrast, the foundation of the economic system of many Gallic non-state polities seem to have been small farmers reduced to a sort of dependent tenancy, to trust what our ancient sources tell us. The economic systems of the Hellenistic Near East seem to have had far fewer freeholders, but also fewer slaves and a larger class of tenants (both free and non-free).
On the one hand, the basic structures of a fundamentally organic economy apply to all of these societies: agricultural productivity was low, labor was inefficiently distributed and as a result surpluses were very limited, leading to societies that were, by modern standards, extremely poor and quite static. But within that framework there is quite a lot of difference, from the closed citizenship of Greek poleis or Sparta, as compared to the expansive citizenship in the Roman Republic (though with somewhat less equality among the citizens as a result) to Hellenistic kingdoms structured around legally-encoded ethnic hierarchies between the Greek-speaking ruling class and the native subject class.
Imperator‘s single combined class-and-economic system, structured around pops cannot help but flatten those different systems. Now I will say that on the one hand, I appreciate the effort to develop this aspect of the game at all (compare, say, EUIV or CKIII which abstract these aspects away) and apart from the economic over-reliance on slavery, as a basic outline of ancient class structures the pop system is better than most. At the same time, it feels like the kind of system that ought, in the course of post-release development, to have gotten bespoke variations to express the wide-ranging differences in economic and social patterns in these different areas (and I haven’t even touched its applicability in India because I simply do not have the expertise to say!).
However, pops are really only one half of Imperator‘s vision of the ancient economy and society, in many ways they are just a mechanical foundation for something the game finds – I’d argue – much more interesting: urbanism. And that’s where we’ll turn to next week.
- In a similar vein, I’d argue Victoria II was a game about pops, whereas Victoria III is a game about political economies which uses pops to simulate them. That isn’t a slight towards either game, just a difference in focus.
- I should note, this is a system that was overhauled post-release, most notably adding the ‘noble’ pop type.
- While the WIki notes that citizens are more urban and freemen more rural, this isn’t actually reflected in game – unless you build specific buildings to change it, both have equal ‘desired ratios’ in both cities and rural territories.
- On both this word and this practice, see K.L. Gaca, “The Andrapodizing of War Captives in Greek Historical Memory” TAPA 140.1 (2010).
- As Gaca notes, this process tended to target self-mobile children and women.
- Finley, an American, immigrated from the United States to Britain in 1955, effectively hounded out of American academia by the House Un-American Activities Committee because he was a quite well-known Marxist. He took up a position at Cambridge.
- In “Technical Innovation and Economic Progress in the Ancient World” EHR 18.1 (1965).
- Scheidel, “Human Mobility in Roman Italy, II: The Slave Population” JRS 95 (2005).
- See for instance J. Madden, “Slavery in the Roman Empire” Classics Ireland (1996) for an empire-wide estimate (that is very rough) or Bagnall and Frier, The Demography of Roman Egypt (1994), which suggests an enslaved rate of c. 11% for Roman Egypt based on the documentary evidence (which may be an undercount).
- See L’économie de la Grèce des cités (2007/8), now in translation as The Making of the Ancient Greek Economy: Institutions, Markets and Growth in the City-States, trans. Steven Rendall (2016), 459, n.144
- For more on this point, which is a complex one, see Paul Erdkamp, The Grain Market in the Roman Empire: A Social, Political and Economic Study (2009)
Great post.
It’s striking the grip that one academic’s model appears to have had on generations of students.
If I recall my history classes correctly, Lawrence Stone had a similar impact on our understanding of the history of love and families.
It happens. The electrical charge of an electron has changed substantially from the first measure deemed credible — but it creeped along, slowly changing as the more accurate readings were not dismissed as error.
Doing some quick research, this appears to be one of Feynman’s stories and not entirely supported by the history of actual measurements. Feynman’s version may not be wrong, but one should be careful not to approximate an approximation and in doing so creep the story further from the facts.
Any sign that the Paradox devs had read Pseudo-Aristotle, “Economics” or Makis Aperghis’ interpretation of it?
I never played Imperator (the coverage it got was so bad it put me off), but I did build an alpha of an indie game that was somewhere between a Paradox and Civilization game set in the Hellenistic era. I never finished it (although it was just about playable as an animationless, 2D, SP game with absentee computer opponents) but it was good fun both designing and programming it. What’s relevant here is that it also had a pop system, and it was similar to what Bret described, but different in the details.
Each city had its population divided between 4 social classes (Noble, Citizen, Foreigner, Slave) and 5 economic sectors (Farmer, Worker, Merchant, Priest, Warrior) which coincided with the 5 main resources (Food, Materials, Trade, Faith, Arms). The Citizen was the “default” pop. The Nobles worked just like Citizens, except they also produced Laws – essentially the equivalent of governance research. Foreigners worked like citizens, except had lower loyalty; they also kept their original nationality/ethnicity and could revolt to join them at an opportune time. Slaves consumed less food as upkeep, didn’t slow down population growth as much as the others, and their loyalty didn’t factor into their city’s overall loyalty – but if the city did rebel for other reasons they would make things much, much worse.
Gold was obtained mostly through taxation, converting a certain % of all resources to gold and also lowering loyalty. In addition there where a whole range of civilization wide policies that could affect pops, making some of them better in a particular economic role, changing how quickly they moved between social classes, and so on. For example, adopting Militia would increase arms produced by all Citizens (even if they’re not Warriors) a little while Helotry boosted the yield of Slaves but drastically lowered loyalty. Cities were self governing, and would improve their own buildings depending on which economic sector that city was strongest in and which job was most common: a garrison town would upgrade its barracks, while the Merchants at the nexus of a trade network would improve it’s harbour. The player chose how much of each city’s production stayed there for local improvements, and how much was pooled in an empire-wide fund for actions that they directly controlled.
Was my model more accurate than Imperators? Probably not, but at a very broad level I found it reproduced some of general characteristics of ancient civilizations when the “correct” circumstances for them arose, which was nice. A model for a game shouldn’t be a perfect emulator, but if it can simulate some of the real outcomes then all the better. More importantly, it led to interesting choices about how to evolve the character of a civilization and specialise in different different areas of growth on both the city and empire level. At the end of the day, that’s what really matters in a game. From my own personal experience I can say that having some kind of abstract pop is a very natural way to model an economy in game. It’s the right balance between abstraction and realism. It’s predictable enough for the player to understand, while retaining enough complexity for emergent behaviour to arise.
This makes me think that the best thing the game could have done to represent Bret Devereaux’ theory of history (which does seem to be pretty good at explaining why ancient history happened the way it did) would have been to make this “a game about pops”. A fine-grained pop-system that also models attitudes among those pops would probably be able to simulate all the things this game seems to be interested in in a more cohesive manner.
In other words, imagine Imperator: Rome but one of the most important menus looks like the “Social Classes in the Roman Republic”-graph in this post.
This might be where the game-iness comes into play – the obviously correct thing to do is to set up an expansive, Roman-style citizenship rules and incubate a culture of service. Just good luck convincing the Carthaginian elite to share their privileges and serve in the army more, or the Seleucid elite to make native Syrians first-class citizens, etc.
I guess you could create countervailing bonuses to incentivize you to keep the historically accurate systems, except then you’re dulling the point about Rome having a Big Advantage, Really. Reminds me of how Total War: Shogun added in some mechanics to incentivize becoming Christian from a gameplay perspective (e.g. cool stuff from the Europeans), but really, the tradeoff should be something like Pros: Your soul is saved! Cons: Lots of people wants to kill you now. 🙁
On a hard difficulty level “Et tu, Brute?” should be one of the loss conditions. You can toe the line but it may be a sudden total loss, or a severe debilitation with the government reorganization.
Making every country playable is a valid goal, but maybe Rome could be the first timer easy mode with all the republican advances in effect.
Victoria II works as a game about pops because it’s an era where the pops changed so much. Shifting people from farms to factory, raising literacy and creating a bourgeois middle class were huge endeavors. During the century the game spans some nations were extremely successful at these things and others were not and they had wildly divergent outcomes as a result.
Imperator Rome doesn’t have the same kind of grand evolution to follow.
I don’t think that is a problem. Crusader Kings has a mostly static feudalism and still has interesting dynamics emerging from interaction with characters and events. And the general changes in the political makeup of the Mediterranean in Imperator’s era does come with significant changes for pops as well. While those changes weren’t as deep as during the industrial revolution, they were significant enough that we still like following the story through its stages today. I have no doubt that this could be translated into an interesting game progression.
The states in Imperator: Rome are in military competition with each other. They try to get an edge in their competition to conquer the Mediterranean by managing their pops particularly well. Changes in pops would emerge from where you are in that competition. For example, research has shown that the the social unrest in the Late Republic happened because Roman wars became a lot less deadly when Rome had become the most powerful state in the Mediterranean. Fewer sons died in war, so they were less able to inherit and moved to the city, where they agitated for their economic interests.
Changes like this show that the transition from local power to great power and from great power to hegemonic power could offer new challenges in pop management. (Unlike Victoria II the changes would mostly be driven by player expansion and other player choices, which does require some careful balancing to make it work, but doesn’t seem impossible.)
The thing is, Crusader Kings tracks a mostly static feudal system, but it does so by tracking individuals, and the fortunes of individuals (and the dynasties they belong to) are not static within the system. The point being made here about gameplay is that in a strategy game, whatever element your game tracks should be an element that interesting things are happening to.
If the intent of the game designers is that a “freedman” pop is just going to stay a freedman pop doing essentially the same things for 300 years, unless beaten up and sold into slavery by invaders or something, then it doesn’t make sense to have intricate mechanics governing the pops to the same extent that Victoria II does.
It’s like how the mechanics governing what happens to terrain tiles in the Civilization series are rather simplistic, because ultimately the game isn’t about modeling complex ecological shifts in fine-grained detail or about comparing the merits of subtly different irrigation systems or land distribution processes. It’s a very broad-strokes depiction of what is happening to large regions.
Right, and conversely the fates of dynasties become less interesting as we exit the medieval period, when they mostly become tied to the fates of the consolidating states, who then become the focus of EU IV.
Nit pick:
>But Imperator mints new enslaved pops another way[…]
This is only true if a very large city is taken. Mostly war just moves existing slaves around.
When a tile is taken EACH non-slave class sends N * eff% /4 pops rounded down.
(eff% is typically 20%-30%)
Therefore no new slaves are made unless the city had 16+ freeman/tribesmen/&c… (this calcution is done per class not all together)
Only Rome, Carthage, and Alex typically have populations that big.
Oh hey, we ended up talking about this last week in the comments! Citizenship is a natural answer to the question of how Rome maintained it’s empire when it didn’t export the Socii system outside Italy.
To briefly defend (explain?) Marx, he was wrong about a lot of things, but he also had outdated data. By Finley there was enough archeology to start talking about how ancient economies worked, but for decades before then the data was just not very good. And Marx was a century before then.
Marx was also, in context, using ancient societies to draw parallels to cotemporaneous plantation economies, where there might be 4 slaves for everyone free. In the ancient world only specific jobs were that dependent on slavery; unless you lived in Sparta you’d have to go to a mine camp to find more slaves than freemen. His slave mode of production was basically true for the global trade economies of the early industrial revolution, just not in the past he was projecting it on.
I feel the need to point this out solely because there is an impetus to think old historians were idiots when they end up being wrong. Sometimes that’s true, but often there are good reasons for their beliefs.
On a similar note nothing technically prevented an abolition movement in ancient Rome, and we do see some sentiment trending that way. It was just fringe, particularly until the later empire.
As for why, I’d argue war slavery as an institution is more “sticky” than capitalistic chattel slavery. The majority of the citizenship would at some point engage with the system of taking slaves and dissent would represent a betrayal of military comrades or the very idea of the military. This shows up in how Roman plundering and loot distribution was handled; it was cooperative, organized, *social*. Slave taking was something every Roman citizen would be expected to contribute to as needed, a privilege of citizenship, as Rome was always at war.
Meanwhile slavery was explicitly a matter of wealth in the 1600-1800’s, meaning the poor had no financial or patriotic stake in a vacuum. The system relied on propaganda, bigotry, and cultural impetus, which made it weaker than an appeal to horizontal social bonds. Hence abolition movements in a society with a slave *trade* was easier than abolition movements in a society with cooperative slave *taking*.
Of course culture does matter; the enlightenment wasn’t a Roman thing. Rome happened across some degree of egalitarianism as a means of raw military power, not as a cultural identity by my reading. They did have some egalitarian movements, but they were mostly limited to personalistic guidance for the elite-“abusing your slaves is wrong because you are ruled by emotional gratification” not “abusing your slaves is wrong because they are reasoning people just like you with and have as much inherent worth as you”.
Yeah, war slavery seems pretty universal. Simply on a practical level an ancient abolitionist movement would have needed to answer the question “What should we do with war captives then?”. Admittedly the Classical Mediterranean was on the more extreme end of the scale, other societies would enslave war captives only for a limited number of years or had their children be equal members of society by default. But I would still credit the Middle Ages making ransoming the norm in wars within Christianity with creating necessary preconditions for later abolitionist movements.
I did read a newer Marxist text some years ago which used the category “tributary mode of production” to describe basically all agricultural state societies – most accumulation is based on parts of the surplus extracted from the (mostly) subsistence farmers by various forms of taxation. That broader category, together with “tribal mode of production” and the “capitalist mode of production” seems to work better than more specific categorizations like “slave mode of production”, “feudal mode of production”, and “Asiatic mode of production”. But those three categories (tribal, tributary, capitalist) are do suspiciously overlap with foraging, agricultural, and industrialized societies; so then one could argue that class relations are just downstream from technology (which I think is called Modernization Theory, and a rival to Marxism).
there are only 3 meaningful modes of production. you can make a good for your own consumption, you can make it for sale on the market, or you can make it because you’re ordered too. call them peasant, capitalist, and command. Of course, in reality, no system is absolute, but that’s the only sensible way to think about it.
You can also make a good because it’s fun. Think of amateur theatre or open source software. (Okay, strictly speaking, the first is a service).
I think large portion of open sources projects are created for own consumption. You make the software to fulfill your own needs and then you release it as open source with the hope that other people will use their time to improve it to fit their own needs.
This is one strength of open source versus commercial software. You need to make the software good enough that you want to use it yourself. Instead of making it good enough/market it hard enough to scam someone to buy it.
@formerlycassander I think there are at least two more: You can make it because you want to (artist) and you can make it to give to others, possibly for prestige (magnate/gift). For the former, I submit free/open source projects, especially in their early stages in their ‘pure’ forms where somebody makes something because they wanted it and make it freely available to others. Game mods and the like also fit here. The latter is less common in our society but was the basis for a lot of other societies (and still occurs here too, though it often acts as advertising for some form of indirect capitalist production-see YouTubers producing content given away for free, to get prestige so that they can produce a source of attention to sell to companies looking for advertising). You might discount the former-only the wealthy can produce a lot without worrying about what benefit it gives back to them-but the latter is the basis for entire economies.
Think about it from the other side, where does you food come from? you can make it, buy it, or take it. Gifting, where it’s economically meaningful, is probably some combination of command or exchange.
Youtubers, though, aren’t gifting. they’re selling the attention of their viewers to advertisers. They might want to make it, but economically, they’re selling a service.
Peasants make good not just for their own consumption, but also for the landlords to sell on the market.
Capitalists don’t make the good themselves, they pay for the workers to make good for them.
And of course you can be ordered to make good for your own consumption or for sale in the market.
the peasants are producing for their own consumption and the landlords are either trading commanding or commanding production, depending on the relationship between peasant and landlord.
That isn’t the way capitalism has ever been defined, so no, I’m not going to call it that. Capitalism relates to who owns the means of production (at least, that’s a necessary if not suffieicent condition), not about the motives for production.
There are other reasons one might engage in economic activity, of course, but that’s a separate issue, the bigger issue is that you’re conflating “markets” with “capitalism”. Markets predate capitalism and will certainly outlast it.
the bigger issue is that you’re conflating “markets” with “capitalism”.
I’ve never seen anyone drawing a distinction that actually turned on the processes involved. Some do it on basis of results but results form a poor guideline.
I’ve seen you triple down on defending anti immigration hoaxes refuted by their own source Mary, your inability to see things is a personal failing.
Notice that Dan is so blinded by his nonsense that he didn’t even notice my comment had nothing to do with immigration.
I’ve never seen anyone drawing a distinction that actually turned on the processes involved. Some do it on basis of results but results form a poor guideline.
Well, I’m not you, obviously, so I can’t say that the concepts that are convincing to me will be convincing to you. But, maybe if you specificied what you mean by results and processes here I could try to address your criticisms?
I wouldn’t define capitalism either in terms of results or processes, I’d define it as being first and foremost about ownership. In a capitalist society the means of production (agricultural land, factories, capital, tools and equipment) are owned by a distinct class of people whose primary economic role is to pay other people to work for them. This sets it apart from other economic models where the means of production are mostly owned by self-employed petty producers (the “proprietary” mode of production), by workers’ cooperatives, by the state, by local political bodies etc.. Markets might be a necessary condition for capitalism, depending on how you want to define it, but they certainly aren’t sufficient, since markets have existed in all kinds of non-capitalist societies. There are other features of the model, but the specific ownership relations are a pretty core one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism
Like I said in the other comment, I think multiple modes of production can be operating at the same time, so I think a country can be “less” or “more” capitalist, and I also think that the introduction of regulation and the welfare state in the 20th c definitely changed the nature of capitalism, but at the core I’d still say that ownership by a distinct capitalist class is the core of what defines capitalism, not the existence of markets.
@Hector, so a country like the USA, where a significant share of workers and retirees own shares in the “means of production” through pension funds, or individual retirement accounts, isn’t capitalist by your definition? Because of course in the USA there isn’t a distinct class of people.
Very accurate observation.
Tracey, there’s room for false populism in capitalistic states, and that impetus nicely dovetails into fascism. The idea that workers have any significant ownership of the means of production through pension funds is simply not true; the majority of productive capital is owned by the 1% and almost all of the rest is owned by the 10%, and the ratio of this ownership has been increasing while wage growth has been almost completely stagnant since the 80’s. The systems of popular ownership manifestly aren’t working to distribute capital to workers, so it’s still a capitalistic state.
It is true, however, that pensions were a socialist reform. They’re just woefully insufficient.
Is that clear?
so a country like the USA, where a significant share of workers and retirees own shares in the “means of production” through pension funds, or individual retirement accounts, isn’t capitalist by your definition?
Do they derive *the majority of their income*, over the course of their lives, from ownership of shares in the means of production? And are most firms *majority owned* by workers? If so, then I’d agree that the country in question isn’t capitalist any more, but I think it’s pretty clear neither of those is true of the US right now.
I agree with you that the fact that “a significant share of workers and retirees” own shares in the means of production through pension funds definitely complicates the concept of ‘capitalism’, but as long as capital ownership is highly concentrated in a specific subset of the population, I think the concept is still useful.
Not really. Especially given that the cohort you are discussing is definitely intertwined with the government.
One notes that the economic policy of technically private corporations with such intertwining is actually — well, fascism.
It is important to remember that a lot of people weren’t ransomed in the middle ages because they were noncombatants. This definition is pretty poor here, so a better term might be that they were considered *terrain*; one neither enslaved nor ransomed the forest, nor the serfs on it. They might suffer for your foraging, or your taxes, but the land and what was on it was the goal of most warfare. Going out of your way to hunt down serfs was actively counterproductive. Levies were still dangerous though, so if a ransom wasn’t forthcoming the captured peasants were often disposed of, something we see more commonly earlier on.
If that’s more humane or not depends on how one accounts for a higher percentage of the population being treated with institutional indifference rather than particular malice.
Still, by the high middle ages (i.e. hundred years war) the practice of ransom was widespread enough that common soldiers might expect to be taken prisoner for later release instead of just being murdered. Part of that’s economics and the professionalization of armies, but murdering captives also just became a deeply socially unacceptable thing to do because of the church. You can deny their influence in some ways, but they really did pull that one off.
Modernization Theory is mostly opposed to Marxist theory because it supposes that societies develop as a function of technology to a liberal democracy. If you view society as a set of steps where technology transcends previous limits then it makes an intuitive sense. The problem is that societies don’t do that; you can explain fascism under Marxist theory as a way in which class dynamics lead to manipulative social structures and propoganda by the ruling class regardless of economic limitations, but modernization theory either can’t do so or has some uncomfortable conclusions about what the next mode of society “naturally” is.
In terms of how technology, production, and political power are all deeply intertwined it’s fully compatible with Marxist theory. In fact the idea that material conditions influence politics and culture is a Marxist heuristic; note how I keep going to an economic cause first before accepting that people just choose to do things a certain way. It’s not always going to work, in fact I’ve seen two recent examples where I can’t prove material conditions are responsible for cultural or technical trends even to myself, but it’s generally sound.
Except fascism developed as an ideology of some outsiders – Adolf Hitler and Mussolini started off as populists, not members of the ruling class. Meanwhile people like Churchill (who was, if memory serves, born in a duke’s dressing room), were fervently opposed to fascism.
Basically, Marxist theory fails the empirical evidence on this point.
Marxist theory doesn’t actually say what I said there, in that my statement is an incredible simplification meant to point out a discrepancy. I wasn’t trying to be comprehensive because it’s not the point of the topic.
Also, remember that the leading figures of a movement are often not the most important. The Nazi party was massively, astoundingly, astroturfed; they had huge financial networks based on millionaire donations from the business class, both domestic and foreign. There’s some debate on the sequence of events regarding active collaboration because the most well known open collaboration happened after 1933, but prior to that German industrial, agricultural, and manufacturing executives were signing letters asking for Hitler to be made Chancellor of Germany. Which happened. And, of course, once in power business leaders collaborated so much they got arrested for it later.
There’s been an attempt to distance business from the Nazis rise to power, but it’s hollow, almost literal Holocaust apologia. The truth is that industrial magnates were vital to the Nazi parties rise, meaning my broad statement is basically true, if incredibly imprecise.
“Also, remember that the leading figures of a movement are often not the most important.”
The idea that Hitler was not the most important figure of the Nazi movement is the sort of idea at which one can only marvel.
Fascists desperately want you to believe the strongman leaders matter, because that’s their mythos. We shouldn’t grant them the plot errantly, and in context there’s reason to doubt them. Why is Hitler important? What’s the actual reason for the Nazi success in achieving power? If we assume it was because of Hitler we have an obvious problem; Hitler’s *German*. The fascist movement was international. If a single nationalist/populist demagogue actually mattered then why did half of Europe end up becoming Fascist? Why were so many subject to the same influx of political forces?
No, the movement is best understood as being more broad, divorced from any one figure. And the most generically important people to understanding a movement are not the leaders, but the funders. Consistently we see landowners, business magnates, and international corporations funding fascist political interests. The demagogues come and go. And these business interests were often international, had shared class interests that transcended borders, and had a vested interest in the success of fascism.
So to be frank, the idea that Hitler mattered should be treated with skepticism. There were many potential Hitlers, but only a few sources of funding to get them elected or protect them in the courts.
“No, the movement is best understood as being more broad, divorced from any one figure.”
“Best” in what sense? Marxists like it best because it allows them to claim that Marx is not refuted by his own standards, but in any other sense, it founders on the obvious problem that the funds that are said to cause the movement did not get paid until it was clear that the movement was going to take power, and they tried to protect themselves with it.
That is, in fact, not how the rise of the Nazi party worked. There were two periods of buy in, one by a section of business executives and magnates that occurred early on, and one once they took power. The first let the Nazis build support and mislead people, the second let them maintain it more easily and wage war more brutally.
But of course modern fascists love defending historical fascism.
Evidence of this first part? Because every actual historian I’ve read said it did not happen.
I know the zero books you’ve read all confirm your biases asshole. Fuck off and leave the discussion to people capable of intelligent speech. You’ve already invalidated your voice here.
And there you go. . .
Dan, looking at this, I’d say there’s room for both “Hitler mattered” and “the class of wealthy industrialist backers and old-school Prussian conservatives who ensured Hitler would end up in power rather than being a flash in the pan broken by the Weimar state mattered.”
The backers mattered insofar as they ensured that Germany would become a fascist state; if Hitler had died in 1918 it is overwhelmingly likely that they would have at least tried to find some other right-wing strongman to support. It’s conceivable that they would have failed where they succeeded with Hitler, because butterfly effects apply to specific historical events, but yes, they would have tried.
However, it is also true that once Germany became a fascist state, Hitler’s actual personality and intentions had a huge amount to do with what kind of fascist state they became.
The German industrialists would have been well enough content, I think, to have a fascism more like Italy’s. A fascism that fights only limited colonial wars against enemies unable to fight back effectively. A fascism that would avoid the risk of getting into existential conflicts with major European powers and concentrate on simply breaking the trade unions, striking extremely beneficial deals with the industrialists, and falsely boasting that they had totally “made the trains run on time.”
But that’s not the fascism they got, and the biggest single reason they didn’t get it is because Hitler wasn’t that kind of guy. Hitler wanted to be a Napoleon- to turn Europe inside out and force its entire power structure to its collective knees.
@Dan – the initial fascists were mainly Italian, not German. The early fascists had a bunch of ideas that influenced a lot of people in a lot of countries, some of said influenced people started fascist parties of their own. People from a wide range of different backgrounds came fascist, and people from a wide range of different backgrounds realised how stupid the ideology was.
That a bunch of German businessleaders supported fascism just shows that success in one field (making money) does not guarantee success in another field (government). Numerous Germans supported fascism and nearly all of them paid a high price for their bad decison-making. Unfortunately a hell of a lot of other people paid that price too.
The Marxist obsession with class based analyses means Marxists miss a lot.
“@Dan – the initial fascists were mainly Italian, not German. The early fascists had a bunch of ideas that influenced a lot of people in a lot of countries, some of said influenced people started fascist parties of their own. People from a wide range of different backgrounds came fascist, and people from a wide range of different backgrounds realised how stupid the ideology was.
That a bunch of German businessleaders supported fascism just shows that success in one field (making money) does not guarantee success in another field (government). Numerous Germans supported fascism and nearly all of them paid a high price for their bad decison-making. Unfortunately a hell of a lot of other people paid that price too.
The Marxist obsession with class based analyses means Marxists miss a lot.”
Yes, the initial fascists were Italian, yes they influenced people, and yes, the influenced people started fascist parties. None of that suggests that attempts to analyze *who and why* they did so is invalid.
What it appears you’re trying to say is that it’s completely incidental that business leaders consistently support fascism. However the rise of German *and* Italian fascism doesn’t have random buy in by business owners, they were among the strongest supporters as a demographic, so any conclusion which provides a better explanation for the broad social buy in by business owners than “Eh, they just happened to find it convincing” is definitionally more valid.
Italian fascists primarily gathered support by using paramilitary violence *sheltered and supported* by large landowners and business owners to suppress dissidents, specifically socialists and communists, while using their funds to avoid legal prosecution. The Italian government, primarily run by what we’d probably call conservatives today (socially regressive monarchists fearful of socialism) was perfectly willing to grant them legal status once they started seizing political power through paramilitary means. Then they openly mixed paramilitary and military violence to suppress opponents, but this remained targeted at obliterating socialist organizations as a deliberate and explicit nod to the business owners who wanted to keep labor costs down.
German fascism was even more openly bankrolled by business interests, whom funded the propaganda, legal defenses, and campaigns of Nazi party officials. Because it took longer we can see the slow build more clearly, but the process was the same; I believe I elaborated the evidence here already.
And in turn, business owners (in both countries) became fantastically rich during the war. Being a pro fascist business owner was *great* for your relative share of wealth as the war took off-even as the entire country sank you were floating on top.
The fact that elites supported a movement that destroyed their nations is not incidental, elites do that quite literally all the time. Almost every societal collapse is triggered by the interests of the elites diverging from the population, very rarely are things socially healthy before a stressor wipes society out. It’s a great reason to distrust the concept and judgement of elites, obviously, but it in no way provides a counterargument to why business owners weren’t, as a class, pro fascism.
And as for Marxist class analysis missing things, from where I’m standing you’re missing a valid way of analyzing history because you don’t like the conclusion, namely that business owners trend toward fascism. Obviously not everything is going to be explained within a single framework, but it provides useful predictive information.
@tracyW
> Basically, Marxist theory fails the empirical evidence on this point.
this is unfair. It fails the empirical test on pretty much every other point as well. :p
@Dan, most countries didn’t collapse into fascism. So your belief about the preferences of the elite doesn’t pass the empirical test.
And lol on your claim about business people becoming “fantastically rich”.
Literally half of Western Europe did. Actually, strictly speaking, counting collaborators, you’re just wrong. I think a majority of participating governments were fascist during WW2, at some point. If they were the majority depends on if you count British dominions as separate countries or not.
This is also, to be clear, not how empiricism works. We have records of who supported fascists and how, and it was business elites. I don’t care if you want to claim that not every country had the movement, as that’s not relevant to the point. You can provide an explanation for why some business interests supported fascism and others didn’t across national lines, but that’s irrelevant to the fact that *they did* support fascism where it took power.
Although by today yeah, every western country has had a powerful fascist movement funded by elite business interests. So…
You’re also strictly wrong about how wealthy collaborating industrialists became. They lost their fortunes-mostly-when Germany lost, but they were fantastically rich during the years before they lost. I’m not sure why you’re so confident here, it’s completely unfounded.
Nazism was sufficiently different from the Italian (and Spanish and French) varieties of right-wing regime that some have not classified it as fascist. In terms of ideology, fascism looked to Sorel and the syndicalists and largely allied with reactionary Catholicism (Spain, Vichy, Tiso, Degrelle). It was corporatist, nationalist and comfortable with the old right of landowners and industrialists. It was enthusiastic about war without having any particular goal in mind (and hence bad at it). The nation was defined culturally.
Nazism married the nationalism and expansionism of the traditional German right with some quite specific obsessions that accreted around Hitler and his coterie – most notably the link between anti-Semitism and race. To the Nazis the old right were simply tools (and as the war went on they were increasingly sidelined). The nation was racial and the struggle was for racial dominance.
In terms of Dan’s argument – the regime would not have taken power without the backing of the military and the industrialists – with whom it shared many goals – but once in power it took off in ways they did not envisage.
This is a misunderstanding. I don’t doubt people believe it, but it doesn’t make sense.
Yes, Nazism was obsessed with a Germanic definition of race, but the other fascists had their own racial definitions. And the Nazis also claimed that they were preserving the culture, and freely moved between any and all positions as rhetorical populism demanded.
Fascism is foundationally irrationalism, not only in that it is rhetorically irrational, but also in that it is opposed to the concept of determining truth via rational means. Fascists don’t have logical rhetoric and are never, ever, honest. They underwrite the final line, that their greviences are just and special and that the systems of society which reward them are just and the ones which reward others are unjust, and write backwards.
It’s not surprising, then, that fascism will have different rhetorical flourishes, although even those collapse into a singular hatred, despite being fundamentally the same thing through time and space.
@Dan “Literally half of Western Europe [turned to fascism].”
The only countries that naturally became fascist on their own were Italy, Germany and Austria. Although the numbers are outsized by the countries being big, it’s still less than half of Europe. The numbers are fuzzy and data is hard to come by, but Germany had a population of ~86.7 million in 1939; The Italian empire (I guess including Africa and Albania?) had a population of ~57.6 million in 1939; Europe had a population estimate (that I could find) of ~435 million in 1939. That’s, what, 26% of Europe being fascists at the onset of WW2?
Degrelle, Petain, Quisling and others were all wartime vassal collaborators that were placed into power by the conqueror German nation. If the business elites of those countries collaborated with the government during wartime occupation, you cannot claim that it is purely due to ideological compatibility, rather than an amoral, ideological willingness for the companies and their owners to survive and prosper under an occupation regime. If a company collaborates with De Gaulle’s liberated “Free France” circa D-Day, can you claim that that company fundamentally “supports liberalism” based on said collaboration alone?
Meanwhile, Antonescu purged Codreanu’s fascist Iron Guard Legionary movement in 1941. The fascist Falangists in Spain made up only a small part of Spain’s ruling class under the rule of the military generalissimo Francisco Franco.
I’m not convinced by that claim at all. It’s incompatible with the very basics of WW2. A lot of Balkan and Balkan-adjacent leaders, like Miklos Horthy, joined the Axis out of self-interest (while being ideologically neutral), But, otherwise, the Nazis had to militarily conquer the bigger half of Europe. The existence of both fringe and popular fascist parties in various countries does not imply an inherent attraction by business interests towards said parties based on that claim alone.
First off, let’s not construct a new claim here, and be clear on who was and wasn’t fascist.
Part of where we’re having disagreement is that you’re supporting a narrow definition of fascism that appears to be limited to Nazism-that is a repressive, regressive, violent and totalitarian regime dedicated to anti leftism and whose unifying scapegoat conspiracy is Jewish. This defines several fascist movements because antisemitism was widespread, but not all fascist movements are antisemitic. It’s an incidental characteristic of European fascism, or even more specifically Nazi inspired fascists. In truth any minorities presented as simultaneously weak and strong by the state are interchangeable with Jews here; Muslims are currently a popular target for resurgent neonazi movements as an example.
If we define western Europe as the major colonial or ex colonial powers, we have Portugal, Spain, Germany, and Italy ruled voluntarily by internal fascist movements or, at best, a mixture of fascists and various other, largely idealogically interchangeable, reactionaries, and four liberal democracies, Britain, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands.
If we include eastern Europe we have a couple non idealogically aligned axis powers, including Hungary and Finland, a couple idealogically aligned fascist power, Romania and Bulgaria, and some collaborators. On the other side we have some kingdoms that were incidental Allied powers like Poland and Greece, some Vanguardist dictatorships including the Soviets, and liberal Czechoslovakia.
So we’re stuck with a region of 50-50 fascists and liberals and a region of kaleidoscopic ideologies who were allied by interests, which had more fascists and dictatorships than anything else. It doesn’t really help the conclusion if the alternative to fascism is military rule or a Vanguardist dictatorship.
Of course neither is the primary evidence that business leaders support fascism. All the material support business leaders gave fascist demogogues to get them elected does that. It’s just evidence they succeeded, often, in overthrowing democracies, because capitalistic states are *empirically* vulnerable to that form of takeover.
@Dan: You managed to leave out Ireland, Switzerland, and Luxembourg. So instead of 50/50, now we’re at four of the eleven countries in Western Europe falling to fascism.
Switzerland is debatable as it’s not part of colonial europe, Ireland you’re right on, Luxembourg is a microstate.
Also, it’s worth noting that Portugal, Spain, and Italy were arguably the least capitalist countries in Western Europe, and very much still dominated by the old landholding families.
@Dan:
“If we define western Europe as the major colonial or ex colonial powers,”
Unique definition of western Europe. Obviously I don’t share it.
And your beliefs about German industrialists prospering under fascism ignores the whole issue of taxes to pay for the war.
What is your point? That it’s not useful? Define a better one. That you’re technically right in your definition? Not relevant.
And the Nazis *specifically* avoided raising taxes as much as possible in contrast to other WW2 participants, particularly on the upper class. It’s one of the most notable things here.
@60guilders Not just those, but also Scandinavia – Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland – disappeared from Dan’s overview of Europe. So now it’s four out of… fifteen countries?
@Dan “First off, let’s not construct a new claim here, and be clear on who was and wasn’t fascist. ”
Truth be told, I’m lost, within this discussion, as to what it is that 𝘺𝘰𝘶 think is fascism. Your assumed definition isn’t clear to me at all. Was Horthy’s Hungary fascist? Was Antonescu’s Romania fascist (especially in contrast to Codreanu’s Iron Guard)? I’m Lithuanian – was Smetona’s Lithuania fascist? What’s the main distinctive difference between fascism, and regular illiberal authoritarian dictatorship?
“It’s just evidence they succeeded, often, in overthrowing democracies, because capitalistic states are *empirically* vulnerable to that form of takeover.”
Even including Spain and Portugal, I only know of six examples. Five of them during the Interwar Period (the four aforementioned + Argentina), and then Pinochet’s Chile during the Cold War. Otherwise, concerning liberal countries, neither during the Cold War, nor before WW1 were they particularly vulnerable to fascist takeover. The closest attempt that I know of was perhaps the Years of Lead in Italy, but it did not succeed in the end.
Maybe this will change soon. Maybe we’re on the cusp of a big wave of backsliding towards fascist dictatorship, like countries were in the 1930. But, historically, except for one unique narrow time period, your quoted assertion simply doesn’t hold.
Again, Scandinavia wasn’t involved in colonialism. I’m not even creating this distinction by myself as Tracey claims, Scandinavia is in different categories by most definitions not based on cold war geopolitics, which aren’t relevant here.
“Truth be told, I’m lost, within this discussion, as to what it is that 𝘺𝘰𝘶 think is fascism. Your assumed definition isn’t clear to me at all. Was Horthy’s Hungary fascist? Was Antonescu’s Romania fascist (especially in contrast to Codreanu’s Iron Guard)? I’m Lithuanian – was Smetona’s Lithuania fascist? What’s the main distinctive difference between fascism, and regular illiberal authoritarian dictatorship?”
The reason for this is that there’s grey area precisely because those regimes have mostly fascist characters but lack a couple elements. In order.
Hungary was an edge case. Horthy had conspiratorial views, but I don’t know enough about them to make a call, and the literature is mixed.
Yes, and nothing, fascists being self cannibalizing shouldn’t be odd. One fascist group tried to seize the government to be more fascist.
Again, edge case. I don’t know enough to really say either way because my engagement with that era of Lithuania is that they were a dictatorship, anti communist, Nazis arguably “betrayed” them and sold them to Soviets, then they were irrelevant until Barbarossa when collaboration and resistance became militarily relevant.
The distinction has been written on extensively by others, but the defining characteristic of fascism is irrationalism, institutional, rhetorical, and systematic irrationalism, both as opposition to the ideals of the enlightenment and as bad logical coherence. There are several indicators of this, including irrational decision making regarding war, but the most common are rhetorical patterns; vague language, simultaneously strong and weak conspiracies, false populism, and media manipulation.
Fascists don’t care about proving things rationally, they care only about the violence of power and control. In fact they despise rationalism, seeing it as weak. Dictatorships with other idealogies may have the same bottom line, power, but they don’t make irrationalism a core characteristic.
Part of why this grey area exists is because, in an era of mass media, public participation, and industrial nations, irrationalism is an effective means of control. It’s a rational decision for the elites to rely on bigotry and unfalsifiable assertions to invite the oppression they benefit from, so increasingly dictatorships moved further into fascism over time during the 20th century, becoming more interchangeable as their rhetoric collapsed into the same themes, followed by policy. If this was a defining characteristic of the regime is a judgement call.
“If we define western Europe as the major colonial or ex colonial powers”
Dan, that is not what “Western Europe” usually means. People who want to talk about the major colonial or ex colonial powers usually use the phrase “the major colonial or ex colonial powers”.
When someone suddenly needs to redefine words so strangely in mid-argument, that usually means they are making it up as they go along, and have just realised the premises they started out with don’t lead to the desired conclusion.
I defined the term with social and historical context because I’m legitimately trying to make a point about the social framework involved. There’s no standard definitions here, it’s arbitrary. I can find several that make my point even stronger; did you know some people exclude Britain *and* Scandinavia from western Europe, but include Iberia, both axis powers, and Austria? There are five fascist powers in western Europe, three Democratic members of the allies, a microstate, and Switzerland by this map I found. Am I even more right now?
This is idiotic. If I played this game you’d be complaining I was arbitrarily following some irrelevant definition.
The problem with restricting your universe to European states with maritime colonial empires is that by far the three biggest in the early 20th century were the UK, France, and the Netherlands, all of which stayed democratic, the first indefinitely, the latter two until they were conquered.
Now, it’s true that “we don’t have as big of a maritime empire as the UK and France” motivated German, Italian, and Japanese nationalism, and this was intensified by grievances over the outcome of WW1 (in Germany) and over being treated as 1.5th-rate powers by the US and UK (in the other two). But this shifts the explanation from a materialist one to a geopolitical one, in which the military brass’s opinions mattered. Hindenburg represented the Junker class, but was also a celebrated WW1 commander, and the Reichswehr took sides and would not repress right-wing violence the way it did left-wing violence; in Japan, much of the impetus for its wartime fascism came from military adventurism and toleration of coups so long as the coup leaders could say they were acting in the interest of the emperor.
@60guilders,
Ireland and Finland were not fascist, but both had very socially conservatively bent, yet democratic governments. I would venture to say the same about Switzerland.
Finland, BTW, had a fascist movement that was defeated after a coup attempt i 1932, but not completely outlawed. The evidence that it was supported by industrial and other business interests is conclusive. In the Finnish case, the democracy was mainly saved by the fact that there was a significant nationalist, anticommunist faction that believed that democracy was essential to building a state strong enough to counter the Russian threat, as otherwise, you would not be able to mobilise all resources for an eventual existential war. Urho Kekkonen, the later president, was one of the leading members of this group.
The Finnish democracy paid good dividends. The Baltic dictatorships surrendered to Stalin without fight, largely because their leaders didn’t trust the willingness of their populations to fight. Finland survived the WWII as an independent nation, losing only 2000 civilians and 90,000 servicemen during the war.
So, while the fascism thrives on the idea of having violence as the basis of the society, a society that you seriously attempt to optimise for an all-out, existential conflict looks much more liberal.
@Finnish Reader,
The coup attempt also failed because the person the coup leaders hoped would run the country was Mannerheim, who had no interest in being a caudillo, right? Or is that factor overrated?
The Marxist obsession with class based analyses means Marxists miss a lot.
I actually agree with this, in principle, but I don’t think your point about fascism (real fascism that is, i.e. the 1930s version) really supports your point. The actual ideology of fascism as it was developed in the early to mid 20th c. actually had a *lot* to say about class and economics. It had a lot to say about other topics too- in many cases race, in some cases religion, in the most important and ‘core’ cases about war and struggle- but the economic ideology really did play a big role. This provides a pretty good summary here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism
In the thinking of a lot of its intellectual advocates, fascism was supposed to provide an answer to the problems of capitalism that didn’t involve abolition of private property or the abolition of distinct classes.
Now, I totally agree with you that a lot of people use ‘fascism’ today to vaguely mean something like ‘authoritarianism’ or ‘authoritarian ethnic nationalism’ or ‘conservative authoritarianism’ generally, and there’s certainly no economic or left vs. right component to *that*. You can be an authoritarian ethnic nationalist and be pretty much anywhere on the spectrum of economic ideology. I think that fascism *as it existed in the 1930s* definitely had a strong economic component though, and that shouldn’t be surprising- it was the era of the Great Depression, people cared a great deal about economics and about varying ways to organize and economy and solve the problem of class conflict. More than they do today, for sure, whether in the west, the (former) east or the south.
The only countries that naturally became fascist on their own were Italy, Germany and Austria.
@Roadent:
I think “on their own” is too stringent a requirement here- small and/or weak countries take actions all the time that are done under pressure from strong countries, but they still exert some degree of agency, and usually reflect a significant domestic faction. I don’t think for example that the 2001-2021 regimes in Afghanistan had no popular support, just because they were propped up by the US military and required the US occupation to survive: clearly they reflected a significant chunk of Afghan society and Afghan popular opinion, just like their Taliban enemies did. I’d say the same about the communist regimes in Eastern Europe, and I’d also say the same about at least some of the “fascist” regimes in 1930s/1940s Europe- blaming it all on the Germans is to deny agency to people like Tiso and his supporters, etc..
I entirely agree with you that defining who and what qualifies as fascist is pretty slippery (and that the term is so heavily politicized and used as a term of abuse that it’s become nearly useless, and I rarely use it myself).
What movements do you think are being incorrectly labeled fascist, Hector, and by whom?
Not really. For one, trivially, you’re leaving out doing things as part of a voluntary organization that someone wants to be in. People produce things all the times without the threat of force, need to eat, or potential profit driving them. For one, every charity or NGO violates your categories.
Obviously this is a silly critique because you’re giving a targeted, off the cuff reply, but it’s important because it points to the larger issue, that how you define means of production depends on what you care about.
For instance, say I care about how people cooperate to get things done. I consider how and why people cooperate to be the most important driver of why things happen.
Horizontal social bonds? Tribal, peasant, primitive mean of production. Individually or as family units? Homesteader or clan means of production. Vertical social bonds? Patronage means of production. Violence? Autocratic means of production. Compelled through organizations empowered by joint buy in? Democratic means of production.
There’s nothing invalid about wanting to consider the question from that perspective.
> For one, every charity or NGO violates your categories.
almost any organized charity or NGO will raise money and have paid staff. They are not escaping the profit motive.
I think responding to @formerlycassander’s comment directly is kind of silly because it misses the point- economic modes of production are defined by relations of ownership, not why people do things, so going down this rabbit hole is kind of pointless.
But I would just point out that “why people do things” isn’t really an easy question to answer, either (though, again, it’s not relevant to defining a “mode of production”). Most of the time people do things for a *mixture* of reasons which are hard to disentangle. A scientist, or a therapist, or a fruit tree farmer, or a worker in an auto parts factory might be doing their job partly for the money, partly because they feel society needs them, partly because they like what they do, partly because it’s “expected” for someone from their background and community, and partly because they have a talent for it. If any of these elements was missing they wouldn’t be doing the job, so they’re all necessary: it’s not like they only have one motivation for doing their job.
> Most of the time people do things for a *mixture* of reasons which are hard to disentangle.
No shit. I said as much in my original post. “things are complicated”, however, is a general purpose response to any categorization scheme, but not a good enough one to give up on categorization or analysis.
@formerlycasander:
I wasn’t responding to you because I think you’re posing the wrong question here: none of what we’re talking about has anything to do with ‘capitalism’. Capitalism is defined by who owns the means of production, not by whether you have markets or not, and not by why people make things.
Yugoslavia between the 1960s and 1980s had market pricing, to a degree, and worker self management of firms, but was still very clearly a *communist society*, not a capitalist one.
Apologies, response glitch.
Christians don’t enslave fellow Christians so medieval armies didn’t enslave Christian peasants either, not just combatants. They still robbed, killed and raped conquered people however.
IIRC, in 1860 around half the population of Russia were Christians who could be bought, sold and arbitrarily tortured by other Christians. Sounds like slavery to me.
Yeah, the “Christians don’t enslave other Christians” is a specifically medieval mentality. It didn’t survive long into the Early Modern era – European slave traders kept buying Congolese slaves even after the Kingdom of Kongo converted to Christianity, reifying race in the process. Then Eastern Europe reintroduced serfdom, to varying degrees, with the rights of serfs decreasing over the centuries (but still more than those of contemporary slaves in the Americas).
European slave traders kept buying Congolese slaves even after the Kingdom of Kongo converted to Christianity, reifying race in the process
I was thinking of exactly that example, yes. Surely the “Christians don’t enslave other Christians” thing is kind of overrated?
War captives are a result of slavery, not a cause. Most wars between states in mid-late medieval western Europe did not result in captives. Nobles were held to ransom, the others stripped on anything worth while and let go – because there was no slave market. Wars with outsiders (primarily Slavs) fed the slave market in early-mid medieval times. It helped that most wars involved people connected by ethnicity and kinship – if a Frankish king had a fight with another Frankish king well, they were all Franks just following their lords as they were oath-bound to do.
My most cynical theory is that slavery is only needed to force someone of different culture. Someone of the same culture (citizens) are all “slaves” of the king/council and can be forced to do things as a matter of course. There are several degree of severity of this but then again there also several degree of severity of slavery.
It would be interesting to come across a worldwide history of slavery/ forced labour systems. The way that people discuss it seems so very parochial.
Most ‘tribal’ societies were horticulturalist, not “foragers”, but that’s just a minor point. I agree with your more general point, that lots of people in a broadly Marxist tradition have refined, improved, and ‘complexified’ the Marxist model over time, and there’s no reason to still slavishly adhere to the original mid-19th century model of classes and modes of production.
I didn’t take a ton of history classes in college, but one really good one that I did take was taught by a hard-core, dyed in the wool communist, who nevertheless diverged pretty sharply from Marx himself on a number of things. One point that I remember him stressing was that in a particular society you could have *multiple different* modes of production going on at the same time. In late 19th c Peru for example you might have a capitalist sector coexisting with neo-feudal landlords coexisting with remnants of the old communal, village-based property system inherited from the Incas, and all three of them coexisting with the “proprietary mode of production” (small self employed producers). And maybe in, say, the same country in 1970 you could fairly describe it (more controversially) as having proprietary, capitalist, and socialist modes of production operating all at the same time, after the military-revolutionary regime nationalized large sectors of the economy.
I do think the bigger failings of Marx’s thought (besides his failure to understand nationalism and religion, and his faith in progress) is his understanding of *class*, not modes of production in particular. It’s pretty clear to me that any reasonable analysis of society, past or present) is going to have to involve way more classes than just two or three.
You have to think of Marx as laying out a new way of looking at history and social development – entirely secular (‘materialist’), heavily constrained by technological limits and punctuated by the resolution of contradictions arising from development. He was arguing in opposition to Hegelians, eschatologists, divine providence and notions of progress that rely on will. The framework is now more ore less tacitly accepted universally – it was not at the time.
Oh, I completely agree, and I wasn’t intending to be overly critical of Marx here. I think we all owe him an immense debt, and those of us who are on principle opposed to capitalism, like me, owe him an even bigger debt. I also don’t *blame* him for getting some things wrong, since he was writing in the mid 19th c and didn’t have access either to the depth of knowledge about comparative history and anthropology that we have today, or to the knowledge of how societies would evolve in the future.
I just think that if you *are* going to operate in the Marxist tradition, or for that matter if you want to express ideological loyalty to the tradition of the later followers of Marx, at some level, then you are going to have to do some significant updating, extension, and in some cases revision of Marx’s thought and concede that maybe in this area or that area he was wrong.
Marx has be falsified because every single prediction he made was false. This is the acid test of Scientific Materialism as of everything else scientific: your predictions can not be false.
Mary, what predictions do you think Marx made? Like, what do you think Marx’s work says? I’m genuinely curious.
1. „His Slave Mode of production was basically true for the global trade economy of the early Industrial Revolution.“
No, that’s not true at all, the basis for early industrial economies and trade was, next to more traditional farming and manufacturing, industrialization fueled by primarily wage labor. Of course slavery was often involved to greater or lesser degrees but it wasn’t the driving factor of industrialized economies.
Among many others literally Marx himself would disagree with you applying his model that way.
2. Chattel slavery is simply a form of slavery where one person has complete ownership over another (Like chattel), it is not mutually exclusive with „war-slavery“ and in fact was the form practiced in Rome and much of the ancient mediterranean. It also predates capitalism by literal millennia.
3. Slavery was also a matter of wealth in Rome and slaves were also traded in Rome.
1. I’m sorry if I’m being imprecise-there’s a growing consensus that the increasing state power of Europe and the developed trade networks of the triangle trade represented early industrialization, or proto-industrialization, fueled by wind and sail power and traditional building materials, but still influenced by industrial science and the same mechanisms of social power as later industrialization. I’m talking 1600-1800, thereabouts, which is a broad 300 years where Europe displays some characteristics of industrial economic systems but not all.
In particular, there was a truly astounding increase in seafood production across much of Europe, a corresponding increase in the complexity and intricacy of ports and ships, increased land consolidation in places like Ireland and rural France, and other subsistence changes that weren’t strictly *industrial* agriculture but resemble it. The fishing improvements are the strongest argument-there’s nothing about the boats being wooden or the power being wind that keeps shipbuilding from being a form of industrialization, and the industry became astoundingly more productive.
These systems were partially fueled by vast quantities of slaves imported from Africa to the New World, forming *regions* of the economy that were slave economies, and which were of vital importance to the entire system. Even if the ships that fueled the subsistence changes weren’t literally made by slave labor or really had any direct material impact on the slave trade, the wealth and infrastructure they relied on were build on the cheap luxury trade. And this luxury trade relied on reducing labor costs to the minimum possible, or even below that by destroying populations and land.
The more unambiguous early industrial economies, or the 1800-1900 era, were fueled by wage labor and land collectivization, as you say.
2. It’s hard to be precise here, although the best term might be market sourced slavery, or widespread market slavery. War Slavery in Rome was the primary means of getting slaves, buying them from European-mediated African traders was the primary means of getting slaves in the Colonial European (and Muslim!) slave markets. Although war against the natives was another early source, they increasingly became less relevant as diseases killed them off. The intake of slaves into the system depended on mass public participation in Rome, and it very much didn’t in Europe, with even regional participation being highly socially stratified.
Of course war still formed the basis for the slave taking in Africa, which is pretty ubiquitous to all slave systems, but to Europeans they basically didn’t interact with that part of the business, meaning all stages of interaction were wealth stratified.
And the development of capitalism as a system is related to the expansion of slavery, as a matter of historical record. The slave trade expanded massively as capitalism became the system of European economies, and directly precipitated the wealth and growth of early capital. Yes, it existed earlier, but changing systems of power aren’t really a matter of something *existing* that didn’t exist, they’re a matter of scale, dominance, reinforcement, and social and legal organization. There are many, many authors who’ve written on this connection.
3. Not to the same extent as Colonial slavery. Even if Roman citizen soldiers didn’t actually own a slave, which would have been rarer, they still took part in the system and were rewarded with money for taking slaves as part of looting. Hence if slavery was abolished then the soldiers effectively took a pay cut *even if they never owned slaves*.
On a similar note nothing technically prevented an abolition movement in ancient Rome, and we do see some sentiment trending that way. It was just fringe, particularly until the later empire.
The Manichaeans supposedly opposed slavery and encouraged slaves to run away, or at least they were accused of that by their Christian opponents.
Fantastic post Bret. I enjoy all of your posts but I have always found these types of posts, where you take a pop-culture tool as a jumping off point for a wide and varied exploration of ideas, to be my absolute favourite.
All these historical notes have me jotting down mod ideas, though I haven’t played this in ages…
The interesting thing is that I think the *categories* are somewhat useable, but what they *do* isn’t. (or rather, it could and should be something that you can fiddle with via laws, government types, etc.)
So it should be possible to have your citizens produce taxes, and/or manpower (representing Rome) or you could have a setup where they mostly focus on manpower and the taxes are levied on “freemen” (representing the hellenistic “ethnic core of manpower with the rest paying tribute”) you can have your nobles produce administrative stuff or maybe manpower depending on the kind of laws you have etc.
I wonder if the game would have moved in that direction had it continued, because it feels like a very “natural” way of dealing with the problem within the game constraints.
An interesting way to integrate the religious angle would be to put the player in the role of their chosen society’s divine patron. Decisions could correspond to specific pops checking auguries or offering vows. Traditional practices or social structures might be overturned with anachronistic rapidity by sending clear omens of displeasure, perhaps a prophet with the new instructions, but at the cost of terrifying everyone involved by the prospect of divine wrath.
That would be a very interesting sort of strategy game to play.
I mean, a few games have tried to take shots at “God Simulations”, although mostly outside of Grand Strategy. Possibly because this “indirect control” model already gets frustrating enough when applied to a small scale, without other actors thrown in.
What they needed, and what they probably would have introduced if they hadn’t hit the twin caps of average player processing speed and declining interest in the game, was to adapt the slider system from EU3 with a different set for each group. It should be possible for a polity to decide to exempt all strata from taxes (and then cease to meaningfully exist) for instance, because all polities at all times have had people suggesting that; likewise it should be possible to make your polity obligate all portions of society to pay significant taxes (and then cease to meaningfully exist). Each notch on each slider could have specific behaviors, or they could just make it a binary [do more]/[like the player more].
High enough happiness could result in pops spontaneously contributing more “tax revenue,” military manpower, etc. than they’re being asked for, allowing a fragile but enthusiastic all-volunteer system.
Just like last week we have some mentions of social set-ups that aren’t good for state capacity but are very good for local elites. These can be hard to model in this kind of game since getting rid of those systems is often a no-brainer for the player (i.e. having a broader definition of citizenship instead of having a narrow ethnic elite is a good thing if you’re trying to set up a big empire).
I’d really like to see a game delve into this so that a lot of your gameplay is based around the negotiation of state power with your own elite more than fighting your neighbors. There are strong elements of this in CK (crown authority) and Vicky (noble pops being annoying if you reform too hard too fast) but would really like to see them centered so that any time you’re off balance the local nobles try to claw power back from you.
That’s only really a bandaid on the underlying problem though: that in these games the player is not representing a concrete person/institution and so has ahistorical motivations. You’re not really playing as a specific person, or on office that get’s passed between different players. Rather, you’re the abstract embodiment of a whole nation / polity / government which has only the interests of the state as a whole as a goal (or, rather, whatever part of the success of the state is modelled in score or victory conditions – either explicitly defined by the game or intrinsically decided on by the player). This is, clearly, not a position that any person or institution had in history; which means that you end up with ahistorical incentives. Adding in the intentions of some groups might help a little, but it doesn’t change the fundamental fact that the player themself doesn’t have historical motivations.
And I don’t think there’s really anyway of fixing that for a game which lasts more than the length of a single human carrer. Note that even in games like Crusader Kings, people tend to roleplay as the nation as a whole and try to paint-the-map rather than play as King who has a grand old time feasting every night. There are some hardcore role-players out there who avoid this “trap”, but most strategy games are played by people who want to come up with and then implement the optimal strategy on a macro polity-wide level. Which is fundamentally incompatible with the real historical driving forces of individuals and institutions.
Vicky tends to basically have the nobility in practice be an obstacle: Something you try to get rid of. Which kinda fits in the time period in the “race to modernity” idea, but doesen’t really fit the motives of people actually involved.
CK3 as said has the problem that of making people think *too* much like a state (or at least family as a vehicle for power-projection) rather than a person: There’s very little incentive to just…. have your kids get a good life, for instance. Which was obviously something actual medieval monarchs cared at least *a bit* about. And even stuff like feasting/hunting/building nice buildings etc. gets “instrumentalized”, you do it for the bonuses rather than because you wanta nice place to live.
I wonder to what extent you could make players get motivated to this just by aestethics? Being able to play dress-up, or design your own pleasure palace? Certainly there are certain games that works very strongly in that regard.
>I wonder to what extent you could make players get motivated to this just by aestethics? Being able to play dress-up, or design your own pleasure palace? Certainly there are certain games that works very strongly in that regard.
Games that do this are explicitly roleplaying games about managing the court, have a strong narrative (usually a scripted one, with more-or-less emergent features) and typically only span the life of a single person. They attract players that specifically wants to play like that. Strategy games don’t, and their players want to focus on grand strategy. Just look at how Bret plays any paradox games! For developers to force (or encourage) a type of playstyle that goes against what the player-base they’ve spend a decade accruing wants is a dangerous business. And dangerous for business.
There are some games that try to bridge the gap (Six Ages comes to mind, I only played the sequel and hated it). But not all blending of genres work well.
Maybe a solution would be to give individual characters different “life goals”. Crusader Kings 3 went a bit into that direction with stress for acting against one’s character traits. Perhaps this could be expanded to become a positive focus for the player. So you might play one character who cares a lot about gaining glory in war, but your next character wants to live a comfortable life instead.
Brainstorming this idea further for a game set in Imperator’s timeframe:
Each character has three happiness meters: glory/reputation, wealth/power, and comfort/pleasure. They have a lower threshold, under which the character is miserable, and an upper threshold, above which a character is happy. A happy character increases your overall score and a miserable character lowers your overall score.
Glory/reputation is gained by victories. Military victories, but also oratory victories (to give Cicero his due), grand pious acts or building up a child to gain their own glory (the ways for female characters to increase their reputation would probably be more limited than for male characters, but it should still be possible).
Wealth/power is gained by increasing one’s estates, taking offices, and gaining informal influence over others.
Comfort/pleasure is gained by building up ones houses and spending time there, getting access to luxury goods, hosting and attending parties, and having marriages and/or affairs with attractive characters.
It doesn’t matter how much you are above or below the threshold, only if you are above or below – this would lead to very risky play if you are below the misery threshold and more safty focussed play if you are above the happiness threshold. If you play a normal character and you are consistently above all three happiness thresholds, one may be increased suddenly (you don’t know which one before it happens – for example, playing a comfort seeking character who has been comfortable for some years you may get a message that says: “I have been comfortable for some years, I think I should make some effort to become rich as well.” (wealth-happiness-threshold rises) or “I have been comfortable for some years, but the kings in the east live in luxury I can only imagine. That would be the true life.” (comfort-happiness-threshold rises).
However, these meters may have the modifier “content” or “ambitious”. If content, the happiness threshold doesn’t increase. If ambitious, the happiness threshold with that modifier automatically increases soon after happiness is achieved – for example, Ceasar had the ambitious modifier on both his glory and his power meter.
If achieving happiness is sufficiently challenging, different characters will play very differently.
The UI design can nudge players into pursuing these goals: If your character is miserable or happy, the overall UI changes to reflect that. And after the character has died and on your score screen the character gets labeled to reflect that (for example: “Gaius Aemilius Felix spent his life seeking his own comfort. He had many happy years and died with a smile on his face.”). There could even be empty spaces at the top of the screen that over generation fills up with busts of your previous characters whose painting (or lack theirof) and damage indicates to what extend they fulfilled their goals.
Idea: strategy games that openly embrace the idea that you’re playing Sauron (or some other immortal overlord) taking over Middle-earth (for example). So yeah, ahistorical behavior will be generated, and we could expect even “Sauron, Lord of the Picts” to take over Europe eventually, but it’d be hard mode compared to starting with Rome.
Now we have new variables to tweak: are the other polities _also_ run by “Saurons”, or are they purely mortal, with AI/mechanics modeling internal squabbling and the randomness of kings dying of dysentry? The latter probably makes the enemies weaker (no long term planner), but sometimes also might make them harder to take over (no single autocratic point of failure to hijack)
Also, how much control the “Sauron” has, from “I can mind control any subject I want, and write behavior scripts that are followed without fail” down to “I’m just an immortal king with a bureaucracy/army/nobility with its own ideas, they can’t kill me but they can rebel”. Various corruption mechanics or diplomacy rules or court games already touch on that lack of full control, but maybe there’s design space in thinking about it more explicitly.
There is a fun little indie game called (so; Janky mess) called Shadow of Forgotten Gods where you play a Dark God (of various types) and the goal is to overthrow civilization (in various ways depending on the god)
The interesting thing is that you start out fairly weak and so your goal is often to destabilize the “good guy” AI nations. (by say, instigating wars, raiding farms to produce famines, arming orcs, spreading cults, etc.) and balance this with not being discovered.
The game has a nice idea, but you’re not playing as a state or an evil timeless tyrant aiming for conquest. It’s more like you’re controlling a handful of spies trying to sow chaos. I played it for a bit, and it’s very formulaic and dry. Cultist simulator has you roleplaying in a similar situation but with drastically different mechanics and a far more rewarding (not to say frustratingly opaque) experience. But neither are really what @mindstalko seemed to have in mind
Or just play as the group’s patron divinity, as they were understood at the time. Could be interesting strategic tradeoffs: do you want this humble, pious, bland leader? Or that bold hero, with bigger direct bonuses, but who won’t consistently follow your instructions?
On some level, you already have civ for this. What this reminds me is Sid Meier Alpha Centauri where because of technology, the leaders are literally immortal. Though there’s no coup mechanism there.
The most impressive thing about Paradox games has been exactly their ability to make players behave like and see from the alien perspective of past societies. Even in EU4 (closest you get to playing the timeless god-king of a unified nation) the mechanics successfully recreate those strange wars where one side is fully defeated yet gets to continue existing or sometimes does not even lose territory.
Of course it’s not perfect and the goal is still to paint the map. But Paradox do a good job of crafting a unique frame for each game, with CK being ofc the most impressive for how different it is. I would not rule them out pulling it off for Imperator as well.
“there is no abolition movement in this period to highlight, no alternative model to conquest and hegemony for state building.”
I was under the impression that abolition of slavery was a thing in India in this time period.
It seems like the game is using “slaves” for what is actually mix of working poor and slaves, typically more working poor then slaves. Then “freemen” is the rural farmers who aren’t so poor, basically the adsidui and the citizens are more like the equites, people of property.
I think p’dox made a mistake by treating the pops of different social status as equivalent in size. Pops shouldn’t convert from freemen to equites, the equites are a far smaller unit and it should be that any number of them could come from a freeman pop. The issue of social balance should be a breakdown between slave/poor/adsidui then the wealthy pops should be in a completely different scale. That way you could have things like many slaves making it possible for war spoils to create a large number of nuveau riche or for long military campaigns to impoverish the adsidui into poverty.
“as these were states – particularly the Ptolemies and the Seleucids – with a fairly clearly defined ethnic ruling class, constructed on the basis of ethnos (‘ethnic group’) or patris (‘fatherland, homeland’), with the Macedonians (which, as a legal status, included most native Greek speakers as well) on the top and subject peoples subordinated to them.”
Could you (or someone) refer me to a book (or article) which goes deeper into this construction of ethnic and legal upper class in the Hellenistic Kingdoms?
Blackwell’s A companion To The Hellenistic World (2005, Edt Andrew Erskine) is a good starting point for these sorts of thematic reference. Section IV of the handbook has multiple essays that relate how ethnicity and social class worked in various parts of Hellenistic world, and is a recurring theme through out. If it doesn’t have exactly what you’re looking for, I’m sure the references therein will do.
Do we know how Roman tax assessments fitted the actual wealth?
Or other Mediterranean states?
Romans had to declare their wealth, land, slaves, oxen… No surviving Roman historian says anything like “There were 26 300 Roman knights and 299 000 foot, owning between them 613 000 slaves to the value of HS 3 038 500 000, 21 357 800 jugera of land to the value of HS 11 373 612 500, and 973 200 oxen to the value of HS 873 500 000” (sorry, I did not check all the numbers for plausible scale). Did a statement like this ever exist?
Anyway, is it plausible that “freemen” are powerful enough to resist taxation and get themselves at least underassessed? And that taxes are paid either by the obviously rich slaveowners, or by poor tenants who are not powerful enough to resist taxation/rent?
We know the fisc was quite stringent about measuring wealth, so documents like this definitely did exist. There may be some surviving local examples from Egypt. Corruption was of course endemic, but AFAIK we lack anything exact.
But what precisely was reported, and what precisely was summed up could vary.
*There had to be a grand total like “Romans declared total property of HS 13 400 000 000, therefore if the Senate sets tribute rate for next year at 1/1000, the Romans would pay HS 13 400 000, and if the Senate estimates Rome needs revenue of HS 40 000 000, Senate should vote tribute at 3/1000 to get HS 40 200 000”
*There had to be individual subtotals to decide the class of every Roman between HS 11 000 and HS 100 000, and eligibility to classes at HS 400 000 and HS 1 000 000
*There had to be subtotals for taxation units because the 325 300 Romans fit to bear arms and the unspecified number of taxpayers unfit to bear arms because of disabilities of sickness, age, sex or maybe stain of servitude could not report to one tax collector – tax collectors had to be assigned sections of taxpayers and subtotals to pay
But it does not mean that the subtotals I mentioned had to exist. We know that Crassus owned HS 170 000 000, inclusive of 20 000 slaves. We do not know the actual breakdown of his wealth – how much was the value of slaves, land, good debts. Did the HS 170 000 000 include cash in hand? Was that liable to be declared at census? Anyway, the subtotal count might have been superfluous to what he was asked, but it does happen to exist.
Slaves did not themselves pay taxes – but they were wealth, so their owners might be taxed for them.
Rome actually collected a tax on slaves… when manumitted, and on their value.
Which means that someone in Rome must have known the total value of slaves freed in any consulate… but not necessarily their total number. Or the number or value of slaves not manumitted.
Roman Egypt collected a poll tax on slaves… except the poll tax was equal for slaves and their owners (and owners´ family members). Which means that the tax collectors in Egypt knew the number of Egyptians and Egyptians´ slaves combined… but not separate numbers of each.
Did anyone in classical antiquity specifically count the slaves for purpose of collecting a tax for slaves that was distinct from taxes on free people?
A search for Claremont Colleges Taxation in Roman Egypt should give a paper that surveys the topic ( cannot post the link). It suggests to me that the Empire probably had only a very loose grasp of its overall finances – reliance on liturgies (unpaid work for the state) plus a multitude of different taxes with different local rates and various exemptions, special levies and payment in both cash and kind – it looks like the fiscal system of say, early modern France: an accretion of measures over time. Recall that the first consolidated accounts for France were only produced in the late 18th century (and led to uproar and recrimination).
“someone in Rome must have known the total value of slaves freed in any consulate”
Oh the wild optimism of someone who’s never worked in local government.
It takes effort and money to count things, and organisations will generally try their utmost not to spend effort and money counting things that they don’t need to count. They do not need this amount of detail to construct a functioning system. All you need is a tax collector to know which 20 or so families they collect taxes from, and be able to make an assessment of what they owe when they visit them (probably for multiple things, not just slaves). The next step up in the chain doesn’t need to know any of that information, it just needs to know how many tax collectors need to report in, and trusts that they’ve gone round to the people they need to and assessed their contributions accurately. If you’re lucky, they might also count how much the collective tax collectors have submitted, but that’s not actually necessary. Rinse and repeat for every step up the chain until you get resources pooled at the ‘all of Rome’ level. Each step on the way is a point of failure in the transmission of information clarity.
The folks at the top don’t need to know where all of these taxes come from. If there’s a smaller amount than they were expecting that’s for the people lower in the chain to fix.
This disconnect between ‘people counting half a dozen things because they need it to do their job’ and ‘people trying to count what a thousand of these people are doing’ is something that’s a decent struggle for present day government departments, and they have an order of magnitude more bureaucratic might than pre-modern governments (plus fantastic enablers like the internet).
“Oh the wild optimism of someone who’s never worked in local government.”
Reportedly, US cities frequently do not know how many curbside parking spaces they have. Despite this being a fairly fixed quantity that you could go out and count, not to mention roughly estimating via simple geometry.
Possibly to an extent, but remember that your assessed wealth determined your voting rights and how you served in the military. If you wanted to be a hastati and vote in the higher centuries, you had to report a high enough wealth.
Yes. But this was by brackets.
Did Romans cluster below class thresholds, or above them?
Did Roman quaestors have statistical tools to detect clustering of values, as we might do if we had the original census schedules (we don´t)?
If there was clustering around thresholds, was it for misassessment, or genuine?
Like, suppose there were a lot of Romans between HS 90 000 and 95 000 (second class citizens), but few between 100 000 and 105 000 (first class citizens). Could it be because the Romans with actually slightly over HS 100 000 falsely reported wealth under HS 100 000 to evade the higher bracket military equipment costs? Or could it be that the Romans with just over HS 100 000 had the fixed equipment costs of first class, but income at the bottom of the bracket, and were genuinely impoverished out of the tax bracket?
Or if there were a lot of Romans with HS 55 000 to HS 60 000, could it have been that Romans who actually owned just HS 45 000 inflated their wealth to bear better arms and stay alive in battlefield, and get third class votes on top? Or instead, because the Romans centuriated captured land into rectangular homesteads of equal area and (notionally!) equal assessed value of HS 50 000 to get so and so many men liable to bear third class arms?
I feel like this setup is somewhat retrojecting modern ideas, especially the distribution of manpower. Particularly the nobles not generating any, when for most of the cultures they’d be expected to form the elite or serve as cavalry. Granted, I can see that hurting diversity of playstyles, if your higher-level pops are strictly better.
There’s this really janky game called Oriental Empires (set in ancient China) which had an interesting kind of setup (it’s basically a civ-style game) where you had noble and peasant population figures, each could recruit different units (nobles being smaller and better, while peasants numerous and shitty, but also cut into your income) the interesting thing is that noble troops would suppress peasant unrest and vice-versa. (and unrest got increased at the different groups for different things) and late-game there was also an option for standing troops, which were incredibly expensive, but suppressed both types of unrest.
I want to mention one thing, in gentle opposition to Our Illustrious Blog Author: I won’t buy a sequel. No matter how good it is, I bought EU: Rome and I bought Imperator, and Paradox burned me both times by offering a sloppy product with little post-launch support. And for Imperator they wanted more money for a not-especially-good product following their DLC practices. I have a few words for their business dealings in that regard and they are unpleasant words indeed.
They fooled me twice on Rome-themed games I really thought would be fun; shame on me for trusting them. But it won’t happen again.
Paradox generally has gone down a lot in the last decade IMO. They’re as much publishers as a development studio, and some of the things published under their label is hot garbage (one of the expansion packs for Surviving Mars had a single digit % score on Steam at one point). The continuous stream of DLCs for their games also make them hard to pick up and play, even if I already own them. Deciding which DLC I want to buy in the couple of years since I last played the game is a hassle, and the multitude of different combinations of DLC different players have hugely fragments the community: both in discussions forum / reddit, and for modding.
All this DLC, and the newer games generally, are also overburdened by complexity for the sake of it. Not the kind of complexity that gives rise to interesting emergent behaviour, but the bloat of having hundreds of tiny modifiers that offer no meaningful choices to the player but increases the amount of micromanagement for the sheer sake of. It’s as if the designers think that any abstraction is bad, and instead feel obliged to create a new variable every time it’s possible to track a negligible side-effect of a side-effect in an unimportant part of the game. It’s full of X gives 5% bonus to Y, unless Z in which case the bonus is doubled, but not it W which makes it negative.
My issue isn’t that this turns the games into poorly-disguised spreadsheets. It’s that the sheer quantity of sub-surface modelling doesn’t actually do anything to make the game more fun or interesting; it just obfuscates what’s happening for the player, makes it harder for them to know what actions will have which consequences, and creates ton of dull repetitive busy work.
I’ve… not seen Paradox accused of making their grand strategy games MORE like that over time – if anything, I’ve regularly seen them accused of quite the opposite, of simplifying down complex previous systems into single meters/sliders in the pursuit of clarity and usability, compared to the incomprehensible calculator-internals systems of the older games. Where DLCs get criticised for micromanagement its not because there’s a zillion invisible incomprehensible new bonuses to tame, but that they’ve added some entirely new system that requires people to step out of the core loop constantly to not fall behind.
The most we can hope at this point is a Deveraux-approved mod anyway. As other commenter said, I can see some of these articles implemented to be changing numbers on what each pop should contribute to the state.
> I had hoped to do this part in a single post, but my book writing schedule intervened and so it became necessary to split it up.
No! Excuses mar the beauty of “This is the first half of the second part of our three part look”. No apologetics!
I think the easiest way to improve Imperator’s pop system is just to split job and political status apart. Citizen/Freedman/Slave does a good enough job of covering everyone, and laws could govern how those contribute tax/manpower and the transitions between them.
I definitely think this is a good idea.
It can model cultural evolution as well: in the traditional social model of the place where I live, agricultural workers had a higher prestige and social status than commercial or industrial workers, something which is *very* different from how our society is structured today. What kinds of work count as “respectable” and “higher status” can be dependent on culture.
There is probably much less variance in this regard if we’re just talking about ancient agrarian polities – similar subsistence systems tend to generate similar social structures – but less doesn’t mean none. Just from the article it sounds like military service was something that the citizen class felt obligated to do in Rome, but not so much in Carthage.
Seeing them in the sidebar I realised I miss reading your tweets…!
But I can’t go back to Twitter now that it’s X.
Would love it if you could cross-post them to a Mastodon account…