I didn’t mean “the money you can only spend on salt”, and if that’s the myth, I’m sorry if I perpetrated it. I meant the money you are given for daily necessities, which includes salt. But I wasn’t meaning that that’s the literal translation of the word, and if that was how it came across, I apologise for my poor wording. I did try to emphasise money there.
Plentiful, maybe, but cheap ? Most of it came from salt mines, which had a dreadful human life cost (basically being sent there was a death sentence deferred by a couple years) which meant it also had a warmaking cost to bring in evermore slaves. Although the Roman Empire was also driven to conquer more and more stuff for a number of reasons anyway…many of which driven by slavery actually, either because “we need moar slaves !” or because “the slaves are doing all the work and now citizens are having a riot because they have no money !”
As with most semantic arguments, the most clarifying thing we can do is replace the symbol with the substance. We all agree slavery is bad. But why is slavery bad? What are the defining elements of “slavery”, which ones do we care about, and why?
Any semantic argument that doesn’t take this step is obfuscating, rather than clarifying. The good news: it seems to me that many here are doing exactly that, and explaining why slavery is bad and why similar institutions are also bad. So… good shit, folks. 
The legal provision in many countries, and specifically in the USA, talks about “slavery OR involuntary servitude except when imposed as criminal punishment” (the exception is to involuntary servitude, not to slavery, *that *is just out) because slavery has characteristics that the other forms of servitude did not have. Slavery does not merely mean “being forced to work at what I did not choose or on terms I did not choose”, it adds the subject becoming chattel goods property rather than persons, even unfree persons.
Society and its laws *even before the abolition of slavery/serfdom *had already carved out a separate category of compulsory services that could be demanded by the state (not by private entities) even of “free” citizens (e.g. military service, jury duty). The justice or injustice of *that *is not solved by saying “is it slavery or not”, but as others have mentioned, by exploring “what is meant, by involuntary servitude, and what’s the difference”?
Roman salt mostly came from seawater evaporation, AFAICT. They built roadsfor it, and established seawater evaporation industries elsewhere too, like Britain.
" *Well, sure, the salt trade was valuable … that’s because it was traded in such high volume. But in 204 BCE, when Marcus Livius ‘the salt-dealer’ imposed his tax on salt, Livy quotes the price of salt at a sextans: that is, one sixth of a copper as, or one 60th of a silver denarius (or in a civilian context, a sextans was one 96th of a denarius). Polybius, writing in the mid-100s BCE, quotes a foot-soldier’s pay as ‘two obols’ per day, that is to say, one third of a denarius (Polybius 6.39.12).
In other words, a Roman pound of salt (ca. 330 grams) cost one twentieth of a foot-soldier’s daily wages.
Important? Of course. Expensive by modern standards? Maybe, depending on the price of salt where you live. ‘Prized and valuable’? No*."
Interesting idea. My own WAG: adding salt to food makes it more palatable. Getting paid money for work makes it more bearable. Money is metaphorically like salt.
This is pure folk etymology without a shred of evidence to back it up, and entirely my own invention, but I like it.
The problem with the X is as bad as Y argument is that it works both ways. People use it to maximize how bad X is but they can end up minimizing how bad Y is.
If you say “being drafted into the army is as bad as slavery” then you’re also saying “slavery is no worse than being drafted into the army” - the two statements are equivalent.
My understanding is that the value of salt in the ancient Roman economy was that it could be used as a substitute for grain, bricks, wine, cloth, or tools.
Granted, my knowledge of ancient Roman economics is based on playing Concordia.
I’m definitely not arguing that.
I’m saying that there is an umbrella term “slavery” that covers a variety of situations including military conscription, indentured servitude, and chattel slavery. That’s not to say that they’re all exactly the same or equally bad, but that they all share things that make them slavery (I laid out the three things I think are essential above: freedom of movement, freedom of work, freedom to leave the arrangement).
I mean, imagine in the 19th century, there are clearly degrees of badness within the lives of slaves. There were field slaves and house slaves. There were slaves who were regularly beaten and those who weren’t. I’d much rather, for example, have been a house slave with a master who didn’t beat them than a field slave that got beaten regularly. Just like I’d rather be a military conscript than a chattel slave.
The situations are not equally bad. But they’re all slaves.
Maybe, if you assume that forced labor = slavery, and that any sort of duty owed to the state is slavery, including conscription and jury duty.
Do you also think that taxes are theft? That’s an analogous situation to jury duty or military conscription being slavery.
I’ve twice posted the three things that I consider essential to slavery, and forced labor is only one of them. Conscription meets all three. Jury duty arguably meets two of them, although it’s a little bit of a stretch to say that it’s forced labor. You have to show up somewhere and render a verdict, but aside from standards of decorum you don’t have to do anything. Jury duty doesn’t restrict your freedom of movement. Heck, if you want to, you can get out of jury duty by moving whenever you get a notice. “Sorry, court, I no longer live at this address, or in your jurisdiction”.
I’m also amenable to the idea that jury duty is short enough that it doesn’t really qualify, although I haven’t thought that through. Being under arrest for a few hours or days isn’t slavery even though all three essential elements are there because it’s so short.
I do not. I agree that the taxes=theft argument and the conscription=slavery arguments share some similarities, but I think they’re different enough in two ways that the analogy doesn’t hold for me.
First, the difference between unlawful taking of things and lawful is relevant in a way that lawful slavery and unlawful isn’t in my opinion. Chattel slavery was once legal, but was still slavery. Conscription is currently legal, but is still slavery. Taxation has always been lawful by definition.
And from a functional standpoint, taxes appear to be absolutely necessary in some form to a functioning government. Conscription isn’t. Conscription is what governments do when they don’t want to pay fair wages to their soldiers.
Is there anything that the government could require you to do as a duty to them that would constitute slavery in your mind? If, in the 19th century, the government had owned all the slaves rather than individual white people, would that not have been slavery? They’re just doing their duty to the government?
I’m not saying your three items are completely wrong; they certainly make up some major aspects of slavery. But I still feel the key factor is the loss of legal rights and legal personhood.
Which allows the assignment of property rights over the subject – I agree, there’s where forced servitude turns into slavery.
This does not prevent someone from arguing that ALL involuntary servitude, regardless whether to private or public interest or whether remunerated or time limited or not, is an immoral violation of natural right and affront to himan liberty and dignity. But slavery describes the *special *case, not the general case.
Quite honestly, it seems the only difference was that it was technically illegal to kill a serf, but it really wasn’t enforced. Otherwise, it was just semantics.
Can you delve a bit more into what that means, exactly? What specific rights does one have to have to not be a slave? Is it more than my three, or less?