that unless he kept the people happy and under control it
would be politically destabilizing. The Roman plebeians
had to be kept busy and pliant, so it was good to have jobs
to give them, such as moving columns about. This
complemented the bread and circuses, which were also
dispensed for free to keep the population content. It is
perhaps telling that both of these examples came soon
after the collapse of the Republic. The Roman emperors
had far more power to block change than the Roman rulers
during the Republic.
Another important reason for the lack of technological
innovation was the prevalence of slavery. As the territories
Romans controlled expanded, vast numbers were
enslaved, often being brought back to Italy to work on large
estates. Many citizens in Rome did not need to work: they
lived off the handouts from the government. Where was
innovation to come from? We have argued that innovation
comes from new people with new ideas, developing new
solutions to old problems. In Rome the people doing the
producing were slaves and, later, semi-servile coloni with
few incentives to innovate, since it was their masters, not
they, who stood to benefit from any innovation. As we will
see many times in this book, economies based on the
repression of labor and systems such as slavery and
serfdom are notoriously noninnovative. This is true from the
ancient world to the modern era. In the United States, for
example, the northern states took part in the Industrial
Revolution, not the South. Of course slavery and serfdom
created huge wealth for those who owned the slaves and
controlled the serfs, but it did not create technological
innovation or prosperity for society.
N O O NE W RITES FROM V INDOLANDA
B y AD 43 the Roman emperor Claudius had conquered
England, but not Scotland. A last, futile attempt was made
by the Roman governor Agricola, who gave up and, in AD
85, built a series of forts to protect England’s northern
border. One of the biggest of these was at Vindolanda,
thirty-five miles west of Newcastle and depicted on Map 11
at the far northwest of the Roman Empire. Later,
Vindolanda was incorporated into the eighty-five-mile