The End of the Past

by Aldo Schiavone

Schiavone is intrigued by the question: why did Roman civilisation, which contained many elements of modern capitalist and market economy, not develop straight into a commercial capitalism of the medieval Florentine type? Schiavone’s answer is that the main culprit was that slavery, as argued already by Marx, was the key reason why ancient societies could not go past a certain level of economic development.